BY JIM ZOUCH
We received a phone call from a young professional, lets call him Tom, who had woken up with acute neck pain. He reported his neck was stiff and painful turning left and right. He was curious to know if this was something physiotherapy could help with. We booked Tom into the clinic that morning and went through his symptoms and recent history. Tom could not remember doing anything differently the days before, and didn’t recall a moment of injury. He did mention that he had been quite busy at work and hadn’t slept as well the last week. Tom reported his pain was all in the neck and did not experience any other symptoms.
We took Tom through a physical examination to determine the movements that irritated his neck as well as a neurological examination involving reflex, sensation and muscle power testing to screen for any potential neural injury. From Tom’s history and examination, I explained to Tom he had what is termed ‘acute wry neck’, a label given to acute neck pain that commonly occurs out of the blue, without a mechanism of injury. I explained to Tom, although the underlying pathology is not well understood, its quite common in younger people and has a favourable outcome with movement and time.
We also discussed how physiotherapy could help reduce the pain and get the neck moving again. Tom was quite relieved after our examination to understand he had not caused himself major harm and that he could expect to get better in a reasonably quick time frame. We spent some time performing some ‘hands on’ therapy to help with pain relief and sent Tom away with some basic exercises to continue to restore his function in the coming days. I explained to Tom, the condition was likely to get better with time but we could help with pain relief and provide some guidance along the way. Tom was quite happy with the pain response and booked in early the following week. I expect Tom will be significantly better by our next session and hope to see him back to normal movement really soon.