Rheumatism: The Neck - Part 1 |
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In younger people the great rheumatic trouble in the neck is muscular rheumatism," this causes pains which have many possible explanations but, just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a pain in the neck is a pain in the neck. The thing that tells you that a pain in the neck is caused by rheumatism is that there are tender places in the neck. The position and the severity of the pain vary from day to day and from hour to hour; they depend on the position of the neck and are worse when you are tired or worried.
Pain in the neck can strike very suddenly. When it does the results of manipulation can be dramatically gratifying. If ever you are asked by a friend to 'stretch' his neck, don't be frightened. He has had it done before and knows the relief it can bring. You can do it with him sitting in a chair and lift him up by his head, or you can do it with him on a bed and pull him by his head: pull him gently at first to make sure that pulling does not make him still more uncomfortable and do pull him absolutely straight --- no twisting or bending --- those are manoeuvres for experts, who may indeed be needed if an acute pain in the neck does not respond to a straight pull.
Rheumatic pains in the neck sometimes spreading to the head, where they attract more attention as headaches, more often come on gradually over a period of minutes or hours. They are worse at times of stress, if you postures if faulty and perhaps, as some people insist, when draughts are playing on your neck. The feeling that something is pressing down on your head is no illusion; that 'something' is your own scalp, pulled down by your own neck muscles, which are attached to it, as well as to the skull, at the back of your head. This sets up a vicious circle: the more the pain the more the worry about it: the more the worry the more the muscular tension, for tense people have tense muscles; the more the tension the more the pain, and so it goes on. Even if you are not worrying you can suffer from another vicious circle of events in the neck. Suppose a little bit of muscle hurts; there is a reflex which makes the parts of the muscles round it contract and thereby protect it from further movement and further pain. They may, however, act so vigorously that they themselves hurt and make the next lot of muscle contract. The result is hard, tender lump or 'nodule' of muscle which can easily be felt. Usually, though, the people whose muscles over-act in this way are, again, tense people with tense muscles. The fact is that eight out of ten people with pains in the neck bad enough to bring them to my surgery have some obvious worry, not some deep-seated half-conscious fear but an emotional situation plain to anyone who will spend half a minute listening to the story. |
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