What could this be--know they need to see a doctor?!

What could this be--know they need to see a doctor?

A close 30 year old family member has complained of a symptom. He said for some years he had been having a "popping feeling in his neck and then a sharp pain radiates to the back of the right side of his head. It doesn't stay for long, but it comes back whenever he is a hurry and moves his head abruptly.
I know this is not exactly the right place to ask for comments as he needs to see a doctor for diagnosis, but if anyone here knows of or has similar experiences could you share.
Don't say tell him to go, he knows he should.

This is pretty common, and probably most people experience it from time to time. When you contort your neck in a certain way or move it too fast in a certain direction, you can pinch a nerve. You get an excrutiating pain that shoots from the point of the pinch up the side of your neck to your head. I had quite a problem with this in my teen years and you get to a point where you don't want to turn your head to the side it occurs on for fear of the shooting pain. I'm not sure there is much you can do about it without major neck surgery to relocate the nerve. You might be able to use certain head movements and exercise to build up the muscles in the neck in such a way as to pull the nerve away from the pinch area, but I would get a neurologist's diagnosis for whether there is any viable treatment for his case. Luckily for me, I seem to have grown out of it once I reached my full adult size. Obviously in your family member's case, this is not going to work and he should seek treatment options.