What Is Upper Cervical Chiropractic?
Upper cervical chiropractic is a focused type of chiropractic care that focuses on the top two bones of your neck: C1 and C2, also called the atlas and axis. It’s very effective at helping the whole body feel better without needing frequent adjustments and without having to chase pain all over the body.
Atlas and Axis (C1 & C2)
These two vertebrae sit at the base of your skull, right where the spinal cord and brainstem come together. When these bones shift slightly out of their normal position, they can affect your autonomic nervous system, the part of your nervous system that helps regulate much of how your body functions. Upper cervical chiropractors use precise imaging and gentle, specific adjustments to address problems in this area, rather than the broad, full-spine adjusting most people picture when they think of a chiropractor.
↓ Watch: Dr. Jason Gonzales explains what upper cervical chiropractic is and how it works ↓
How is it different from regular chiropractic?
Most people picture the same thing when they think of a chiropractor: lying on a table while the doctor adjusts the neck, the mid-back, and the lower back, often with the twisting and popping that general chiropractic is known for. That approach can help a lot of people, and it works across the whole spine.
Upper cervical chiropractic is narrower by design. Instead of adjusting many areas, it focuses on the relationship between the head and the top two bones of the neck. The adjustments are more gentle and more specific, without the twisting most people associate with a chiropractic adjustment. And rather than relying mainly on hands-on assessment, upper cervical care is guided by objective imaging that shows exactly how those top bones are positioned, so the adjustment can be precise to your anatomy.
Both are forms of chiropractic. The difference is focus: one works broadly across the spine, while upper cervical chiropractic concentrates on one of the most neurologically important areas and the role it plays in how your whole body functions.
Why we don’t adjust you every visit
Here’s one of the biggest differences, and for a lot of people it’s the one that matters most. In general chiropractic, you typically get adjusted on every visit and in multiple locations. For many people, that becomes a routine with no clear end: the relief helps, but it fades, so you go back, and the cycle continues.
Upper cervical chiropractic works differently. We don’t assume you need an adjustment just because you’ve come in. Each visit starts with an objective measurement, in our office that’s infrared thermography, to check if your previous adjustment is still holding. We want it to hold for as long as possible. When we confirm you’re still holding from the previous adjustment we’re not going to adjust you again just because you’re in the office. Not needing another adjustment is the goal.
When we say your adjustment is “holding,” we mean the fixation has not returned since your last adjustment. Fixation is when the joints of your upper neck stiffen or lock out of their normal motion. That matters for a reason that’s easy to miss: all else being equal, your body is in a better position to heal and regulate itself while it’s holding. In the early stages of care, holding doesn’t always mean you feel better yet. But it’s a signal that your nervous system is doing its work in the background, without interference, which is exactly what we’re after.
This is the difference between correcting a problem and managing it. The aim isn’t to keep you coming back forever. It’s to restore normal function and then confirm, with objective testing, that it’s staying that way.
Why the upper neck matters so much
If a problem in one small area of the neck can affect so many different parts of the body, it’s fair to ask why. The answer is in what sits there.
The top of your neck is where your spine meets your brainstem, the part of the nervous system that connects your brain to the rest of your body. Nearly every signal traveling between your brain and your body passes through this region. It’s also closely tied to your autonomic nervous system, the automatic side that runs the things you never have to think about: your balance, your blood pressure, your heart rate, your breathing, your digestion, your organ function, your glandular function, and the balance between fight or flight and rest and digest.
One example of how far this reach extends is digestion. The same autonomic nervous system works through the vagus nerve, which helps coordinate the muscular contractions that move food through your digestive tract and helps regulate the valves, or sphincters, that control flow along the way. When that signaling is working well, digestion tends to run more smoothly. It’s the kind of connection most people would never trace back to the neck, which is part of why a problem in this region can show up in places that seem to have nothing to do with it.
Because so much passes through such a small space, the upper neck is built to be both mobile and precise. When the top two bones hold their normal position, signals move freely and your body can regulate itself the way it’s designed to. When those bones shift and stay shifted, a problem chiropractors call a subluxation, that regulation can be affected. And the effects aren’t always felt in the neck itself. They can show up elsewhere in the body, sometimes far from where the actual problem is.
This is why upper cervical care looks at more than alignment. Alignment matters, but the deeper question is function: whether your nervous system can do its job without interference. That’s also why the same underlying problem can look so different from one person to the next. When a control center is involved, the symptoms depend on the person, not just the problem.
What conditions can upper cervical chiropractic help with?
Because the upper neck plays a role in how the whole body regulates itself, the problems people bring to upper cervical chiropractic care are more varied than you might expect. Some are what you’d associate with the neck. Many are not.
These are some of the problems people commonly seek upper cervical chiropractic care for:
Head and jaw
- Chronic headaches, including tension headaches
- Recurring migraines
- Jaw tension and pain
- Fullness or pressure in the ears
Neck and back
- Chronic neck pain
- Neck stiffness
- Mid back pain
- Lower back pain
Not everyone with these problems is a candidate for care, and upper cervical chiropractic is not a treatment for any specific disease. What these problems often share is a common thread: a nervous system that isn’t regulating the way it should. The only way to know whether that applies to you is to test for it, which is exactly where we start.
How do you know if my neck is the problem?
This is where upper cervical chiropractic is most different from what you’ve probably experienced. We don’t assume your neck is the problem, and we don’t start care to “see if it helps.” We test first, and we only move forward if the objective findings say we should.
It happens in stages.
First, a screening. Before anything else, we start with a functional screening test built around thermography. Thermography is a test that measures your autonomic nervous system: the same part that turns fight or flight on and off. Thermography testing can show us if your system is adapting or stuck. Being stuck in fight or flight is called sympathetic dominance. This first step is how we filter people in or out. If the screening doesn’t suggest a problem we can help with, we’ll tell you, and we won’t take you on as a patient.
If the screening points to a problem, we do a full workup. This is a complete clinical examination of the upper cervical spine and how your body is functioning around it:
- Biomechanical x-rays of the upper neck
- A radiologist’s report on those images
- A posture assessment
- Cervical range of motion testing
- Any relevant orthopedic and neurological tests
- Manual palpation of the upper cervical spine
Together, these tell us whether there’s a subluxation in the upper neck, where it is, and exactly how to correct it, if an adjustment is warranted at all.
Then, during care, we keep measuring. Every visit begins with thermography, so we’re never guessing about whether you need an adjustment or whether your previous adjustment is holding. As we covered earlier, that’s why you won’t be adjusted on every visit. The objective measurement leads, not the routine.
Is upper cervical chiropractic safe?
If you’ve ever searched whether neck adjustments are safe, you’ve probably come across the concern about stroke. It’s worth addressing directly, because it’s a real question and it deserves a real answer.
The concern traces back to a specific injury: a vertebral artery dissection, a tear in one of the arteries that runs through the neck. The movement most associated with that risk is forceful rotation of the neck, especially when it’s combined with extension, in other words, twisting the head while tilting it back. That’s the motion people picture when they think of a neck being cracked, and it’s the motion the safety research has focused on.
An upper cervical adjustment doesn’t involve that motion. There’s no rapid twisting of the neck and no forceful extension. The adjustment is low-force and specific, directed precisely to the top of the neck based on your imaging, rather than a broad, manual movement of the whole head and neck. The specific motion the fear is attached to isn’t part of how an upper cervical adjustment is delivered.
No health care is completely without risk, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But the approach is gentle by design, it’s guided by objective imaging rather than guesswork, and we screen people carefully before we begin, including telling people when care isn’t appropriate for them. Being deliberate about who we treat, and how, is itself part of keeping care safe.
What to expect
If you’ve never done this before, here’s roughly how it goes.
Your first visit starts with the functional screening test. There’s no pressure and no commitment; the goal is simply to find out whether this is even the right path for you. If the screening doesn’t point to a problem we can help with, we’ll tell you honestly, and that’s the end of it.
If it does point to a problem, the next step is the full workup: the imaging and the hands-on examination that show us exactly what’s happening at the top of your neck. Only after we’ve seen that information do we talk about whether an adjustment makes sense for you.
The adjustment itself surprises most people. There’s no forceful twisting and no loud cracking. It’s quick, specific, and gentle, often far less dramatic than what you may have braced yourself for. Many people are struck by how little it takes.
From there, care is about holding and monitoring rather than constant adjusting. As we covered earlier, each visit begins with thermography, and you’re only adjusted when the measurement shows you need it. Over time, the goal is for your body to hold its own adjustment longer and longer, because that’s the sign your nervous system is doing its job without interference.
If this is the first explanation that has made sense
If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you’ve been looking for answers for a long time, and that you’ve been disappointed before. We’re not going to tell you that upper cervical chiropractic is the answer, because we don’t know yet, and anyone who promises that without testing you first hasn’t earned it.
What we can tell you is how to find out. The screening is free, it takes about fifteen minutes, and it’s honest: if your nervous system isn’t the problem, we’ll say so, and we won’t take you on as a patient. If it is, you’ll finally have something objective to point to, and a clear next step.
After everything you’ve already tried, that’s a reasonable place to start.
Is upper cervical chiropractic the answer you’ve been looking for?
15 minutes to find out if we can help you, or not.