Headaches in Children – your 5 key questions answered!

Chiropractic care is a great option for treating headaches in children. In this article Dr Jennifer Barham-Floreani discusses important issues related to childhood headaches and answers these five key questions:

1. Should parents worry about their child’s headache?

2. What symptoms do children with migraine or tension headaches experience?

3. What are potential causes of childhood headaches?

4. What types of care are available?

5. What alternatives to medication are there?

Our eleven year-old is a trampoline enthusiast. He would literally take a trampolining class every day if the family budget would allow…

He loves how his chest is becoming stronger and his shoulders and arms muscle-bound, but as chiropractic parents we feel a little uneasy about his eagerness to bounce and flip from the moment he wakes. Yesterday he took a nasty fall trying to perfect a standing back-sault and experienced for the first time a whiplash injury. He was rather distressed by the acute pain and the headaches that followed that evening. The experience helped him appreciate how the body gives us signs and symptoms when it is distressed.

Just like adults, children can become ‘out of sorts’ and end up with headaches due to knocks or falls, poor diet, a lack of sleep or a lack of water etc. Interestingly, they are also susceptible to stress particularly when it relates to family matters—one such presentation for stress even in children may be headaches or abdominal migraines.

Headaches are a common problem for adults however they also affect a large number of children. A 2006 study reported that over 3.7 million American children between the ages of 4 and 17 experienced headaches in the previous 12 months (1). A study of Australian children found that only 36.8% of 10-18 year olds had never experienced a headache (2). Headaches are in fact one of the top 5 health problems experienced by children (3).

Read the full article here