Home remedies · Back, muscles & joints
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
A cherry stone cushion or a hot water bottle for twenty minutes on the neck, with a cloth in between. Then — not before — move slowly: tip the ear towards the shoulder, hold for twenty seconds, both sides; turn the head slowly left and right; circle the shoulders ten times. Two or three times a day. Anyone at a screen stands up once every half hour.
A tight spot is not a knot in the muscle but a part of the muscle that will not let go: the fibres stay tensed, press their own small vessels shut and so get less oxygen — which makes the pain and keeps the tension going. Warmth breaks that circle because it widens the vessels and makes the muscle more stretchable; moist warmth reaches a little deeper than dry, because water conducts heat better than air. The movement afterwards is the real part: it takes the fibres through their full length, and it is why warmth alone lasts only until evening.
Do not stretch while it is cold, and never into the pain — a pull is enough. No jerky head circles into the back of the neck; that irritates the small joints. The hot water bottle not straight on the skin and not for hours on the same spot. If tightness comes back every week, the cause is usually not in the neck but in the height of the screen, in the pillow or in the sitting.
With numbness, tingling or loss of strength in the arm or hand, with pain radiating into the arm, after a fall or accident, with fever alongside a stiff neck and headache, with a neck that no longer moves, and with a sudden violent headache unlike any before.
Have it assessed rather than treated at home: back pain with numbness in the saddle area, disturbed bladder or bowel function, weakness or fever. A joint that cannot bear weight after an injury, or is deformed. A one-sided swollen, warm leg.