My wife gets headaches, what woman doesn’t–kidding! Calm down, female reader. Don’t worry, she’ll smack me for all of you once she reads this article on Icy Hot and headaches.
Headaches occur for all sorts of reasons: lack of exercise, caffeine addiction, fluorescent lighting, staring at a computer screen, co-workers who won’t shut up. I think my wife’s headaches usually come on the weekends and I’ve noticed she doesn’t go through her normal morning coffee routine because, like me, she’s sleeping in.
Caffeine addiction is bound to get a large percentage of us. If you already suffer migraines or those headaches that seem to linger for hours on end then that lack of coffee only frustrates the problem. My wife’s headaches seem to start but never recede even after taking Advil or some form of Ibuprofen.
It was for this reason I made a suggestion to her one day. Why not try Icy Hot?
Huh?
The reason I made the suggestion is that I was always hearing that headaches were the result of stiff muscles in the neck and shoulder area. Therefore I surmised if you could loosen those muscles up–stop them from constricting–then you would relieve the headache.
That’s why massage works so well for a headache. It’s not always a fast remedy, but an hour massage will dull the pain if not relieve it entirely. And the massage itself feels tremendously good. Especially around the temples if the headache is sharp.
I started using my own advice when I got headaches and didn’t have access to pain medicine. I would simply massage my own neck. I t sounds like a funny thing to do and believe me it looks awkward, but it does work. I wasn’t always successful in ending the headache immediately, but I could give myself temporary relief until I could get home and lie down.
Now with my wife massage works to some extent. The problem is I can’t always be massaging her–as much as she would like that. I would never get any of my freelance work done. My solution was to rub Icy Hot on her neck.
At first she said absolutely not! “It smells, Jeff!” As with all of my ideas, I have to do quite a bit of convincing. Some of my brainstorms have failed in the past and as usual my wife remembers those above the successes.
But the Icy Hot made sense. At last one Saturday she gave in due to a rather bad headache that persisted for several hours. I put the cream on the back of her neck and massaged it in. I also made sure to get it on her shoulders too. It heated up quickly as she laid down.
And it worked!
I believe it is the heat that relieves the headache by softening up the muscles in the neck and shoulders. Icy Hot is meant for injuries that are persistent. The heat has to last for quite some time. So in order to treat a persistent headache the same rules apply. Keep the neck and shoulders heated for as long as needed. With my wife it only seems to take about an hour to work.
My wife still hates the smell. Let’s face it, you can’t use this remedy at work or when you go out in public. But for home it’s a great solution. Even now she still avoids it until it is the last option because of the smell. When she finally gives in and I massage the Icy Hot onto her neck it works every time.
