Explainer | Have you got a pain in the neck? Your lifestyle is mostly to blame. Sit properly, stretch and exercise to avoid pain

Four in every five people will suffer neck pain in their lifetimes; some will be affected by ‘tech neck’, from looking at mobile phone screens the wrong way

Computer users are often affected if they have poor posture. Doctors spell out the correct way to sit, strengthening exercises, and when to take screen breaks

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One in three people suffer neck pain each year. Hong Kong experts explain why it is easy to develop neck pain, and the lifestyle changes you can make to prevent it. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 7:15pm, 27 Apr 2024Updated: 8:29am, 28 Apr 2024

My husband has a pain in the neck. No, not me, but a real one that requires regular visits to a physiotherapist and pain medication prescriptions.

He is not alone: about 80 per cent of us will experience neck pain in our lifetime, and it is the fourth leading cause of disability in the United States.

The US National Institutes of Health estimate one in three people are afflicted each year – women more often than men. The symptoms are usually harmless and go away on their own after a while.

But they might keep recurring. There is a lot of opportunity for neck pain to develop, says Hong Kong orthopaedic surgeon Dr Chow Hung-tsan.

Chow Hung-tsan is a Hong Kong orthopaedic surgeon. Photo: Chow Hung-tsan

The neck is composed of six major ligaments, seven stacked bones – or vertebrae – labelled C1 to C7 (for cervical, the top of the spine), eight pairs of spinal nerves and more than 20 muscles.

Those are a lot of building blocks within a structure that starts at the base of your skull and ends at shoulder level, in a visible space that is only about 13cm (5 inches) deep. What is more, the neck bears the not insignificant weight of the head, which can be as much as 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds).

Anthea Rowan

Anthea Rowan has written for papers and magazines on almost every continent and on a huge variety of subjects, from travel in Africa to mental illness in the States to education in Europe. Her work has appeared in The Times in London, the Washington Post in America and regularly in the South China Morning Post. She is the author of A Silent Tsunami: Swimming Against the Tide of My Mother’s Dementia.

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