Relief For Pain - 3 Osteopathic Secrets to Relieving Neck Muscle Spasms and Reducing Neck Pain

If your neck feels tense or painful, your neck muscles may be locked up in a spasm. A neck muscle spasm occurs when the cervical muscles are overstimulated. Essentially, they won't turn off.

A spasm can occur when a muscle is held in the same position for a long time. Or a muscle can be made to do repetitive movements. So, it is being trained to work extra hard at one activity.

The neck may be affected by the shoulder and upper back muscles, so it is best to treat all of the upper-body muscles if you want to take strain off the neck.

Natural treatment secrets based in osteopathy.

There are natural remedies that most doctors and health practitioners don't practice. But they can help you get instant relief, stop the muscle from its spasm, and prevent your neck from future spasms.

They originate in osteopathic medicine schools, and are also practiced by massage therapists, athletic trainers, and physical therapists. However, the training in these techniques is minimal, and the application is becoming a lost art. Who is practicing these simple, natural techniques in the wellness and medical professions? (Answer: Hardly anyone!)

* Positional Release- With the following positional release techniques, you will deactivate the muscle in spasm. It can be done with one of two ways:
Muscle Shortening- Identify the muscle which is in spasm. Then find its end points, where the muscle attaches to the bone. You will want to put the muscle on slack by bringing the two ends closer to each other. With your fingertips, press the muscle in toward itself from the ends. This signals the neuromuscular system to turn off the muscle.
This is a tricky skill with neck muscles because it is more difficult to find the ends of the muscles.
Repositioning- Another way to put the muscle on slack and send those deactivation signals is by gently moving other structures around the locked-up muscle. If you have a nasty 'crick in the neck', for example, one end of the affected muscle attaches to the shoulder blade. So, you can gently press the shoulder blade upward, toward the neck, to put it on slack.

Strain, Counter-Strain- This is the third technique that most health practitioners could be using to relieve spasms. When your neck is in spasm, you will apply a slight, gentle resistance force in the opposite direction of the spasm, and then stretch the muscle hn the direction that it was originally tight. It will stretch farther and loosen up.

If you practice these, you will eventually be able to use them very quickly to stop spasms. When you are proficient at them, you can also help others to relieve their pain and tension. Help yourself, and help others!

Of Bipolar Disorder, The Hippocampus, and The Exercise Fiend

My mother highly valued intelligence, and her way of putting down someone she saw as sub-par in the smarts department was saying, "He's no brain surgeon, I'll tell you that." But I, literally, am no brain surgeon, so to discuss this latest research I have to do one of those "let's start at the very beginning" Julie Andrews routines.

So, you've got a brain. So far, so good. And the brain has what is known as a limbic system. The limbic system is a set of structures that make up the inside of the cortex, which, in turn, is the tissue that is just outside [I know this is getting to be like "The House That Jack Built," but hang in there for just a few more moments] the cerebrum, which basically heads up your central nervous system. The limbic system is crucial in the experience of emotion--and memory, too, by the way.

Ok, one of those structures in the limbic system [and this is where I really wanted to get to] is known as the hippocampus. Essentially, it's part of the brain's mood center. And it's negatively impacted by stress, including the stress of bipolar episodes.

For years, brain autopsies on people with bipolar illness showed decreased density in the hippocampus. Additionally, a freshly published study entitled "Hippocampal Interneurons in Bipolar Disorder," published in the 2011 volume of the Archives of General Psychiatry compared brains of those with bipolar disorder to those of healthy control subjects. The abstract results are too wonderfully arcane to deprive you of, so here goes: "the bipolar disorder group showed reduced volume of the nonpyramidal cell layers, reduced somal volume in cornu ammonis sector 2/3, reduced number of somatostatin- and parvalbumin-positive neurons, and reduced messenger RNA levels for somatostatin, parvalbumin, and glutamic acid decarboxylase 1." Got it?

What they're really saying is that the hippocampus functions differently--and less well--in bipolar patients, partially due to reduced volume.

That being the case, it becomes of primary importance, if you're suffering from bipolar disorder, to take care of those hippocampal cells, and prevent whatever volume loss possible.

Despite our rather disheartening knowledge that there is brain atrophy in the bipolar nervous system, there is much cause for hope. A 2007 article showed that taking lithium increased volume in the paralimbic regions of the brain, and it has since been demonstrated that consistent treatment with adequate doses of antidepressants increases hippocampal volume, as well.

And, medication aside, we now get to return to one of my favorite topics, which is, as I've mentioned in other articles, exercise. Just to be clear--I firmly believe that bipolar disorder needs to be treated with a strict medicine regime, rigorously adhered to. I'm not a proponent of going all-natural, or organic, with such a serious illness.

However, in addition to whatever medicine your doctor has prescribed, exercise also holds much promise for not just slowing the shrinkage of the hippocampus cells-but actually reversing the process.

Numerous studies have found that 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week will slow hippocampus volume loss in the elderly, thus working against age-related memory loss. A research study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science entitled "Exercise Training Increases Size of Hippocampus and Improves Memory" found that the exercise impacted hippocampal volume so positively that it was the equivalent or reversing age-related volume loss by 1-2 years.

Schizophrenia is associated with hippocampal shrinkage to an even greater extent than bipolar disorder. Yet in a study of control-sample healthy men and men with schizophrenia entitled "Hippocampal Plasticity in Response to Exercise in Schizophrenia" in the February 2010 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, authors Frank-Gerald Pajonk et al found that cycling for 30 minutes 3 times per week increased hippocampal volume--for both groups, even the schizophrenics.