Text Neck – How Acupuncture Can Help

Have you heard of this new term that is sweeping the world? The term came about because people were getting not only neck pain but actually causing damage to their cervical spine, supporting ligaments, tendons, and muscles from looking down at their cell phones, tablets, or other wireless devices too often and for way too long. Guess who is most at risk these days – kids and teenagers, the new generation, the ones we call millennials. 

Welcome to the 21st century, where technology has possibly become more important than our health. Today when you people watch all you will notice is that everyone’s heads are buried down in their mobile devices, and everyone seems to be running into everything because they are not looking where they are going. Kids at schools are being taught on iPads, 9 year olds have smart phones with games on them, and overall kids are playing outside less and less. Even toddlers are given tablets at dinnertime to keep them quite. Technology is the new pacifier. The future is here and the sooner kids start learning about technology the better off they will be once they get into the work place. But what is going to happen to our health? Not only have our attention spans come down to three-minute blocks, but we are also literally changing the physical structure of our bodies.  Have you seen an 11-year-old starting to form a hunch back…I have and it’s becoming more common.

What’s happening to the neck muscles and the spine?

A head typically weighs 10-12 pounds, and some say that for every inch your head moves forwards, backwards or side-to-side, it gains an extra ten pounds. So imagine you move your head 4 inches down to look at you smart phone, your spine now has to hold an extra 40 pounds up on top of the 10-12 pounds that your head already weighs. Can you imagine what that will do to the bones, muscles, ligaments and nerves over time? At this point you may start to form some bone spurs because that will help create more stability in the spine. Ligaments and muscles are constantly being stretched which means that they are under constant pressure to hold the head up (and remember the head is heavier and heavier now) so the ligaments become thicker and the muscles become tighter. Wallah…now you have neck pain and you may possibly start to see more headaches, maybe some TMJ tension, and you won’t believe it but neck pain may even cause lower back problems. If text neck is left untreated, chronic issues will start to develop such as spinal degeneration, arthritis, disc herniation/compression, nerve damage and more.

What acupuncture will do to fix it?

The way acupuncture can help is by decreasing the inflammation in the neck muscles and ligaments. This will take some of the stress off and allow everything to start healing. Because acupuncture increases circulation it will also increase the rate of healing to any acute or chronic damage created over time from the repetitive motion of holding one’s head up.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) we talk a lot about the treating the root or the branch or both at the same time if needed. The root is the origin of the problem and the branches are the manifestation of that problem. Since text neck can cause more than just neck pain we will consider all symptoms the patient presents and decide then what is most important to treat. In this case we will always treat the neck (the root) because unless that becomes healthy again none of the other symptoms will disappear. But lets say that a patient is suffering from a lot of headaches and the headache pain is more severe than the neck pain, we may for the first few sessions focus on the headache, and treat the neck as a secondary issue.

Your acupuncturist may use electro-stimulation to aid in the healing of your text neck and any of the symptoms it may produce. Electro-acupuncture uses the same acupuncture points as TCM but small clips are attached to the needles at one end and the other end is plugged into a device that generates electric pulses. The current is delivered through the needle and stimulates a larger area than the needles alone so it can also decrease inflammation in a larger area.  Patients will experience a tingling sensation and sometimes some muscle contractions, but for the most part patients report relaxation and a decrease in symptoms.

Acupuncture is very effective at treating the symptoms of text neck and can rid the body of most of the pain and discomfort you feel from it.  But what are you supposed to do about technology? How do we fix the causes of text neck?  It does not seem to be going away anytime soon, so we need to learn to coexist in a way that is not harmful to our bodies.  The best way to reduce the risk or occurrence of text neck is to restore proper function and posture to the head, neck, and body. Some easy ideas are simply altering your daily routine, such as setting a timer and getting up at every hour to stretch the neck, walk around, get a drink of water, or wearing a posture-support shirt or posture reminder to minimize the slouching and forward shift of your head.  Other ideas such as a standing workstation, elevating your computer screen to eye level (or getting an external keyboard and elevating your laptop to eye level), and turning up the brightness of your monitor can help to keep you from leaning in, thus minimizing the stress on your head and neck.  Technology is changing the world almost daily, we just to make sure we are helping our bodies and routines to change as well. 

REFERENCES:

Cheryl Bodiford McNeil, Toni L. Hembree-Kigin, and Karla Anhalt, (2011), Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (Issues in Clinical Child Psychology), Springer; 2nd ed. 

Susan Standring PhD DSc, (2015), Gray's Anatomy: The Anatomical Basis of Clinical Practice, 41e 41st Edition, Elsevier; 41 edition 

Frank H. Netter MD, (2014), Atlas of Human Anatomy, Professional Edition: including NetterReference.com Access with Full Downloadable Image Bank, 6e (Netter Basic Science) 6th Edition, Saunders; 6 edition 

Thomas W. Myers, (2009), Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, 2e 2nd Edition, Churchill Livingstone; 2nd edition 

Peter Deadman, Mazin Al-Khafaji, and Kevin Baker, (2007), A Manual of Acupuncture 2nd ed. Edition, Journal of Chinese Medicine Publications; 2nd ed. edition 

O.M.D., Dipl.Ac. Darren Starwynn, L.Ac. Jan Allen, and O.M.D. John Stebbins, (2002), Microcurrent Electro-Acupuncture (Bio-Electric Principles, Evaluation and Treatment), Desert Heart Press