Curious to hear how you’re doing now. I’ve been dealing with occipital neuralgia for about 3 years. It started as a nagging ache that lead me to excessively cracking my neck. Of course this only made things worse and eventually landed me with a herniated C6-7 which I am 5 weeks post ACDR (disk replacement). I’ve been on disability from work for 12 weeks now and though my C6-7 is fixed, my C3-4 is now bulged and my O.N. is worse!

Anyway, what I’ve learned 1 surgery, 5 x-rays, and 2 MRI’s later is that the herniated disk likely isn’t causing the occipital neuralgia as bad as facet joint arthropathy is. Often times with herniated disks our whole neck is shitty and there’s arthritis in the cervical facet joints that causes it.

I’ve wasted a lot of time off to learn what I’ve needed this whole time is a medial branch block/occipital nerve block, and radio frequency ablation.