forward head posture
polycounter lvl 7
You guys ever heard of it? It seems fairly obvious as a condition, considering the way I see everyone hunched over computers, including myself.
Recently, a couple months ago I was in the middle of a month or two long work stint, slaving over the computer, in I'm sure, a super terrible posture the entire time.
Anyways, one night, my head (not ears) just erupted with weird, electric sounding noises, and I decided to sleep it off. Unfortunately, it stayed, and has been with me since.
The doctors were pretty much useless, told me it was tinnitus and to just live with it.
I started developing other weird problems; the noise would get progressively worse while my vision started to do weird things (visual snow mostly). I decided to stop using the computer for awhile, and strengthen my neck. Seemed to get better after awhile, then it just got super bad at one point. I'd wake up in the night, my vision strobing, and the noise mirroring the strobing... just crazy, alarming shit.
I don't have health insurance, so I waiting it out a couple days to see what would happen, and it seemed to get better so long as I didn't do anything to aggravate my neck.
Anyways, longer story short, I went to see a chiropractor, and after some x-rays we saw that my atlas was 1 degree turned, jutting into the base of my skull, my neck had a 5 degree twist (imagine the vertebrae lined up, then imagine them twisted 5 degrees) and my neck vertebrae were like a straight line, instead of curved.
This chiropractor practices the nucca style chiro, which focuses on adjusting only your atlas and letting everything else fall into place gradually. Since getting this adjusted, all my symptoms have been decreasing pretty much linearly... slowly, but very much better.
So, I'm always hearing about problems from people I know, about eye strain and other kind of typical problems (neck pain, tinnitus etc.) from people who work on computers all day. I'm really starting to believe this could be a major reason why.
There's not a lot of people talking about the fact that your neck isn't supposed to be craned like a bird. Apparently I was also starting to develop arthritis in my neck as well where the brunt of the weight was from my head. This seems pretty serious doesn't it?
We're all kind of used to working ourselves to exhaustion doing this stuff, but I really think we should all look into the health concerns going along with this stuff a little more readily.
I'm a pretty young guy (24), but I've been on computer my whole life. I can only imagine, that these symptoms are just developing as our entire culture becomes computer monkeyized.
Replies
Bad posture overlla has hundreads of sideeffects and can lead to many nasty end products. You seem to have gotten one of them, though luckily it wasnt too far gone to casue permeanent damge to your nerves. Its recommended you talk a break ever 30-60mins and have a walk even if its just to get a drink. Personally i know all this since ive been told by my doc about it because of the compound fractures in my lower vertebra (posture never caused them), then i researched on it in general.
So unless you want to be fucked in 10-20 years a £60 investment into a proper chair and lifting your monitor up anit so bad.
I also really need to work on my posture. I am such a slouch and crane my neck over all the time. I am afraid I will become a hunch back if I dont fix it. Problem is slouch sitting is so much more comfortable and seems like such an effort to sit properly so when working for long stints I slouch more and more : /
I sometimes think it would be best to take a wood 2x4, nail it to the back of my chair aimed strait up and strap my head and shoulders to it to force myself to sit upright ha
I have moved my monitor up placed on many books as before when it sat on my desk it was so far bellow eye level which has helped a lot but i still crane into the screen.
lol, yeah I imagine.
I also understand you kinda want your feet flat on the ground, and your head kinda level with the monitor. Just enough so you don't have to look up at it.
I also got a new chair, but I swear to god, nothing has ever been perfect considering chairs...
I have to use a pillow to keep the curve in my spine, and not start hunching over.
Bleh. My chiro says once my spine levels out I shouldn't have problems sitting.
I swear though, I never imagined that bad posture could lead to such intense things. It was definitely a wake up call.
badasses dont have cripplingly bad posture, problem solved.
(this is real advice)
I went to the gym for years before this. I've always had negligible gains, but I worked out.
Then I quit for 3 months, and this happens. I think the forward head posture impedes your ability to really gain weight.
But I do intend to hit the weights again after I'm good.
I'll check this out, maybe it'll help.