https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgMdUJiN9zI
I've been receiving a lot of questions about the soft tissue work we do in the head and face, so decided to write a blog and record a short video as a patient reference and resource.
Head and facial pain can be chronic, debilitating and very hard to treat, and often present with chronic headaches, especially migraine headaches. It does require some detective work to get to the source, and that will often involve the spine, especially the cervical spine, sometimes TMJ. However over time, the cervical spine and the jaw will tend to result in secondary muscular compensation in the superficial layers of the head and face, which become an independent problem that will require its own treatment. As you can see from the photos of my old anatomy books, we have a surprising number of complicated superficial muscular layers throughout our heads. It is probably not something that was much on my radar until the last decade, and probably not even something and became much more specific at treating until the last 5 years, as I started incorporating new tools and techniques that were specific to the very superficial and delicate muscles of the head. But the feedback I have been receiving over and over from patient is that incorporating craniofacial treatment along with cervical treatment results in some pretty dramatic overall improvement, especially seems to decrease the frequency and severity of symptoms return. And it's often a type of therapy that patients have instinctively been seeking, in a bit of a "no man's land" of readily available treatments.
This brief video highlights one common type of treatment using a soft tissue instrument called a guasha blade. The advantage of the instrument is that craniofacial muscles are very thin, with underlying bony structures that require treatment with very little compression over a hard base. The guasha blade can be angulated almost parallel to the cranium, allowing for a very gentle lifting and releasing of the muscle with no compression.