Why are there soreness on both sides of the neck?

Our neck is used quite frequently in our daily lives. If the posture is incorrect or if it is maintained in a fixed position for a long time, it can easily cause pain. Swelling and soreness on both sides of the neck are usually caused by bad living habits. If there are other symptoms, you need to consider the factors of the disease. The key is to be clear about the most common factors. So, what’s causing the soreness and swelling on both sides of your neck? Let’s take a look below.

Most of the patients suffer from this condition because they have too little neck movement, often lower their heads, bury their heads in reading or working, which causes the neck to bear too much weight. For the neck joint, the neck ligaments and soft tissues may be severely over-stretched due to sudden external force, such as a car accident or intense contact sports. Another more common cause of severe over-stretching of soft tissues is long-term poor posture. Both of these can easily cause mechanical pain.

Differential Diagnosis

Neck pain: It is a common problem among young people as well as middle-aged and elderly people. Its symptoms can be local or conductive. The so-called local pain refers to pain in the neck alone, which may be caused by ligament sprain, muscle strain, or wear and tear of the joints. The so-called conductivity means that in addition to neck discomfort, there is also numbness and soreness in the hands. This is mostly caused by compression of the cervical nerve roots, or inflammation, adhesion, and tightening of the fascia from the neck to the arms and even the wrists.

Neck sprain: commonly known as stiff neck. Due to the invasion of wind and cold in the neck and back, blood stagnates and qi stagnates, and the meridians become uncomfortable. Or improper neck position while sleeping. Pain on one side of the neck caused by reasons such as sudden twisting of the head is called cervical sprain. In daily life, people sometimes wake up and feel pain and discomfort in the neck, with the head tilted to the painful side and unable to move freely. This is a common soft tissue injury caused by stiff neck, clinically known as cervical sprain. The neck, like the joints and waist, is a part that is easily sprained.

Neck stiffness: Neck stiffness refers to tension, swelling, hardening, spasm (cramps) and other phenomena in the neck muscles, and inflexible neck movements. Common in fatigue and cervical spondylosis. Neck stiffness is caused by continuous excessive muscle contraction, which not only reduces the blood supply to the neck muscles, but also causes the accumulation of metabolites such as lactic acid, causing muscle ischemic pain. Pain in the back of the head or on the top of the head may be a tension headache caused by lesions in the head or cervical spine.

Inability to turn the neck: Inability to turn the neck is a symptom of the clinical manifestation of locked-in syndrome. Locked-in syndrome, also known as locked-in syndrome, is an efferent state caused by lesions at the base of the pons. Vascular lesions mainly occur in the brainstem, mostly caused by bilateral occlusion of the pontine branches of the basilar artery, leading to bilateral infarction at the base of the pons.