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What is Occipital Neuralgia?

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

How's everybody doing out there? This is Dr. Carlock. We're going to start this new video series where we're going to talk about a different little condition each week.

Since I just did actually a talk this past week on headaches, we're going to talk about specific type of headache today called occipital neuralgia. A lot of people come in here, they have occipital neuralgia, and some of you might be suffering it from it at home. I'm going to explain a little bit what exactly that means.

When they say occipital, that means just the bottom of the skull here. This is the occiput, the occipital region. And neuralgia, the word neuralgia just means nerve pain. So it's occipital nerve pain.

All these are nerves in the back of your head, they can become compressed, whether it's from tight muscles back there or from a bone out of place in your neck, and that can cause just sharp, sharp pains in the back of your head. They use a fancy word to describe it, occipital neuralgia, but it's nothing really too fancy if you come to think of it and boil it down.

If you're suffering from that, definitely I would come on in here and get checked out, because there's a lot of stuff we can do to help relieve that pain, whether it's loosen up some of those muscles and adjust the neck for proper motion. So yeah, just a little quick info on occipital neuralgia.

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