Types of Headaches a Colchester Chiropractor Sees Most

You have had a headache for three days and you are not really sure what kind it is. Maybe you have been calling it a migraine because it was severe, or a sinus headache because your face felt full. That is a normal way to describe pain. It is also why a lot of people spend years chasing relief that was never going to work for the headache they actually have.

Headaches are a category, not one condition. The type determines what helps and whether a provider like me is even the right person to see. Here is how the common ones sort out.

Tension Headaches: Pressure on Both Sides

This is what most people mean when they say "a headache." Pressure or tightening, often described as a band around the head. Usually both sides. Mild to moderate, the kind you push through at work while feeling steadily worse. It can last thirty minutes or stretch across most of a week. Nausea is not typical, though mild light or sound sensitivity is possible.

The usual drivers are sustained postural load, jaw clenching, stress, poor sleep, and dehydration. If your headache arrives Tuesday afternoon after six hours at a laptop, this is very likely it.

Cervicogenic Headaches: Pain That Starts in Your Neck

This is the one that gets missed most, and the one I see most. It originates in the joints, discs, or soft tissue of the upper cervical spine, and the pain refers upward into the head.

The tells are specific. It is one-sided and stays on that side. It starts at the base of the skull and travels forward toward the temple, the eye, or the forehead. Neck movement changes it. Holding one position brings it on. You may also have reduced neck rotation on the painful side without ever having noticed.

People call these migraines because they are one-sided and can get severe. They are not, and they respond very differently to care.

Migraine: A Neurological Event, Not Just a Severe Headache

Migraine has actual criteria. Typically one-sided, pulsating, moderate to severe, and untreated it runs four hours to three days. It brings nausea, vomiting, or real light and sound sensitivity, and ordinary movement makes it worse. Climbing stairs should not intensify a headache. With migraine, it often does.

About one in five people get an aura first, usually flickering lights, zigzag lines, or blind spots. Migraine is also recurrent by definition, so one bad headache is not a diagnosis. If this is your pattern, I go deeper into phases and triggers in migraine relief through chiropractic care.

Cluster headache is separate and genuinely rare, around one percent of people. Severe pain around one eye, attacks of fifteen minutes to three hours, tearing and restlessness. That pattern needs a neurologist.

The Two That Get Mislabeled: Sinus and Rebound

Sinus headaches are diagnosed far more often than they occur. A true one comes with an actual infection: fever, thick discolored discharge, facial pain that worsens when you bend forward. Facial pressure alone, with clear drainage and no fever, is far more often migraine or cervicogenic pain sitting behind the face.

Rebound headache, or medication overuse headache, is the one nobody expects. Over the counter pain relievers taken more than two or three days a week can start generating headaches between doses. The pattern: near daily headache, present on waking, briefly relieved by another dose. Breaking that cycle takes your prescribing provider's involvement.

Naming the headache correctly is not academic. It is the difference between three months of care that works and three years of care that was never aimed at the right tissue.

Red Flags: When a Headache Is an Emergency

Some headaches are not a chiropractic problem, and I would rather you leave this page and go get checked. Seek emergency care now for any of these.

A headache that reaches maximum intensity within seconds, often described as the worst of your life. Headache with fever and a stiff neck. Headache with confusion, slurred speech, weakness or numbness on one side, vision loss, or trouble walking. Headache after a head injury, especially with vomiting or drowsiness. Headache with a seizure. A new headache pattern after age fifty, or a new headache if you are pregnant, recently postpartum, immunocompromised, or have a cancer history. A headache worsening steadily day over day.

Those are emergency room symptoms, not wait and see symptoms.

Where to Go From Here

If your headaches are tension or cervicogenic, or migraine with a clear neck component, that is squarely what I work with at Family First Chiropractic in Colchester, Vermont. To start changing things before your first visit, begin with the daily habits and releases that ease headache pain. To understand what an adjustment is doing at the top of your neck, read how chiropractic care eases headaches.

If you have been guessing at your headache type for years, bring that history in. Come with the pattern: where it sits, what it feels like, what you were doing before it started. That is where we start.