CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The new year always comes with new resolutions and if one of your new goals for 2024 is to work out more, you might want to pay attention. A helpful tool athletes use for recovery might actually be doing more harm than good.
THE QUESTION
Is using a massage gun on your neck dangerous?
THE ANSWER
Yes, using a massage gun on your neck is dangerous. The massage gun is only intended for the bigger muscles in your body.
THE SOURCES
WHAT WE FOUND
WCNC Charlotte showed Dr. Long a video, in which a woman claims using a massage gun on your neck is very dangerous because there are so many small arteries there. He agreed.
"So the neck is always just a very sensitive area, it needs to be even treated by any practitioner with skill, mainly for the fact that the bones in the neck are very exposed," he said. "And even some of the vascular structures that she was talking about, like your jugular artery, some of these other things that supply blood to the brain."
The National Library of Medicine backs up this argument. In one of its studies, repetitive use of a handheld massage gun on a woman's neck led to a condition called Vertebral Artery Dissection, a rare but serious condition that could cause a stroke.
For people with neck pain, Long said there are better, safer alternatives.
"Basic self-care options you can do are just some self-massage, you can use just fingers, pressure in the back of the neck and just hit some basic range of motion," Long said.
But in the end, Long said having a little bit of neck pain outweighs the dangers of using a massage gun.
"There's too many risk factors that go along with this that would I'd rather walk around with some low-level neck pain all the time as opposed to using massage gun on my neck," Long exclaimed.
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