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Pounding Pain In The Back Of The Brain – Trumpet Blog
Today was a very productive day with a specialist responsible for CT scanning my complete circulatory system.
While spending three hours on an examination table in my local Dr’s. Office, I gained additional information on why high, loud playing with a trumpet can sometimes create pain in the back of one’s head.
The original purpose of my exam today was to determine the cause of a common condition call Peripheral Neuropathy. The outcome of this exam is yet to be determined but the information I came away with was even more interesting.
During today’s procedure, my very competent and helpful technician and I mulled over the fact that when I was asked to “bear down” (isometric tension between my diaphragm and my abdominal muscles as if trying to extricate the world’s largest bowl movement) the flow of blood from my heart was substantially reduced. And upon the release of this abdominal restriction, the increase in blood flow was substantially increased. This observation reinforced my original belief that high, loud notes tend to restrict the blood flow to the brain which sometimes even causes a person to blackout.
During our conversation on this interesting topic, we both concluded that the tightening of the abdominal wall reduced the aria in the thoracic cavity to the point that this compression restricted the full expansion of the heart and in turn, restricted the expulsion of blood from the heart. This observation explains the blood restriction to the brain but does not explain the results of “tuck the chin to the chest” practice I had explained in my earlier post to ward off the eventual sharp pounding in the back of the head.
Once my exam was completed, my tech offered an interesting possibility. She mentioned that she and my Doctor might be interested in looking further into this topic and offered to do some studies on the subject. How tempting this first seemed but as I thought more on the subject the more I realized that my days of teaching had ended two decades ago with my retirement from education. Although I am not in a position to spend additional time or energy looking into the “high note, brain pain” issue, I would be very interested in my readers experience in this matter.
If you have additional information on this topic, please leave your comments on this site and I will enjoy reading your resposes.
