Endpoint Wellness

Acupuncture in Albuquerque, Sports Medicine, and Pain Management

How To Ease Neck Pain

For many living with chronic neck pain, conventional treatments such as medications or chiropractic care won’t always provide relief. Here are some natural tips on how to ease neck pain.

Help your neck pain with hydration

1. Stay Hydrated

The discs between the vertebrae in your spine require water to maintain disc height and spinal alignment and to take pressure off the spine. Each individual spinal disc is roughly 80 percent water when we’re born, with this ratio decreasing as we age and the discs degenerate.

Over time, maintaining strong daily hydration habits may prevent further degeneration of cervical discs, which may reduce neck pain.

2. Be Careful How You Use Your Phone

One way you may not even realize that you’re aggravating your neck is by cradling your phone in your neck while you’re talking. This puts unneeded strain on your cervical spine.

In addition, many people are starting to experience text neck by craning their neck down to look at their phone while they text or browse the internet.

3. Get In The Pool

The therapeutic effects that swimming has on neck pain can be significant, specifically in reducing inflammation, providing quick pain relief, and easing neck stiffness.

Interesting methods have included:

  • Squatting until the water reaches the chin, then moving back and forth and to the right and to the left.
  • Using a swimming pool that is quite warm.
  • Finding a stroke that is gentle on your neck for swimming laps, or consult with a physical therapist or other health professional for recommendations. Depending on your swimming skill, you may be able to do “Texas 25s”—either crawl or breaststroke—which is swimming a length of the pool without taking a breath. If you can do this, then you can get a lot of aerobic exercise without twisting your neck at all.
  • Getting the water level up to the neck and simply moving around.

4. Consider Acupuncture

Acupuncture provides varying degrees of neck pain relief for many individuals. Some people swear by its effectiveness as it helps a lot of people overcome a lot of different symptoms, including curing neck pain.

At Endpoint Wellness, we specialize in techniques that fix neck pain.