Joint dysfunction is one cause of cervical radiculopathy. Chiropractic care may be able to help you or someone you know.
Call (360) 260-6903 to set up your free consultation.
Transcription
Hey, it’s Dr. Troy here again.
A lot of questions I get about cervical radiculopathy. A lot of patients go what is that?
Well, cervical is the neck and radiculopathy means nerve pain. That’s really what it means in English.
Causes of Cervical Radiculopathy
If we look in the neck here you’ve gotta a bundle of nerves which is called the brachial plexus; so the lower three or four or five cervical vertebra, those nerves come off in between the vertebra. If those vertebra get out of alignment that will actually close down the hole that that nerve comes out of which can cause irritation to the nerve.
You can have joint dysfunction causing cervical radiculopathy, you could also have a disc putting pressure on the nerve, you could have a bone spur, you can also have swelling from an injury.
So these things all could be predisposing factors to cervical radiculopathy. It’s very rare to see tumors, it’s very rare to see fractures. You’re going to tend to know, hey I had a huge trauma there’s a fracture, those are very rare to see. Most of them are related to disk joint dysfunction, swelling, irritated nerves and so on.
Conservative Care First
This MRI I’m going to show you here, this is exactly what the patient had. You can see at C5 and C6 where we put the arrow, there’s a disc bulge into the spinal cord. She didn’t seek conservative care first, meeting chiropractic care, massage, or physical therapy or some traction. She went straight for surgery which was recommended by the neurosurgeon. I understand, she had pain in her arm but I always say hey let’s try conservative care first.
The research shows that within 30 days there’s an eighty-five percent improvement in these conditions with conservative chiropractic care. That’s according to research by Dr. Mark Studin which is pretty amazing research.
So if we look at this, the post MRI of her, she had a disc replacement put her neck and you can see there are a substantial encroachment to the spinal cord. On her first MRI she only had right radicular arm pain on the follow-up MRI post-surgery, she went back to the doctor they did a follow-up MRI because she was having ridiculous arm pain in both arms.
So in my mind this actually made her problem worse. If we could have intervened before, the outcome might have been a little bit different. I can’t speculate on that but that’s my thoughts being in practice for 24 years.
Summary
If you know somebody who’s suffering from radiculopathy in the neck or you are personally, let’s get you in and let’s take a look, let’s see if we can help you. We’re going to know pretty quickly within a month or two if chiropractic is helping resolve the problem.
That’s really the whole goal because this girl that had this post-surgery, she’s going to be on medication for a long time. She lost her job because of it and so a natural approach I think is the best way to handle this.
The other thing that you can also experience, not only numbness but you can experience weakness loss of reflexes, loss of grip strength, your hands numb, these are all signs it could be cervical radiculopathy. Many times we will see patients they get diagnosed with carpal tunnel when it’s actually coming from their neck.
The only way to really know is to have a chiropractic evaluation to determine if chiropractic can help your individual situation.
So if you’re interested call the office (360) 260-6903.
This is Dr. Troy here to help if you have cervical radiculopathy.
