Has your neck been hurting? Maybe you woke up with a stiff neck, or your neck started bothering you after sitting at a desk all day. Office workers, busy professionals, and anyone who spends hours looking at computers often deal with neck pain. The good news is that osteopathy offers a gentle, hands-on approach to help your neck feel better and move more freely.
Osteopathy treats your whole body, not just the painful spot. This means if your neck hurts, an osteopath like Alexandra Bohlinger at Alexandra Osteopilates in East Grand Rapids will look at your shoulders, upper back, and even your posture to understand why your neck is in pain. By addressing the real causes instead of just covering up pain, osteopathy helps you heal from the inside out.
Why Do Professionals Get Neck Pain?
Living and working in 2025 means you might be sitting at a desk, driving for your commute, or using your phone and computer for hours every day. All this sitting and looking down at screens puts serious pressure on your neck. In fact, every time you tilt your head forward just one inch to look at a screen or device, your neck muscles have to support an extra 10 pounds of weight! Imagine doing that for eight hours a day—no wonder your neck hurts.
Poor posture at your desk is one of the biggest causes of neck pain. If your monitor is too far away, you lean forward to see better. If your chair isn’t adjusted right, your shoulders creep up toward your ears. If your mouse is hard to reach, you twist awkwardly while working. Over weeks and months, these small problems add up to real pain.
Stress also makes neck pain worse. When you’re stressed or anxious, your neck and shoulder muscles tighten up without you even noticing. This tightness leads to trigger points—spots where muscles get stuck and painful. People who experience stress have 1.6 times more neck pain than people who feel relaxed.
How Osteopathy Helps Your Neck Feel Better
Osteopathic manipulative treatment, or OMT, uses gentle hands-on techniques to help your neck move better and feel less painful. Unlike some treatments that use force or medication, osteopathy respects your body and works with how your body naturally heals itself.
Here’s how osteopathy helps: An osteopath finds the tight, restricted areas in your neck and surrounding muscles. Then they use special techniques to help those tight areas relax and move freely again. When your neck moves better, pain goes away because the muscles aren’t working so hard to compensate.
One popular osteopathic technique is called soft tissue manipulation. Your osteopath gently applies pressure and stretching to the muscles around your neck to ease tension and get more blood flowing to the area. Better blood flow means better healing and less pain.
Another technique is muscle energy technique, or MET. In this method, you gently use your own muscles against a small amount of resistance that the osteopath provides. This helps your muscles relax and your joints move more freely without forcing anything.
A third technique is called strain-counterstrain. Your osteopath finds tender points in your neck that are extra sensitive. Then they gently move your head to a comfortable position that takes pressure off that tender point, hold it there for about 90 seconds, and let your nervous system reset. This helps your muscles stop being overprotective and start relaxing.
Studies show that osteopathic treatment works really well for neck pain. People who get OMT have better pain relief than people who just take pain medicine, and they don’t have to worry about the side effects of medications. The treatment helps both acute neck pain (pain that just started) and chronic neck pain (pain that’s been there for a long time).
Osteopathy for Arthritis in the Neck
If you have arthritis in your neck, you know how stiff and sore it can feel. Arthritis happens when the joints in your neck wear down over time, and the smooth surfaces get rough. This makes movement painful and limited. Osteopathy can help with arthritis pain too.
Your osteopath gently moves your neck joints to improve how they move and reduce stiffness. They also work with the muscles and ligaments around these arthritic joints to reduce stress on them. This combination—improving joint movement while relaxing the muscles around it—helps reduce arthritis pain naturally. Many people find they can move their neck with less pain after osteopathic care.
Fit Osteopathy Into Your Busy Schedule
If you live in Grand Rapids and work there too, you might think you don’t have time for an appointment. But Alexandra Osteopilates makes it easy. The studio is located at 251 Plymouth Avenue SE in East Grand Rapids, which is super convenient from downtown Grand Rapids—just a short drive away.
Alexandra offers extended hours to fit busy professionals. Her studio is open from 7am to 8pm on weekdays (Monday through Friday) and 7am to 1pm on Saturdays. This means you can squeeze in a session before work, during lunch, or after work without taking too much time away from your day.
If you commute from Kentwood or Wyoming to Grand Rapids for work, stopping by Alexandra’s studio fits perfectly into your routine. You can stop by for a quick session on your way home, feel better immediately, and then continue with your day.
Alexandra’s Approach to Treating Your Whole Body
What makes Alexandra Bohlinger special is her commitment to treating you as a complete person, not just a neck with pain. She is trained as a British osteopath and has over 20 years of experience helping people heal. She combines osteopathic techniques with classical Pilates training, which means she can address both the immediate pain and help you build strength to prevent future problems.
Alexandra looks at how your whole body moves and works together—your posture, your shoulders, your upper back, and your spine. If poor desk posture is causing your neck pain, she’ll help fix that. If stress is tightening your muscles, she addresses that too. This complete approach is what makes osteopathy so effective.
She also teaches you exercises and stretches you can do at home to keep your neck feeling good between sessions. This empowers you to take care of yourself and prevents the pain from coming back.
Take the First Step Toward Neck Pain Relief
Neck pain doesn’t have to be part of your life forever. Whether you have acute neck pain from a sudden strain or chronic pain from years of poor posture and stress, osteopathy can help. The gentle, hands-on approach respects your body and works with your natural healing abilities.
Grand Rapids professionals like you deserve to feel healthy and comfortable. Alexandra Osteopilates is right here in East Grand Rapids, easy to reach from downtown Grand Rapids, Kentwood, Wyoming, and all the surrounding areas. With flexible hours that fit your busy schedule and expert care that treats your whole body, you can finally get relief from neck pain. Stop letting neck pain slow you down—reach out to Alexandra today and take the first step toward healing.