Why Sudden Headache, Neck & Lower Back or Foot Pain While Working from Home?

We sat with Dr Madelaine Franklin, a chiropractic physician practicing in Dubai, to get her view on the most common issues that can arise while working from home: neck & lower back pain, headaches, and foot pain.

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Dr. Madelaine Franklin

Chiropractic Physician
Franklin Chiropractic and Physiotherapy Center

Why do we feel more tired while working from home?

The last two to three months most people have been at home, some people are still at home. It's a more sedentary life and what we find ourselves regarding working from home is that we're not always in the best position. Most people will start working on the dining-room table, others are working on the bed, some are lying on the floor working. What we find is that the body starts to get tired in those positions and you start getting bad posture, and you start developing headaches and/or lower back pain. If you haven't set up at a proper desk and a workstation over this period of time, those are the type of patients, we're definitely seeing.

The body doesn't adapt well to bad positions for longer periods of time. Also in the usual work environment, you find yourself being interrupted by colleagues or you get up for a quick lunch, you'll get some water and moving around a whole lot more than what you do at home. In the contrary, during COVID-19, we have had patients sitting maybe six or eight hours a day continuously without moving, and they find themselves in pain either with the lower back or the neck. So definitely I think the dining room table has been the biggest culprit for most people. With the hard chair, a flat back, they hedge right over and develops a bit of the anterior head carriage.

The other thing is with the laptops. Most people have taken a laptop home to do the work but laptops in reality is only designed to be mobile for you to do a quick email or traveling with. It is not meant to be your workhorse that you sit on all day long. So we find it's way too low, people again are looking down onto it, they haven't set it up onto a laptop stand so it changes the ergonomics completely.

Those that will continue to work at home for the next couple of months should definitely invest in a better chair, invest in a desk, get a laptop stand, get an external keyboard, so you can put your body into a better position. 

What are the most common issues that can arise while working from home?

They came in with neck pain, headaches and migraines that were triggered off. The most common treatment that we do for that is releasing the neck muscles, releasing all the tightness in the front. Again, it comes back to the workstation, working on the laptop.

The second most common issue was the lower back. Those were the ones sitting more on to the lounge. If you're sitting on your couch at home, you're not sitting on your "bum bone" (coccyx), you're slouching down, so you're sitting more onto your back. And those patients were getting sciatic pain. The glutes were getting really tight and that was just flaring up the sciatic nerves, so a lot of pain going down the legs.

Third most common one was a very interesting one, which I didn't expect. It was foot pain. As more people weren't wearing shoes at home, a lot of people that have flat feet or fallen arches or over pronating ankles, weak ankles, were actually getting more foot pain. That was purely because they weren't wearing their shoes. Without shoes we were walking on tiled floors, cement floors, wooden floors for a period of time, and that's definitely aggravated. Or doing exercise. Everyone went to the exercise phase and doing all the Zoom exercises but they were doing their exercises without putting on their sneakers, so their feet didn't have good support.

So we had a lot of patients that had pain underneath their feet and they had no idea why, and that was pretty much why. Because you're not wearing your shoes, and you're not wearing your shoes when you're working out. It's great to not wear shoes in the natural environment like grass or sand, and that's absolutely fine wearing no shoes at home for a couple of hours. But as soon as you start talking about two, three months at home without shoes, eventually your feet are like they need a bit of support. They give up eventually. So that was the interesting one.

Gyms reopened. What is your advice to those starting to workout after 2-3 months of staying at home?

Definitely, you have to warm up properly. If your muscles haven't been working properly for the last two, three months, just get good stretches.

Use is the roller. You can get a foam roller or even the hand roller and do it before you go to the gym. At home, roll your legs, your quads, your calves. Really get those muscles working out so that you can start getting the fibers nice and parallel. Sometimes they bunch up, you'll find them really tight in their quads, in their glutes, so just give yourself a good couple of minutes of rolling before hitting the gym. That is going to eliminate some strains that could possibly develop if you get onto the treadmill straight away or onto the cycles, so absolutely give it a nice roll, give it
a nice stretch.

And then the old traditional one. Once you finish, definitely do a cool down so that all the muscles can start relaxing. Again either onto the roller, good stretches, get yourself a nice tennis ball and do a couple of trigger points. Wherever you find the muscles a little bit sore, press it against the wall up. Then put it on the floor, sit on it, find those creep muscle trigger points, so definitely start just manually releasing it. So roller, hand roller or tennis ball will definitely help those muscles. Just relax a bit.

But at the end of the day, don't think that you are, where you were, two three months ago when you stopped. Definitely take it a notch or two down and work your way up from there. Unfortunately we've got muscle memory and muscle memory also forgets. So that's why we become weaker. That's why we have to continue to build that back to where we were.

*Disclaimer: Please consider the information in this video/article most recent as per date and medical recommendations towards COVID-19 may change as the situation evolves.