Chiropractic for neck, shoulder, arm pain

Ask the Chiropractor- How does chiropractic work for neck, shoulder, and arm pain?  Dr Hulsebus will discuss what we look for and how we handle it.  #healthy815 #palmerproud #icachiropractor

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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- Hello and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is a little podcast that we do when somebody has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care. Whenever you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care I always recommend you ask a chiropractor, not anyone else. You see, I'm the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs right up here. And during the IceHogs games we have an orthopedic surgeon, we have an ER physician and we also have a family doctor and also a dentist. And it's interesting for us to sit down and talk 'cause the one thing I've learned is that they don't know pretty much at all what I do. And these are different doctors in every game and vice versa, we switch them to. And so no more than I can explain how to do dentistry to a patient, can the family doctor explain how to do chiropractic? So it's always important to find somebody in the field that you're asking for if you want the real advice. So we were asked a question recently about having neck pain, shoulder pain, and arm pain. Hey, my neck, shoulder, arm are really giving me fits, is this something that chiropractor could help with? And what we call this in our field is called brachial radiculitis. Basically there's a group of nerves that come outta your neck and they form a bunch of different weaving in and out branches and they go all the way down your arm. It's called the brachial plexus. The lower back has something similar. It's called the sciatic nerve or a bunch of nerves come out in the all form one nerve. The difference is in the arm and the shoulder. They don't just form one nerve and go down they actually form three or four nerves and go down the median, the ulnar, the radial nerve and they go all the way down your arm. But they come from different spots in your neck. So when somebody comes in here and they tell us they're having a little neck stiffness and a shoulder pain and maybe some numbness in their fingertips, we're basically thinking brachial radiculitis just like it would be sciatica the lower back, this would be like sciatica of the neck. And so what you have is you have your C5 your fifth cervical your sixth cervical, your seventh cervical and your first thoracic where your ribs are. These nerves all come out and they form this what they call brachial plexus this group of nerves. And like I said, they crisscross, they interconnect they do this and that. They go through the median scaling muscle on your neck, down your shoulder and all the way down to your fingertips and back. Now why did I talk about that one muscle in particular the median scalene muscle? But when we studied whiplash and trauma classes, we learned that the median scaling muscle can be whipped back and forth. It can really be irritated. And when the muscles irritate or inflamed it becomes sticky and by sticky like molasses. And what happens with that inflammation all that stickiness, the brachial plexus is either going through that above or below or around it whatever that muscle gets really, really irritated. What happens is it starts to hit, that nerve going on your arm and your shoulders and until this muscles calm down, it won't go away. But let's say you're having this and you weren't involved in the whiplash, because not all of us were involved in the whiplash before we felt this. Well, the real common way to irritate the median scalene muscle is to have bad neck posture and how to get bad neck posture by typing, reading, driving, sitting, sleeping with your arms in front of you on your side. Anything that causes you to roll your shoulders forward. Like this weekend we just got done with Thanksgiving and to spend a lot of time in the kitchen helping prepare dishes and washing them afterwards. And you hunch over when you're in the kitchen working down in front of you on the countertop or maybe you're on the garage working on a tool or a project, you do the same thing you roll your shoulders for it and you stick your head out. This puts a lot of weird stress and that median scalene muscle. And we've all had this situation where we did a lot of that and we feel fine afterwards, but then we sleep wrong, turn our head quickly, go outside get the cold air causes neck shivers or just get our arm pulled off funny. And now we have this neck pain, we have this penguin on our arm. That's because the median scalene muscle was already put in a vulnerable position by having really bad posture. And then we added extra force to it and it got to be too much. And that created the whole muscle to go in the spasm. It started hitting that nerve going down your arm. So as a chiropractor what we'll do is we'll take an x-ray of your neck front to back and side to side and we'll make sure the disc look good and the bones look nice and healthy and we'll figure out what's going on with your alignment issues. With that information we'll kinda see how you can turn your head or maybe how you can't turn your head or bring your ear to your shoulder both sides or see how you can't, how it doesn't match up. And that'll give us a clue how to take care of you. And we'll start doing chiropractic adjustments to try to free up those nerves. Again, if you had sciatica, we would do the exact same thing but we do in the lower back. So we take a look at these bottom nerves in your neck and the top ones where your ribs come out and we do a couple of chiropractic adjustments in these areas that free these up and get the motion restored and start removing the inflammation and stress. Then we'd have you do is we'd have you start doing some posture exercises. You see, I always tell people I could have you in here four times a day, adjust you four times a day but I can't change your posture that fast because postures a learn behavior. So first you have to get the chiropractic adjustment to unlock it so then you can change it. So we usually start off by seeing you a little bit frequently at first, I don't wanna say how many times because it all depends on the how bad you are, right? If your nexus off a little bit on the x-ray and your range of motions pretty good, we probably don't have to see a lot. But if you have all kinds of changes and twist and turns in your x-rays, you can barely turn your head, this can require more. So I don't wanna say how much or how little until we do the examination. After we do the x-rays and the examination, then we'll know. So usually what we'll do is we'll get adjusting that area to try to free it up with the chiropractic adjustments. Then we'll start giving you like at home stretches to work on like sticking your chest out real big counting to 10, maybe doing snowing angels on the wall with everything, touching the wall. And start doing some things that change your posture because then once your posture's been changed and you start holding your neck better, taking the stress off of those joints and that median scaling muscle, we should start to see the healing begin. So usually at this point, the chiropractor will slow down the frequency, how often they see you because now you're starting to adjust easier you're starting to hold your adjustment better and you're starting to function better. So now the real goal is to try to concrete your better posture and your better alignment issues, to make sure this thing goes away and doesn't come back. And then after that the chiropractor will usually do a reassessment at the end to see where you are and where you stand. And then it'll give us a better long term picture. Now the way you start to feel better, your first thing you start to feel better is you range of motion. You should start be able to turn your head better then you should start sleeping better. You should have less stress on your neck, you should have less stress on your shoulders, and then the nerves going down your arm will start to heal. That's always the last part. Not lot of people get frustrated on that. But the last part is once the the spine itself starts to heal and the muscle start to heal and the posture starts to improve, only then are you able to start healing the brachial plexus, so the nerves going down your arm into your hand. So it's a step by step process. Now my father, he's a chiropractor and he always told me the last thing to show up is numbness. And the last thing to go away is numbness. So if you're experiencing numbness the chiropractor can do exams and make sure it's not a vascular problem, to make sure it actually is a neurological problem coming from your neck. Those are easy tests to do. You can make sure that, but yeah expect the numbness to be the last thing to come. If your hands already numb, that means you've been dealing with this for a while, a lot longer than you think and you really need to get it taken a look at and get the care started. So that's how we do that. So if you're having neck, shoulder, and arm or hand pain that's how the chiropractor would assess the situation. That's what we would find. And again, if you think you're going through this and you wanna check with your family doctor first that's okay, but just keeping the back of your mind your family doctor doesn't know what a chiropractor does. The most medical doctors I work with didn't know what we do until they get to know me and talk to me and learn from me a little bit. So don't assume that the family doctor would know. Go see a chiropractor that you know and you trust, okay? So if you have a question about chiropractic always ask the chiropractor. And if you have a question right now you're thinking of, hey, I wonder if chiropractic could help with this. Leave a message below, hit a direct message or go to Rockford dc R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com and leave us a message there. Maybe next time you turn on for the next podcast I'll be answering your question. Alright, that's what somebody did for me to do this one now. So next time it could be your question. Other than that, stay healthy, stay safe. Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic always ask the chiropractor. Thank you.