Neck Pain
Your neck holds up a twelve-pound head for sixteen hours a day and never once complains until it does. Dr. Andrew Allen finds out why, and treats the cause instead of just cracking the symptom.
Over 20 years of experience · Wheat Ridge, Arvada, Lakewood, Golden & West DenverYou have been managing this for a while
A heating pad on the couch. A new pillow, then another new pillow. Rolling your shoulders in meetings. Reaching up to squeeze that one spot forty times a day. Maybe someone popped your neck once and it felt amazing for about six hours. Neck pain responds beautifully to temporary fixes, which is exactly why so many people stay stuck in a loop of temporary fixes for years. Relief that does not last means the cause was never found. At Lakeside Spine & Injury Center, finding it is the entire point of the first visit.
How neck pain actually shows up
Necks are talkative. They refer pain into places that have nothing to do with the neck, which is why this one gets misdiagnosed so often:
Cannot check your blind spot
Rotation is gone on one side. You turn your whole torso to back out of a parking spot, and you have been doing it so long you forgot it is not normal.
The knot that never leaves
That spot where the neck meets the shoulder. You have been pressing on it for years. It is a symptom, not the problem.
Headaches from the base of the skull
Pain that starts at the top of the neck and wraps forward behind the eye. Cervicogenic headaches are extremely common and very treatable. See headaches and migraines.
Tingling into the arm or hand
Numbness, pins and needles, or a heavy arm. When a cervical nerve root is irritated, symptoms follow a specific map. That map is diagnostic.
Waking up wrecked
You sleep fine and wake up locked. Sometimes it is the pillow. More often the neck was already compromised and eight hours of stillness exposed it.
Grinding and popping
Crunching sounds when you turn your head. Usually not dangerous, usually a sign of restricted joint motion worth evaluating.
The afternoon creep
You feel fine at 9 a.m. and can barely hold your head up by 3 p.m. That is an endurance problem in the deep neck flexors.
Jaw, ear, or eye involvement
Neck dysfunction refers into the jaw and face more often than people realize. Unexplained ear or jaw pain is worth a cervical evaluation.
It started after a crash
Whiplash symptoms often show up days or weeks later. Do not wait it out. See our car accident injury care.
Your neck is usually paying for something else
Necks rarely fail on their own. They fail because the structures above and below stopped holding up their end. These are the root causes Dr. Allen is actively ruling in or out:
A mid back that stopped moving
The thoracic spine is supposed to supply extension and rotation. When it stiffens, the neck supplies it instead, at joints not built for the job. This is the most common driver we find, and it is why treating only the neck fails. See upper back pain.
Shoulder blade mechanics
If your scapula does not glide and rotate correctly, the upper trap and levator take over as stabilizers, and they are terrible at it. That is your permanent knot. Closely linked to shoulder pain.
Deep neck flexor weakness
The small muscles at the front of the neck are the true stabilizers. When they fatigue, the head drifts forward and the load on the joints climbs sharply. Almost nobody trains them, and almost everybody needs to.
Cervical disc involvement
A disc that has bulged or herniated can crowd a nerve root and send symptoms down the arm. Real, common, and often manageable conservatively. See herniated discs.
Facet joint irritation
The small paired joints at the back of each vertebra. When one gets stuck or inflamed, it produces sharp, one-sided, movement-specific pain with a very predictable referral pattern.
The upper cervical spine
The top two segments account for roughly half your head rotation and sit directly beneath the nerves that generate headaches. Restriction here drives more symptoms than any other spot in the neck.
Breathing pattern
If you breathe with your neck and shoulders instead of your diaphragm, you are contracting your scalenes twenty thousand times a day. That is a workload no muscle recovers from.
Sustained load, not bad posture
There is no perfect posture. There is only too much of one position. Two hours on a laptop at the kitchen counter, then a phone tucked against your shoulder, then a drive home.
Unresolved whiplash
Ligament and deep stabilizer injury from a collision can persist quietly for years and then resurface as chronic neck pain with no obvious cause.
Stress and jaw clenching
Not a lecture, just mechanics. Clenching loads the jaw and the upper cervical spine together, and the neck ends up carrying tension it never generated.
How Dr. Allen figures out what is actually wrong
You get evaluated and treated on day one. Not a clipboard and a handshake and a see-you-next-week.
We listen to the whole story
When it started, what makes it better, what makes it worse, whether there was ever a crash or a fall, and what you are actually trying to get back to. The history usually narrows it before we touch anything.
We watch you move
Rotation, side bending, extension, shoulder blade control, and how your thoracic spine behaves when you reach overhead. Pain tells you where. Movement tells you why.
Orthopedic and neurological testing
Specific tests to differentiate disc involvement from facet irritation from muscular referral. When arm symptoms are present, reflexes, sensation, and strength get tested. This is what separates a real diagnosis from a guess.
Segment-by-segment hands-on assessment
Dr. Allen palpates each cervical and upper thoracic level directly to find which specific joints are restricted, and which tissue is guarding them. Twenty years of hands find what a form does not.
We connect it to your life
Your monitor height, your commute down Wadsworth, your pillow, your bike fit, your sport. The cause is usually sitting in your calendar.
You get treated the same day
You leave your first visit having actually been treated, and knowing in plain English what is going on and what the plan is. If we are not the right fit for your case, we will tell you and point you where to go.
Colorado is hard on a neck
We would not live anywhere else. But the Front Range lifestyle has a signature, and after twenty years Dr. Allen can usually guess your hobby from your movement pattern.
The Denver commute
Wadsworth, Kipling, I-70, then eight hours at a desk downtown. Sustained sitting with a forward head is the single highest-volume neck exposure most people have.
Cycling on Clear Creek Trail
An hour in the drops means an hour of sustained cervical extension against gravity. Beautiful ride, brutal position, and a very common source of neck pain here.
Ski and snowboard season
Falls, chairlift whiplash, and the tension of a body braced against cold and speed. Snowboarders in particular arrive with a specific upper cervical pattern.
Wadsworth and Kipling traffic
Fender benders are a fact of life on these corridors. Whiplash does not require a dramatic crash, and symptoms often surface days later.
Snow shoveling
Braced shoulders, gripped hands, cold muscles, and repetitive rotation. Your upper traps do most of that work and they will tell you about it.
Fourteeners with a pack
Twenty pounds pulling your shoulders back and down for eight hours while you watch your feet. That is a full day of cervical loading.
Climbing at the gym or in the canyon
Belaying is sustained extension. Overhanging routes are sustained flexion. Golden and Clear Creek Canyon keep this one busy year round.
The remote work kitchen counter
A laptop on a counter is an ergonomic disaster performed daily. It is one of the most common findings we uncover in a neck history.
Altitude and dry air
Thin, dry air affects sleep quality and hydration, and poor sleep lowers pain tolerance. It is not the cause, but it stacks the deck.
How we treat neck pain
There is no single technique that fixes a neck. Dr. Allen builds care around what your evaluation actually found, which is why no two plans here look the same.
Chiropractic adjustments
Targeted manipulation of the specific restricted cervical and thoracic segments. Specific beats general every time, and the mid back almost always gets treated alongside the neck.
Soft tissue therapy
Hands-on work on the upper traps, levator, scalenes, and suboccipitals to address the guarding and adhesion that keeps pulling things back out of position.
Dry needling
Thin monofilament needles into trigger points that hands cannot reach, including the deep suboccipitals. Often the fastest route to relief in stubborn neck and headache cases.
Cupping therapy
Decompression-based soft tissue work that may help circulation and tissue mobility across the neck, upper traps, and shoulder region.
Therapeutic exercise
Deep neck flexor endurance, scapular control, and thoracic mobility. A short, specific set aimed at the deficit we found, not a photocopied sheet of twenty stretches.
Functional movement assessment
The reassessment loop. We re-test what we tested so you can see the change, and so we know whether the plan is working or needs to change.
Neck pain FAQ
Is neck cracking safe?
Cervical manipulation performed by a licensed chiropractor after a proper evaluation has a strong safety record. The evaluation is the important half of that sentence. Dr. Allen screens for the specific findings that would make manipulation inappropriate, and there are gentler techniques available when it is. If you are uneasy about it, say so, and he will use something else.
Why does my neck pain give me headaches?
The nerves from the top three cervical segments share a pathway with the nerve that supplies sensation to your face and head. Your brain cannot always tell the difference between an irritated neck joint and a headache, so it produces one. These are called cervicogenic headaches and they respond well to treating the neck.
Do I need an X-ray or MRI first?
Usually not. Imaging is valuable when specific findings warrant it, and Dr. Allen will tell you if your case is one of them. Plenty of people with clean scans have real pain, and plenty with abnormal scans feel fine. Imaging is one input, not a verdict.
Will I have to come three times a week forever?
No. There are no long-term contracts and no forced treatment plans here. The goal is to get you out of pain, teach you what caused it, and send you back to your life.
Would a better pillow fix this?
Sometimes it helps at the margins. But if a pillow were the cause, the pain would have started the week you bought it. A pillow that hurts you is usually revealing an existing problem, not creating one.
My arm is tingling. Is that serious?
It means a nerve is likely involved, which is worth evaluating properly rather than waiting out. Most cases respond well to conservative care. Progressive weakness or loss of coordination is different and needs prompt attention.
It started after a car accident. Is that different?
Yes, in both the clinical picture and the paperwork. See our car accident injury page for how those cases are handled.
Do you take my insurance?
Coverage questions are best answered directly. Call or text (303) 351-0744, or check the FAQ.
Stop managing it. Start fixing it.
Neck pain is not something you age into and live with. Get a real evaluation from a doctor with twenty years of hands, and find out what is actually going on.
Lakeside Spine & Injury Center · 6073 W 44th Ave #101, Wheat Ridge, CO 80033 · Proudly serving Wheat Ridge, Arvada, Lakewood, Golden, Edgewater, Applewood, and West Denver.