Home physiotherapy in Lower Parel for corporate desk pain — mill-land towers, ten-hour calendars and the headache that starts in your neck

The Lower Parel working day has a shape that I can almost set my watch by. Calls start at nine-thirty and are scheduled back to back until seven, because the calendar software will happily fill every slot. Nobody stands up. Lunch is eaten at the desk during a call with the camera off. And somewhere around four in the afternoon, a dull ache begins at the base of the skull on one side, climbs over the ear, and settles behind the eye. By eight it is a headache, and the person takes a painkiller and books a session for their eyes.

That pattern — one-sided, starting in the neck or occiput, spreading forward to the forehead or behind the eye, worse after sustained neck positions, better after moving around — is the classic presentation of a cervicogenic headache. It is a headache generated by structures in the upper neck, usually the joints and muscles of the top three cervical segments, and it is very common in people who hold their head still in front of a screen for nine or ten hours.

The reason it matters to name it correctly is that a cervicogenic headache responds well to treating the neck and poorly to everything else. People spend months on eye tests, screen filters, hydration advice and increasing doses of over-the-counter analgesics, none of which touch a joint that is stiff and irritable at C1 to C3. And the analgesics have their own trap, which I come to later.