Head, neck and jaw: migraines, neck pain and dizziness

Nobody finds anything wrong, and yet you are in pain.

This area has one particular feature. It is where consultations multiply. A dentist for the jaw, an ENT specialist for the tinnitus, a neurologist for the migraines, a physiotherapist for the neck. Each one examines their own territory carefully, and each one finds it normal. The symptom, however, persists.

A normal test rules out a lesion. It leaves the question of a functional problem wide open.

There is a simple explanation for this persistence. The head, the neck and the jaw form a single unit crossed by the same line of tension, and that line runs much further down than the area that hurts.

It works in direct connection with the rest of the body, through what is known as the craniosacral axis. Behind this name lies something very concrete: a tough membrane, the dura mater, which wraps around the brain, runs down the entire length of the spine and attaches to the sacrum, right at the bottom of the back. Imagine a rope stretched between two points, from the skull down to the buttocks. Pull on one end, and the other end moves. That is exactly what happens in your body.

In practice, this means that long-standing migraines can originate in a shock that seemed harmless at the time. A broken nose in your teens, whiplash in a car accident, nose surgery, a major emotional shock, sometimes even a fall onto your bottom. Each time, the body absorbed the impact, redistributed the tension and found a new way of organising itself. This new organisation works, until the day it no longer does, and that is when the symptoms appear.

On top of injuries, there is a second mechanism: the sensors. Your eyes, your inner ear and your jaw constantly send information to your brain so that it can organise your posture. When one of these sensors goes off track, the whole system adjusts to compensate. Have you ever felt dizzy after changing your glasses? Or had neck pain in the weeks after dental treatment? That was this mechanism at work.

Stress and anxiety often complete the picture. The junction between the skull and the first vertebrae of the neck, which osteopaths call the C0-C1-C2 hinge, is the narrowest point on the entire nerve pathway between the brain and the body. This is where the vagus nerve runs: the nerve that regulates the digestive system, your sense of inner calm and the quality of your sleep. When this area becomes chronically tense, it can keep you in a permanent state of alert. Sleep gets worse, the jaw stays clenched at night, the shoulders never really come down. This is what patients often describe as “a feeling of brain fog”, a vague exhaustion that tests leave unexplained.

The vagus nerve is worth pausing on, because it explains clinical situations that often puzzle patients and their doctors. This nerve emerges at the base of the skull, just beside the first cervical vertebrae, then runs down through the neck and supplies most of the organs in the trunk, including the stomach, the intestines and the heart. When chronic tension settles at the base of the skull, this nerve can be mechanically irritated. And since this is the nerve that drives digestion, irritating it can cause chronic acid reflux, bloating, nausea, and sometimes palpitations even though heart tests are reassuring. This is why a patient can have every digestive test come back normal, then notice an improvement after targeted work on the base of the skull.

The cause was not in the gut. It was in the neck.

Understanding this means understanding why lasting relief comes from working back along the whole chain, rather than from treating the neck alone, the jaw alone or the ear alone. The work is to trace the problem back to its starting point, and to release the tension where it has taken hold for good.

Read the article: Morning stiff neck: what to do in the first few hours →