I have noticed something that is becoming more obvious to me, but it is quite often not even noticed by the person suffering from it. What I am referring to is called hump neck – which is when the back of the neck becomes slightly swollen.
There is a reason for this and it is fast becoming a scourge of our modern day society, so allow me to explain…
The seventh vertebrae of the neck (C7) is particularly prone to this problem. This vertebrae already sticks out a bit on a lot of people, but it is becoming more prominent with people’s life style.
The main culprit now is the constant use of a smart phone. Just look around you at any time of day and night and you will regularly see someone with their head bowed forward slightly while they are surfing their phone, or updating social media.
It seems to me that some people spend quite a lot of time doing this without realising that it can cause some long term difficulties later on.
While constantly sitting in this position with the head bowed, it is causing unnnecessary pressure on the neck, particularly C7. The body will compensate for this by building up the area at the back of the neck to support the heavy weight of the head. This is how hump neck (or text neck) comes about and it means that the spine is no longer sitting in line.
It results in a build up of fatty tissue at the base of the neck, quite often caused by this bad posture of leaning forward. It will require massage treatment, mobilisation and stretching to correct it.
I am seeing this regularly now and I’m having to treat clients around the neck area to relax the muscles in order to bring some alignment. It can be corrected with massage treatments over a period of time, but faster results can be obtained if the massage is used in combination with the clients own awareness to do something regularly for themselves as well.
I was aware of this neck pain quite a while ago, so I did a bit of research and found a great little product that people can use at home to help eliminate the problem. The more people can do to help themselves with this, then the better result they will achieve when I treat them.
The one I bought for myself is made by Kenko Back and it is also referred to as (neck cloud.) As I understand, this company were the originators of this useful little product. There are plenty of cheaper options available on the internet, but for me, the original was preferable and I didn’t mind paying extra for it.
According to it, this little neck stretcher is useful for chronic neck pain, headaches, trapped nerve, stiff neck and bad posture, caused by sitting incorrectly, or the constant leaning forward attending to your smart phone.
Now, I am not telling you to go out and buy one of these – you need to make your own mind up on that, but I’m simply offering you a possibility to use something that could help you in the long term.
If you are suffering from neck hump and you consider using one of these regularly, then the job of correcting your spine around the neck area will be a bit easier for me to deal with next time I see you.