RAMBLIN
Woman massages headaches away
SHUEYVILLE — Your head feels like it’s about to explode. You rub your temples to make it feel better. When that does no good, you pop some aspirin. You return to what you were doing, praying the pain will just leave you alone. Welcome to tension headache 101. ‘‘We really don’t want to be popping pills, but we don’t want to walk around with these headaches,’’ says Joan Wollschlager, 48, who says she has the solution. Massage. Ice. Exercise. That’s the regimen we follow with a sore leg muscle. When you realize the head has dozens upon dozens of muscles, why not do the same for a headache? ‘‘They call it a tension headache,’’ Joan says. ‘‘Something has to be tense.’’ After suffering through headaches her entire life, Joan has spent more than two decades researching her theories. She is a walking testament to how it works. ‘‘I used to be able to count the days I didn’t have a headache in a month on one hand. Now, I can count the days I do have one,’’ she says. Joan is so confident her methods work that Friday she will present her findings to the neurology department at University Hospitals in Iowa City. She feels the medical community can do its part to teach sufferers how to massage away their headaches. After all, Joan says, 40 million Americans have regular headaches and 90 percent of them are tension headaches. They cost businesses $50 billion a year in lost time and health care costs. Living in Shueyville (really rural Swisher) for a year after moving from Marion, Joan has set up The Headache Clinic in her home. She has added a branch office at the recently opened Sisters Health Club Inc., at Czech Square in Cedar Rapids. For her full time job, Joan’s a dental hygienist in periodontics at the College of Dentistry at the University of Iowa. She calls it ‘‘delightful,’’ because ‘‘people who wind up in the periodontics department are people who really want to keep their teeth.’’ Joan and her husband, Blane, also 48, are originally from North Dakota. He’s an electrical engineer at Rockwell Collins, although they took time out in the early 1990s to work as missionaries for Trans World Radio in Africa. Joan’s past jobs have ranged from selling radio advertising to booking a convention center — all while suffering headaches. Migraines — headaches that attack one side of the head like a stabbing ice pick — could derail Joan for days at a time. Then, she put two and two together and realized processed sausage caused them. Now, she limits what she eats, like pepperoni pizza. Tension headaches are a different animal. They hurt all over. Joan learned a bit about them a couple decades ago while working for a dentist who charted muscle pain in the head. She was hurting in the same places. Then her daughter, Sarah, now 25, began to experience headaches. Massage helped. Soon, Sarah’s friends sought Joan’s help. Following study in myotherapy and with a license to practice massage, Joan decided she’d see what she could do to help others. Someday she hopes to write a book, something like, ‘‘You Don’t Have to Have this Headache.’’ It could be a best-seller. Dave Rasdal’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at (319) 398-8323 or dave.rasdal@gazettecommunications.com
Dave Rasdal/The Gazette Joan Wollschlager operates The Headache Clinic at her rural Swisher home along with her Winchester Heights Massage Therapy Inc. business. She has opened another branch at Sisters Health Club Inc., at Czech Square in Cedar Rapids.
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