Why Your Headache Treatment Isn't Working: A Clyde North Chiropractor on What Nobody Has Checked

Here's something that happens more often than you'd think.

Someone comes in for neck pain. We work through the history, the examination, the findings. And then, right at the end, almost as an afterthought, they say: "Oh, and I get headaches too. But that's separate."

It's almost never separate.

I've lost count of how many people have told me about their headaches like they're a personality trait. Something they've inherited, or simply have to live with. They've been managing them for years with whatever works: paracetamol, ibuprofen, a dark room, a strong coffee, a lie down.

And here's the part almost nobody is told. If you're reaching for pain relief regularly to manage headaches, there's a well-documented chance that the medication is now part of the reason you keep getting them.

This isn't an article that lists the seven types of headache and tells you to drink more water. This is the conversation I have in my clinic when someone is ready to stop managing their headaches and start understanding them.

The trap almost nobody warns you about

There's a condition called medication overuse headache, sometimes called rebound headache. It happens in people who already get headaches and who use pain relief often to manage them.

Here's how it works. The medication takes the headache away. As it wears off, the pain comes back, often a little worse. So you take more. Over time, the pattern shifts. What started as the occasional headache managed with the occasional tablet becomes frequent headaches that are being driven, at least partly, by the tablets themselves.

This is not a fringe idea. Medication overuse headache is recognised in the International Classification of Headache Disorders and is now considered the most common cause of secondary headache. It applies when someone has headaches on 15 or more days per month while regularly using pain relief for more than three months.

In the general population, research puts the figure somewhere between 0.5% and 2.6%. But among people attending headache clinics with daily headaches, reported rates run anywhere from 11% to 70%.

I want to be careful here. This is not an argument against pain relief, and it is absolutely not advice to stop anything your GP has prescribed. That's a conversation for your doctor.

It's an argument for asking a different question. Not "what can I take for this headache?" but "why do I keep getting them?"

Where headaches actually start

Most people assume a headache is a head problem. It's in your head, so the problem must be in your head.

But there's a specific type of headache that starts in the neck. It's called a cervicogenic headache, and it's far more common than most people realise. Across the research, this type accounts for roughly 15% to 20% of people with ongoing headaches.

The reason comes down to wiring.

The nerves that supply the top three levels of your neck meet up with the nerves that supply your face and head. They all arrive at the same relay point in the upper part of your spinal cord. This is the accepted reason behind neck-driven headaches.

Think of it like two phone lines plugged into the same switchboard. A signal comes in from a stiff, irritated joint at the top of your neck. It arrives at the same place as signals from your forehead, your temple, and behind your eye. Your brain gets the message clearly, but it has no reliable way of knowing which line it came in on.

So it reports pain where it expects pain to be. Behind the eye. Across the temple. At the base of the skull.

Your neck sent the message. Your head got the blame.

And we can be specific about where. When researchers used targeted nerve-blocking injections to pinpoint the source of pain in people with suspected neck-driven headaches, they found the source in 75% of cases. One joint near the top of the neck, at C2-3, was responsible in 62% of those. One joint. Accounting for the majority.

The upper cervical spine: the atlas and axis vertebrae sit directly beneath the skull, with nerve pathways converging at the brainstem. When these joints are stiff or compressed, the signals they send are often felt as headache pain in the forehead, temple, or behind the eye.

Why nobody has checked your neck

Here's what frustrates me clinically.

Most people with recurring headaches have had their head investigated thoroughly. They've discussed triggers, sleep, hydration, screen time, stress, caffeine, diet. Some have had CT scans and MRI's to rule out anything sinister.

What most of them have never had is a proper structural examination of the upper cervical spine. Nobody has assessed how the top three joints of their neck are moving. Nobody has measured the shape of their cervical curve. Nobody has looked at where their head sits relative to their shoulders.

If the source of the problem is involves the joints at the top of your neck, and nobody examines it, the problem stays hidden no matter how many other things get ruled out.

This is the same structural blind spot I wrote about in my article on why neck pain keeps coming back. When the cervical curve flattens and the head drifts forward, load concentrates through the upper cervical joints, which are precisely the joints most implicated in headache.

The headache and the neck pain aren't two conditions. They're often two symptoms of one structural problem.

What happens if you keep waiting

Headaches that persist don't stay the same. They change character over time, and the direction of that change matters.

Persistent pain alters how the nervous system processes it. The pathways carrying those signals become more sensitive, the threshold for firing drops, and the brain becomes progressively more efficient at producing pain. This is central sensitisation, and it's a large part of why episodic headaches transform into chronic daily ones.

Medication overuse accelerates the same process. Chronic exposure to acute headache medication is thought to induce central sensitisation and alter pain-processing pathways, which is precisely the transformation from occasional headache to persistent daily headache that so many people describe.

The structural side compounds it. Joints that haven't moved properly in months become stiffer. Muscles guard harder. The forward head posture that started the problem gets more entrenched because the muscles that should hold you upright have quietly weakened.

None of this is meant to alarm you. It's the opposite. Every one of these processes is easier to interrupt early, before the nervous system has learned the pattern and before the structure has adapted around it. Acting while the problem is still mechanical is the single biggest advantage available to you.

How I actually approach it

When someone comes in with recurring headaches, I'm not treating the head. I'm checking whether the neck is generating the signal.

That means examining how the top three joints of the neck move, checking where the head sits relative to the shoulders, and measuring the actual shape of the neck curve rather than guessing.

The approach I use is Chiropractic BioPhysics (CBP), which is built around restoring the spine's natural curves using measurable methods rather than feel alone. Where the assessment shows the neck curve has flattened, treatment combines specific adjustments with corrective exercises and cervical extension traction designed around your individual measurements.

The evidence for the manual therapy side is solid. A randomised controlled trial of 256 adults with ongoing neck-driven headaches tested spinal adjustment against a light-massage control and found that adjustment produced better outcomes, with a clear pattern of more treatment leading to more improvement up to a point.

For the structural side, a randomised trial following patients for two full years after treatment ended found that those who received cervical extension traction increased their neck curve and held that correction at both three months and two years. The control group showed no structural change at all.

I want to be honest about the limits. The research behind cervical curve correction is strong and continues to grow, but the trials are still relatively small and results vary between people. Not every headache comes from the neck, and not everyone with a flat neck curve gets headaches. This approach is right for a specific presentation, and part of a proper assessment is working out whether you fit it.

What it offers, when it does fit, is a way to change the structure that keeps generating the signal, rather than catching the signal after it arrives.

Most people with recurring headaches have had their head investigated thoroughly and their neck barely examined at all. Measuring the cervical curve changes the entire clinical picture.

Something you can test this week

Here's a simple exercise that costs you nothing and tells you a surprising amount.

For the next seven days, write down two things each time you get a headache: what time it started, and what you were doing in the two hours before.

Most people find a pattern within a week. Headaches that build through the afternoon after a morning at a desk. Headaches that arrive after a long drive. Headaches that show up on the days with the most screen time and disappear on holidays.

If your headaches cluster around sustained positions rather than around foods, weather, or sleep, that's a strong signal that the neck is worth checking properly.

It's not a diagnosis. But it's the kind of information that makes an assessment far more useful, and it may be the first time you've seen your own pattern written down.

Where to start: headache treatment in Clyde North

If your headaches keep coming back, or you've noticed you're reaching for pain relief more often than you used to, the most useful next step isn't another trigger to cut out. It's finding out whether your neck is behind them.

That's what our ClearSpine Pain Assessment is designed to answer. We perform five targeted tests that tell you where your symptoms are coming from, how long the pattern has been building, and what the realistic path forward looks like. You'll leave understanding your headaches rather than guessing at them.

Effective headache treatment in Clyde North starts with examining the structure nobody has looked at yet.

I see people from across Melbourne's southeast, including Berwick, Cranbourne, Narre Warren, Officer and Beaconsfield, here at the clinic in Clyde North.

If you're ready to stop managing your headaches and start understanding them, book your ClearSpine Pain Assessment or call us on (03) 5915 9895.

Your headaches aren't something you have to live with. They're a signal, and signals come from somewhere.

(An important note: headaches that are sudden and severe, that follow a head injury, that come with fever, vision changes, weakness, confusion, or that feel noticeably different from your usual pattern need urgent medical attention. Please seek emergency care for any of these. Do not stop or change any prescribed medication without speaking to your GP.)

Dr. Ashley Cherrett (BAppSc(Chiro), BHlthSc) is the principal chiropractor and owner of Cherrett Chiropractic in Clyde North, Melbourne. He practises using the Chiropractic BioPhysics (CBP) technique, a structured, evidence-based approach to spinal correction. This article is educational and does not constitute medical advice. Individual results vary, and all care is based on individual assessment.