Migraine massage therapy TorontoHeadache & Migraine Relief

If your headaches are clearly driven by general neck and upper-back tightness — the classic tension-type pattern — that gets its own dedicated page: see Tension & Posture Headaches. This page covers something more specific: myofascial trigger points with predictable referral patterns that often present as headaches, and a few self-tests you can try yourself to see if one of them is behind what you're feeling.

Not a diagnosis — for more information, contact me or another trusted healthcare provider.

A meta-analysis of massage trials for headache found average reductions of roughly 2.78 fewer headache days per month and 7.52 fewer hours per attack — genuinely encouraging, and part of why trigger point work is worth trying. A few trigger points refer pain in surprisingly predictable patterns: an upper trapezius trigger point tends to refer in a shape roughly like a question mark, tracing up and around the ear, with the trigger point itself usually sitting right where your shoulder meets your neck. A lower trapezius trigger point tends to cause a tension-type headache sitting just behind the mastoid bone, at the base of your skull, right at the back of your neck. And an SCM (sternocleidomastoid) trigger point can cause a headache that feels like it sits behind one or both eyes.

It's worth trying these yourself to see if the referral pattern actually matches what you're feeling. For SCM: place one finger at the base of your ear and your thumb on your collarbone, lie on your back, and do a slight half sit-up to feel the muscle running between those two points; grab it between your index and middle finger, work your way from the collarbone up toward the base of the ear, and squeeze gently as you go — see if it recreates that headache behind your eye. For upper trapezius: massage the muscle at the back of your neck, where your shoulder meets your neck, and feel for that question-mark-shaped headache around your ear. For lower trapezius: reach your arm over your shoulder — like you're patting yourself on the back — and massage the muscles just to the left or right of your spine, feeling for that headache at the base of your skull.

If any of these self-massage techniques recreate your headache symptoms, you likely have a myofascial trigger point contributing to it — and I'd love to provide relief in the short term, along with tools to reduce the discomfort long-term on your own.

What I Focus On

• Upper Trap Referral
• Lower Trap Referral
• SCM Referral
• Self-Massage Tests