Part of Neck pain
How to sleep with neck pain, and how to measure your own pillow height
Warning signs, and when to get help
How do you sleep with neck pain?
In whichever position you can actually hold for six hours, with your head level with the rest of your body, on a height you have tested rather than one you have bought. That really is the whole of what the sources agree on. The NHS asks for a low, firm pillow, a firm mattress and your head at the same height as the rest of your body, advises against sleeping on your front, and says not to twist your neck in bed. healthdirect Australia says much the same in different words: a pillow that keeps your head and neck in their natural position, not too high, and comfortable for you.
Neither of them gives you a number. No height in centimeters or inches, no count of pillows, no named filling.
The physiotherapy guideline is no different. The 2017 JOSPT neck pain guideline is the clinical practice guideline physical therapists (physiotherapists) work from, and it has nothing to say about where you sleep. The word mattress does not appear in it at all. Pillow appears twice: once in an evidence table describing a cervical pillow used alongside exercise in a trial, and once as a search term in the appendix listing how the literature was looked for.
Neither mention is a recommendation about height. So a figure quoted at you in centimeters has come from whoever is selling the pillow.
Most of what follows assumes your neck has hurt for weeks, or keeps flaring, and that you are already working through the staged neck pain program and want the next three months of nights arranged sensibly. If you simply woke up stiff this morning after a perfectly ordinary yesterday, read a stiff neck after sleeping instead. That is the page written for it, and it carries the pillow research in full.
How do you work out your own pillow height?
Treat height as a measurement you take, not a product you choose. The rule it has to satisfy is the NHS one: your head ends up level with the rest of your body, so the line through your head carries on the line of your spine instead of angling up or down from it.
Lying on your side needs more height than lying on your back, because the gap between your ear and the mattress is wider than the gap at the back of your head. And you do not have to guess at the rest: lie the way you normally sleep and get someone to look at you from behind, or to take a photo on a phone. The photo is more honest than how the position feels from the inside.
There are only two ways to get it wrong. Too thick, and the chin is pushed down toward the chest, or on your side the head is pushed up toward the far shoulder. Too thin, and the head tips back on your back, or sags toward the mattress on your side. Each one leaves you sore in a different place, so work out which way yours is going before you change anything.
Take height away if your chin has been pushed toward your chest. Add it if your head has been tipping back.
Change height in small steps. A folded hand towel slid inside the pillowcase moves it a little at a time and costs nothing, so you can finish the whole test before you buy anything. Give each height two or three nights. The first ten minutes of a new set-up tell you almost nothing, and a night spent noticing your pillow is its own problem.
There is some support for height mattering more than material. Across nine higher-quality studies with 555 participants, what shifted neck alignment in side lying was the shape and height of the pillow rather than what it was stuffed with (Chun-Yiu and colleagues, 2021). The same review found that pillow design made no measurable difference to sleep quality, useful to know before you spend money hoping to sleep better.
One study has looked at height directly, and its two caveats matter as much as its result. In 84 adults with neck and shoulder symptoms whose pillow height was adjusted to each person, half reached a fall of three points or more on a numerical pain rating scale by three months, which is the smallest change usually counted as clinically important (Yamada and colleagues, 2023). There was no control group. A before-and-after study like this cannot separate the pillow from time and everything else that changed, and the paper's first author declares that he is a shareholder and the chief executive officer of a pillow research company.
With both of those stated, it supports the idea of adjusting height to the person. It does not establish a height for anybody, and it is the only study of its kind we could read.
Should you buy a new pillow for neck pain?
Probably not yet. A 2025 systematic review of pillows for people with long-standing neck pain found five usable studies with 239 people between them, and no type came out ahead, whether latex, foam or standard (Ghosh and colleagues, 2025). The larger meta-analysis is less flat than that, and the two belong together. It did find rubber and spring pillows ahead of other types for pain, waking symptoms and disability in people with long-standing neck pain, and it still concluded that what moved neck alignment was the shape and the height, not the filling (Chun-Yiu and colleagues, 2021). So the two reviews do not agree, and that disagreement is the state of the evidence.
Both reviews leave the same thing standing: the height is yours to find and nobody else's to sell you. So do it in that order. Test with what you already own, and shop afterward, for a dimension and not for a treatment.
Some pillows do have to go. The one that leaves your head clearly angled up or down every single night and will not adjust, because no amount of patience fixes a shape. And the one that has collapsed, because the height you tested has gone with it.
What nobody can give you is a brand or a model, and a page that does is selling something. Even the review that favored a filling says in the same breath that it was the shape and the height that moved the alignment, so a filling is not where this is decided. The marketing has run a long way ahead of the research here. Remember that at the point where a product promises to correct your neck.
What about sleeping on your side, or on your back?
Side and back both work. The one to pick is the one you can hold. Our page on a stiff neck after sleeping covers how shoulder width changes the height you need. What matters over months is simpler: a position you have to concentrate on is not a position, and the set-up that survives three months is the one that wins.
Front sleeping is the exception, and the NHS advises against it, because your head has to stay turned to one side for hours so that you can breathe. Changing a lifelong habit is hard, so a pillow under one hip to stop you rolling fully onto your front is a more realistic target than a rule you will break by 2am.
From about 28 weeks of pregnancy the NHS advises going to sleep on your side rather than on your back, because it says sleeping on your back after that point can double the risk of stillbirth. So use a side set-up with the gap under your head filled, and leave lying on your back until after the birth. The NHS also says not to worry if you wake up on your back: settle onto your side again and carry on.
Whether a sleeping position caused your neck pain in the first place is a different question, and the answer is that nobody knows. The NHS and healthdirect both list an awkward position overnight among the common causes, which is what those authorities say rather than something a trial has settled. The figures that exist alongside that are associations in particular groups: a 2023 review of risk factors in college students, pooling 30 mostly cross-sectional studies, reported higher odds of neck pain in students who described using their pillow badly (Gao and colleagues, 2023). Those are students reporting on themselves, so the finding does not transfer to you, and an association does not tell you which way the arrow points.
Sleeping when your shoulder hurts too
The shoulder tends to decide this one, because it is less forgiving than the neck. The usual arrangement is to lie off the painful shoulder, with that arm uppermost and resting on a pillow in front of you, so the arm is not hanging forward and pulling on the top of the shoulder and the side of the neck all night. Shoulder pain at night goes through the set-up properly, including what to do when both sides hurt.
Check the height again when you change sides. A pillow that suited the other side is not automatically right for this one, and the gap it has to fill may be different.
What if your arm goes numb at night?
This is the point where the pillow stops being the question. An arm or hand that goes dead at night, wakes you, or is numb when you come round is a different problem from pillow height, and no sleeping position on this page is the answer to it. Get the head level first, since that costs you nothing, and then treat the arm as a separate matter.
What to do next depends on the pattern, not on the height. Pain, pins and needles or weakness running down one arm can mean an irritated nerve in the neck, which is what the cervical radiculopathy program is written for, and it needs an assessment rather than new bedding. Numbness in both hands, or hands that have slowly become clumsy with buttons or keep dropping things, is on the warning list on this page at the same-day level, because it can point to pressure on the spinal cord in the neck.
If a neck movement makes you dizzy, stop, sit still until it settles, and get medical advice the same day before you try again. That covers turning over in bed as much as anything else. When neck pain is serious goes through every one of these routes and how fast each needs acting on. Read it if any of this describes you.
Sleep is part of recovery, not a detail beside it
A sore neck and a bad night tend to come as a pair, and that is worth knowing because it changes where the effort goes. In an exploratory study that followed 50 people from the first two weeks of a new bout of neck pain out to 26 weeks, disturbed sleep clustered in the groups whose recovery went least well, alongside ongoing systemic inflammation and raised psychological factors (Lutke Schipholt and colleagues, 2024). That is 50 people, an association rather than a cause, and it does not show that fixing your sleep fixes your neck.
It is still enough to move sleep out of the nice-to-have column. If you are working through a staged program on four hours a night, you are asking your neck to recover on very little, and the set-up for the nights deserves the same attention as the exercises.
The exercises are still the part with the evidence behind them, so keep them going: the staged neck pain program carries the stages and the starting doses, and your physio will adjust this. Neck rotation is the first movement in stage 1 of that program, and a stiff morning is a reasonable time to do it rather than a reason to skip it. After neck surgery or a broken bone in the neck, check with your surgeon or physio before you start.
Waking with neck pain and a headache
Headache on waking, easing as the neck loosens through the morning, spreading from the base of the skull forward on one side: that fits the pattern of a headache coming from the neck. Test the height before anything else, since the angled position that leaves a neck sore can leave a head aching as well.
Fitting the pattern is not the same as being caused by it. In most people who have both a headache and neck pain, the two travel together rather than one producing the other. Neck pain and headaches takes that apart properly, and it is the page to read if the headache is the bigger half of your problem. One exception matters more than the rest: a headache that feels new and unlike anything you have had before is not a pillow problem, and the warning signs on this page give the route for it.
When the nights are telling you something else
Most neck pain has no serious cause, and the mechanical kind behaves: it changes with position, it is easier after a good night and worse after a bad one, and it eases when you find the right spot. A few patterns do not behave like that, and those are the ones below.
Pain that is there all the time and does not ease with rest or changing position, or pain at night that keeps getting worse, needs your doctor within a few days. If you have had cancer, now or in the past, or you have lost weight without trying, that becomes the same day, and if you are being treated for cancer now, contact your cancer team the same day. These are not warnings about your pillow. The list below is sorted by how fast each one needs acting on.
If your neck pain started after an accident, a fall or a knock to the head, this is not the page to start with, and when neck pain is serious carries those lines in full. Age and bone health change the answer too, which is why one of the signs below asks anyone of 65 or over, or with low bone density, to get the neck checked after even a minor fall.
One more thing, if your nights have been bad for months. Being unable to sleep because of the pain is itself a reason to be seen, not something to work around with a better pillow, and the NHS asks you to see someone if neck pain has not gone after a few weeks or painkillers are not helping. What to change at your desk covers the other half of a long day, which is the position you hold for eight hours while you are awake.
One sign in the list below appears twice, at two different speeds. Pain that is there all the time and does not ease with rest or changing position, or pain at night that keeps getting worse, is a same-day matter if you have had cancer at any time or have lost weight without trying, and otherwise needs your doctor within a few days. If you cannot tell which of those you have, treat it as the more urgent one.
Related exercise programs
Warning signs
Get emergency help now
- Emergency: any sign of a stroke, even if it goes away. That means a face that droops on one side, an arm you cannot lift or keep up, slurred or muddled speech, weakness or numbness on one side of your body or face, sudden blurred vision, double vision or loss of sight, trouble swallowing, sudden dizziness with unsteadiness or falling over, a sudden severe headache, or a sudden fall where your legs give way but you do not black out (a drop attack). Call emergency services straight away. With neck pain, these can rarely come from a tear in an artery in the neck.
- Emergency: a new headache, or new pain on one side of your face, jaw or neck, with a drooping eyelid or a smaller pupil on the same side, or with a new pulsing or whooshing sound in one ear that keeps time with your heartbeat. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. This can be a tear in an artery in the neck (cervical artery dissection), which can lead to a stroke.
- Emergency: a sudden, severe headache or neck pain that feels new and unlike anything you have had before. Call emergency services straight away.
- Emergency: a new headache or neck pain, or both, that does not feel like ordinary neck pain. If this is your first bout, judge it by how it behaves rather than by how it compares. Either of the next two is enough on its own. One, it came on suddenly, in a single moment, even if it is not severe and even if it has eased since. Sudden onset counts on its own. Two, nothing you do changes it much: no position or rest makes a real difference, and after the first day or two it has not started to settle. It counts even if you have none of the other emergency signs above, and it matters more if it started after a neck injury or strain, even a minor one, a bout of heavy coughing, or having your neck manipulated. Go to an emergency department straight away, or call emergency services if you cannot get there safely, and do not drive yourself. Do not start these exercises, and do not have any hands-on treatment to your neck, until your neck has been checked. A tear in an artery in the neck can start as pain alone, often on one side, with nothing else to find. If it came on gradually rather than in a single moment, and you can find a position that eases it, follow the same day warning sign for this below instead. Pain that started in one moment stays with this emergency line even if a position now eases it.
- Emergency: a stiff neck with a fever, a severe headache that is getting worse, pain when you look at bright lights, confusion, or a rash that does not fade when you press a glass on it. Call emergency services. These can be signs of meningitis.
- Emergency: neck, jaw or arm pain that comes with chest pain, shortness of breath, sweating or feeling sick. Call emergency services.
- Emergency: new problems walking, for example your legs feel stiff, heavy or weak or you have become unsteady on your feet, new trouble controlling your bladder or bowels, or hands that suddenly become clumsy, for example you can no longer do up buttons. Call emergency services straight away. These can be signs of pressure on the spinal cord in the neck.
- Emergency: your arm, hand or fingers turn cold, pale, blue or gray compared with the other side. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. The blood supply to the arm may be blocked.
- Emergency: in the days or the weeks after an operation on the front of your neck, new swelling in your neck, trouble breathing, breathing that has turned noisy or whistling, a feeling that you can only breathe while sitting up, or trouble swallowing that is getting worse, with or without a fever. Call emergency services straight away. Do not phone the ward or your surgeon first and wait for someone to call back, do not drive and do not let anyone drive you in, and sit upright rather than lying down while you wait. Bleeding or swelling in front of the spine can narrow the airway in the first hours and the first day after this operation, swelling of the throat tissues can do it in the first three days, and an infection behind the throat can do it after that, which is why this line does not stop at the end of the first week (Debkowska and colleagues, 2019).
- Emergency: neck pain with a fever, or you feel hot, shivery or very unwell, and you also have new weakness, numbness or tingling in one or both arms or legs, new trouble walking, or new trouble with your bladder or bowels. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away. This can be an infection pressing on the spinal cord or nerves in the neck (spinal epidural abscess), which needs emergency treatment.
- Emergency: you have had cancer, now or in the past, and your back or neck pain feels like a tight band around your body, or you have new or worsening pain spreading down an arm or leg, weakness, numbness, pins and needles or a loss of feeling in your arms or legs, trouble walking, or trouble controlling your bladder or bowels. Those symptoms count on their own, with or without back or neck pain. Call your cancer team's emergency number straight away, or go to an emergency department if you do not have one or cannot get through, and do not drive yourself. This can be cancer pressing on the spinal cord (metastatic spinal cord compression), which needs treatment straight away.
- Emergency: new neck or back pain after a fall, a knock or a jolt, even a minor one such as a trip or a sudden stop in a car, if you have a condition that stiffens the spine, such as ankylosing spondylitis. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, do not drive yourself, and tell the staff about your spine condition, so they keep your neck and back in their usual position. A stiff spine can break after a small injury, and the break is easy to miss at first. If the pain started straight after the injury, or you also have numbness, tingling or weakness in your arms or legs, keep still and call emergency services.
Get help now, day or night
- You are pregnant or had a baby in the last few weeks and have a severe headache that does not go away with simple painkillers, problems with your vision such as blurring or flashing lights, pain just below your ribs, vomiting, heartburn that does not go away with heartburn medicines, sudden swelling of your face, hands or feet, or you feel very unwell. Contact your maternity unit straight away, or get urgent medical help if you cannot reach them. These can be signs of pre-eclampsia, which can develop in the days or weeks after the birth and needs checking immediately. The same applies to a headache after an epidural or spinal anesthetic that gets worse when you sit or stand up and eases when you lie down. Call emergency services if you have a fit (seizure) or a headache that came on suddenly and is very severe. Call emergency services too if you have a headache with a stiff neck and either a high temperature or bright light hurting your eyes, as this can be meningitis.
- Same day: you have rheumatoid arthritis and get new neck pain, or a new headache at the back of your head that keeps coming back. If it comes with tingling or numbness in your hands or arms, get medical advice the same day. If you also feel unsteady on your feet or your legs feel stiff, heavy or weak, call emergency services straight away. Without any of those, tell your doctor or rheumatology team within a few days, and leave out any neck exercises until you have been checked.
Get help today
- Same day: a new headache or neck pain, or both, that does not feel like ordinary neck pain, that came on gradually rather than in a single moment, that started after a neck injury or strain, even a minor one, a bout of heavy coughing, or having your neck manipulated, but that does ease when you change position or rest. Get checked the same day before you start these exercises or have any hands-on treatment to your neck. If nothing you do changes it much any more, or it has not started to settle after a day or two, or it did come on in a single moment, follow the emergency warning sign for this above.
- Same day: you have had an operation on your neck for a squeezed nerve or for pressure on the spinal cord, and the tingling, numbness or arm pain has come back after settling, or new weakness has appeared in a hand or arm. Get advice from the team that operated the same day. What a returning symptom means after that operation depends on what was done and on what your scan showed, so it is their question rather than a physio's. If you also have new trouble walking, new trouble controlling your bladder or bowels, or hands that have suddenly become clumsy, use the emergency line above instead and call emergency services straight away.
- Same day: hands that have slowly become clumsy, for example trouble doing up buttons or dropping things, or numbness in both hands. Get medical advice the same day. These can be signs of pressure on the spinal cord in the neck (cervical myelopathy). If the clumsiness or numbness gets worse quickly, call emergency services straight away.
- Same day: pain or tingling in both arms at the same time, rather than in one. Get medical advice the same day. This can also be a sign of pressure on the spinal cord in the neck.
- Same day: an arm or hand that is getting weaker. Get medical advice the same day.
- Same day: pins and needles in an arm together with neck or arm pain, or an arm that feels heavy or weak, and nobody has checked it yet. Get medical advice the same day.
- Same day: an electric shock feeling runs down your back or into your arms or legs as your head bends forward. Stop and get medical advice the same day.
- Same day: dizziness, a spinning feeling or feeling sick that comes on when you turn or tip your head, without any of the emergency signs above. Stop the exercises and get medical advice the same day. If you faint, it does not settle within a few minutes of sitting still, or you cannot stand or walk steadily, call emergency services.
- Same day: severe neck or arm pain that comes on suddenly or is getting worse quickly, without any of the emergency signs above. Get medical advice the same day.
- Same day: neck pain with a fever or chills, or you feel generally unwell. Get medical advice the same day, and go to an emergency department if you feel very unwell.
- Same day: new neck pain and you have had cancer, now or in the past, or you have lost weight without trying. Get medical advice the same day and mention it. If you are being treated for cancer now, contact your cancer team the same day.
- Same day: new, frequent headaches with pain or tenderness at your temples or on your scalp, or jaw pain when you eat or talk, or, if you are 50 or over, a temple or scalp that has become tender to touch, for example when you brush your hair or rest your head on a pillow. Get medical advice the same day. These can be signs of inflamed arteries in the head (temporal arteritis, also called giant cell arteritis). If your vision changes, call emergency services.
- Same day: neck pain after a car accident or a fall, even a minor one, if you are 65 or older, have low bone density (osteoporosis) or have taken steroid tablets for a long time. Get your neck checked by a doctor the same day, for example at an emergency department, before you start these exercises. At 65 or older, doctors usually want an X-ray or scan of the neck after an accident.
- Same day: pain that is there all the time and does not ease with rest or changing position, or pain at night that keeps getting worse. If you have had cancer, now or in the past, or you have lost weight without trying, get medical advice the same day.
Book an appointment
- Within a few days: pain that is there all the time and does not ease with rest or changing position, or pain at night that keeps getting worse. See your doctor within a few days.
Common questions
How do you sleep with neck pain without a pillow?
On your back, and only if your head still lands level with the rest of your body on that mattress. Going without a pillow meets the NHS rule when the mattress lets your head settle in line with your spine, and it breaks that rule when the chin lifts and the neck is left held backward all night, so this is something to check rather than assume. On your side it is hard to make work at all, because the gap between your ear and the mattress has to be filled by something, and with nothing in it the head drops toward the mattress by about the width of your shoulder. There is no trial saying how many pillows to own, so treat going without as one more height to test rather than as a cure. The check is the same one this page uses throughout: look at your head and neck from behind in a mirror, or get a photograph taken while you are lying as you normally sleep, and see whether the line through your head continues the line of your spine. From about 28 weeks of pregnancy the NHS advises going to sleep on your side rather than on your back, because it says sleeping on your back after that point can double the risk of stillbirth. So use a side set-up with the gap under your head filled, and leave lying on your back until after the birth. The NHS also says not to worry if you wake up on your back: settle onto your side again and carry on.
What is the best pillow for neck pain?
Nobody can tell you, and the honest version of that answer is more useful than a brand. A 2025 systematic review of pillows for people with long-standing neck pain screened tens of thousands of records, found five usable studies with 239 people between them, and reported that no type stood out, whether latex, foam or standard (Ghosh and colleagues, 2025). A larger meta-analysis did favor rubber and spring pillows over other types in people who already had neck pain, and its more practical conclusion was that what changed neck alignment in side lying was the shape and height of the pillow rather than the material inside it (Chun-Yiu and colleagues, 2021). The same review found that pillow design made no difference to sleep quality, which is worth knowing before you buy one hoping to sleep better. So the question to answer is height, not type, and height is something you can measure at home with what you already own. Our page on a stiff neck after sleeping sets out those trials in full.
How should you sleep when the pain is on one side?
The usual starting point is to lie on the painless side with the sore side uppermost, as long as the height still leaves your head level with the rest of your body. It is not a rule, because no trial has compared lying on the sore side with lying off it, and some people find the opposite more comfortable. Run it as a two-night test each way rather than deciding in the first ten minutes, since the first few minutes of any position feel fine. Support the top arm on a pillow so the shoulder is not dragging the neck forward, and keep the head from being pushed toward the far shoulder by a pillow that is too thick. If the pain sits on one side every time and keeps coming back there, neck pain on one side goes through the reasons that pattern happens. Pain in one arm with pins and needles or weakness is a different problem from a sleeping position, and it belongs with the warning signs on this page.
References
- NHS. Neck pain. Page last reviewed 27 April 2023. https://www.nhs.uk/symptoms/neck-pain-and-stiff-neck/
- healthdirect Australia. Neck pain. https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/neck-pain
- Blanpied PR, Gross AR, Elliott JM, et al. Neck pain: revision 2017. Clinical practice guidelines linked to the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health from the Orthopaedic Section of the American Physical Therapy Association. Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy. 2017;47(7):A1-A83. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2017.0302
- Ghosh S, Goyal M, Goyal K. Effect of pillow on pain, disability and sleep quality in patients with chronic neck pain: a systematic review. Rehabilitacion (Madrid). 2025;59(3):100922. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rh.2025.100922
- Chun-Yiu JP, Man-Ha ST, Chak-Lun AF. The effects of pillow designs on neck pain, waking symptoms, neck disability, sleep quality and spinal alignment in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Biomechanics. 2021;85:105353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinbiomech.2021.105353
- Yamada S, Hoshi T, Toda M, Tsuge T, Matsudaira K, Oka H. Changes in neck pain and somatic symptoms before and after the adjustment of the pillow height. Journal of Physical Therapy Science. 2023;35(2):106-113. doi:10.1589/jpts.35.106. Before-and-after study of 84 adults, no control group; the first author declares being a shareholder and chief executive officer of a pillow research company. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36744195/
- Lutke Schipholt IJ, Coppieters MW, Diepens M, et al. Systemic Inflammation, Sleep, and Psychological Factors Determine Recovery Trajectories for People With Neck Pain: An Exploratory Study. The Journal of Pain. 2024;25(8):104496. doi:10.1016/j.jpain.2024.02.010. Exploratory prospective cohort, 50 people followed to 26 weeks. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38342190/
- Gao Y, Chen Z, Chen S, Wang S, Lin J. Risk factors for neck pain in college students: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Public Health. 2023;23(1):1502. doi:10.1186/s12889-023-16212-7. 30 studies, 18,395 participants, mostly cross-sectional with self-reported exposures. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37553622/
- NHS. 27 weeks pregnant: the best sleeping positions during pregnancy. Best Start in Life week by week guide. https://www.nhs.uk/best-start-in-life/pregnancy/week-by-week-guide-to-pregnancy/2nd-trimester/week-27/
- NHS. Symptoms of a stroke. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stroke/symptoms/
- NHS. Cervical spondylosis. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/cervical-spondylosis/
- NHS. Meningitis. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/meningitis/
- NHS. Temporal arteritis. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/temporal-arteritis/
- NHS. Pre-eclampsia. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pre-eclampsia/
- Doukhi D, Debette S, Mawet J. Headaches attributed to cranial and cervical artery dissections. The Journal of Headache and Pain. 2025;26(1):28. https://doi.org/10.1186/s10194-025-01958-9
- Darouiche RO. Spinal epidural abscess. New England Journal of Medicine. 2006;355(19):2012-2020. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra055111
- Finucane LM, Downie A, Mercer C, et al. International framework for red flags for potential serious spinal pathologies. Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy. 2020;50(7):350-372. https://doi.org/10.2519/jospt.2020.9971
Written and checked by the PocketPhysio editorial team. Last updated 2026-11-06.
This page is general education, not a diagnosis or a personal treatment plan. See a physiotherapist or doctor for advice about your own situation.