Half of every head turn happens at one joint
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How it works Last winter I backed the car out of our drive and found I could not turn my head far enough to see the road. I got as far as the side pillar and stopped. Carol had to lean forward and tell me it was clear. Forty years of driving, and I was being talked out of my own drive like a boat into a slip. It was not pain, exactly… it was a wall. My head went round so far and no further, and the last bit came from twisting my whole body in the seat. So I did what I always do. I went and read how the thing is built. And it turns out the turning is not spread evenly down the neck at all.
Seven bones and a heavy load Your neck is seven small bones stacked one on top of the next. Doctors number them C1 to C7, from the skull down. C stands for cervical, which just means neck. On top of them sits your head. It weighs ten to twelve pounds. Or put another way, a bowling ball, balanced all day on a stack of bones no thicker than a broom handle at the top. Between most of the bones sits a disc. A disc is a soft cushion, a bit like a jelly sweet with a tough skin. And at the back of each level there is a pair of small joints, called facet joints, that guide how the bones slide on each other. The top two do the turning The top bone is called the atlas. It is named after the giant in the Greek story who held up the world, which is fair, because it holds up your skull. It is a ring. It has no thick block of bone at the front like the others. The bone below it is called the axis. It has a stubby peg of bone that sticks straight up into the ring of the atlas. When you shake your head to say no, the atlas spins around that peg… like a wheel on an axle. Here is the part that surprised me. That one joint, between the top two bones, gives you about half of all the turning your neck can do. A 2022 medical review in the journal Diagnostics put it at 50 to 60 percent. The five bones below share out the rest of the turn. Their main job is the nod and the tilt. In other words, the top of your neck says no, and the bottom says yes. Why the turn goes first With the years, discs lose some of their water and get thinner. The facet joints wear, the way any hinge does. None of that is a disaster. But a stiff joint here and a thin disc there add up, and the turn is the movement that runs short. Joints also live on movement. The slick fluid inside them, called synovial fluid, is spread around when you move. So a neck that only ever faces a screen or a page tends to lose the turns it does not use. Use it or lose it is a cliché. Here, it is also roughly how the plumbing works. That was my wall in the car. Nothing broken… just a neck that had done a great deal of facing forward and very little looking round. You have plenty of company A big study of world health, the Global Burden of Disease project, counted 203 million people living with neck pain in 2020. It expects that to reach 269 million by 2050. Most are between 45 and 74, and more of them are women than men. Bear in mind what one of the authors, Professor James Elliott, said plainly. There is no gold standard test for neck pain, and no single known cause. I find that oddly calming… it means a sore neck is common, and usually not a mystery anyone missed.
Meanwhile, I have been doing Monday's chin slide, and a slow look over each shoulder in the morning, held for a breath. I can see the road from the drive again. Carol still checks, but she has stopped narrating.
Here is to seeing the road from the drive, The Health Brief is for education only. It is not medical advice. Always check with your own doctor about your own situation. |