Do You Have a Pinched Nerve? Here’s What It Really Means.

In this episode of 'Ask the Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus from Rockford, Illinois, explains what a pinched nerve truly is and how chiropractic care can help. He debunks common misconceptions, like the pain being caused by an actual pinching, and provides insight into the role of subluxations, inflammation, and posture in causing nerve irritation. Dr. Hulsebus also outlines what to expect during a chiropractic evaluation and treatment, emphasizing the importance of specific adjustments and the potential drawbacks of muscle relaxers. He encourages those suffering from symptoms such as pain, numbness, or tingling, to seek chiropractic care without waiting for a referral and highlights the benefits of prompt and personalized treatment plans.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. Thanks for tuning in again today. I wanna talk about something that a lot of patients come in and tell me they're dealing with and they're simply told they have a pinched nerve. They went to some other healthcare provider. The healthcare provider did a test, maybe some imaging. Who knows? And they came with a diagnosis. You have a pinched nerve. Now if you have a pinched nerve. Is that something a chiropractor can work with? Absolutely. Every day, all day long. That's all we do. Let's talk a little bit about what a pinched nerve is and what a pinched nerve isn't, and a little bit maybe about how a chiropractor would go about taking care of it and what you should expect if you have a pinched nerve with the chiropractor, how they will go about helping you get over this pinched nerve. Number one, what is a pinched nerve? A lot of people use this term to describe pain or numbness or tingling going down the arm or the leg, or maybe even just a pinching going on your neck or your shoulder area. I. And just so you know, this is actually not a pinching, because if it was pinched, the nerve wouldn't work. Your arm wouldn't go up and down. You wouldn't have anything going down your arm. You just, you would have an arm that doesn't work. It's basically a nerve that's irritated, inflamed, or just has a lot of pressure going on from inflammation, swelling, or maybe a tight muscle. Rubbing it wrong, different areas. I know one thing like in the neck, when your neck posture's bad, there's a muscle that goes from the kind of from your jaw down to your shoulder, and this muscle gets inflamed. When it gets inflamed, it gets sticky. When it gets sticky, the nerve can hit it and then that will go down that nerve doing what a lot of physicians refer to as a pinched nerve. And actually it's a posture and a chiropractic issue that we can take care of. Speaking of that, what is the most common cause of a pinched nerve? It's called a subluxation. And what's the subluxation? One or two more vertebras in your spine are misaligned. This misalignment will cause 'em not to function the way they properly are. They will actually freeze and the body will try to protect them from moving certain directions from creating further injury. Now when this happens, there's a chemical release called catecholamines. These catecholamines will hit the nerve, go down the nerve and tell the nerve that now we're in a state of fight and flight or change. Autonom tone of the nerve. Autonom tone. What is that? The nerves are always working in functioning. You're not really thinking about as part of our autonom nervous system, and it's got two modes. Everything's good or we're in danger. Maybe you've heard of fight and flight. So the nerve gets at fight and fights and they're going down it long enough and eventually it starts getting symptoms of a pinched nerve. So what chiropractors do is they take care of these subluxations. So in reality, if you have been diagnosed with a pinched nerve, chiropractors are excellent at finding the subluxation that could be causing the symptoms of what is referred to as a pinched nerve. Matter of fact, we're some of the best providers in the world to find that information. So how do we do this? We have chiropractic examinations. So if you came to the chiropractor after being diagnosed with a pinched nerve, we would start off usually with images. We actually wanna see how the spine lines up. If there's a misalignment in the spine, the easiest way to find it would be. Images of your spine, so we would take images. Now, if you've already had images taken from a different healthcare provider, please bring those with you. If you have those images with you, we might be able to use the images you already have. There's a couple of criteria. One, you have to be standing up. You cannot find a subluxation when you're laying down because your center of gravity has changed how you're carrying yourself or holding yourself. Two, the x-rays have to be recent. They can't be from four years ago. We won't know how you got injured in a car accident four years ago with an old x-ray. So they have to be recent x-rays. And lastly, these x-rays need to be of your spine. I've had people come in with x-rays of their foot telling me they got a pinched nerve in their back. Here's an x-ray of my foot. This will not help us analyze the spine. This will help you see the foot, but however, this will not help us analyze the spine. So please make sure that you bring one of the spine. Another thing we'll do is we'll go through a couple range of motion tests with you. We'll see how you move or don't move. Remember, if these vertebras are misaligned causing a subluxation, you'll have a lack of range of motion. You'll see a fixation. We also have several other chiropractic tests that we do where we'll lay, you face down, we'll bend your knees and lift your legs, have you turn your head, and we'll see how your spine moves. Biomechanically, if we see a fixation, that'll also help us match up with the x-rays and help us determine where this issue is so we can help relieve the pinched nerve as so say pinched nerve. Now if you went to a different doctor, you might've described things like muscle relaxers. Let me tell you why. I personally don't care for muscle relaxers. I don't necessarily think that's always the best route to go. If you have a subluxation, the vertebras are under stress and they're trying to protect you from further injuries, so the muscles will lock up around there, not allowing you to twist and turn the wrong way to make the injury worse and create more inflammation. So taking the muscle relaxer allows that muscle to give up its guard allows you to twist and turn the wrong direction, hence easily creating a bigger injury. So I'm not always a big fan of muscle relaxers. Now, I know some people take anti-inflammatories and inflammation's a big part of this. So reducing inflammation's one thing, but I don't think muscle relaxes are always the way to go. But again, you shouldn't be diagnosing this yourself. You should talk to your chiropractor. And if you really want to get involved in medical conversation, ask your medical doctor, 'cause they're the ones that prescribed you the drugs. And I would ask him why in muscle relaxer without anti-inflammatory if inflammation's the enemy. So once we have figured out what's going on with you, and once we figured out how you've already been treating it, then we can dive into a case of what we would do is we would start by giving you a chiropractic adjustment. Now there's all different types of chiropractic adjustments that different chiropractors do. If you've seen something that you're afraid of, if you see something that you're nervous about, discuss this with your chiropractor. First us, we use our hands here in my office and we go in there and there's a noise that you hear, and that noise is simply gasping, released from the joint. It does not ligaments popping or tendon snapping in my clinic, we don't put straps on you and yank can pull on you. We are very specific. I would not get a chiropractic adjustment from anybody personally unless it was a very specific adjustment, unless they could tell me I'm adjusting this one vertebrae. When people do gross manipulations of the area, I don't really know if they're getting the right one or not. I also don't know if they're causing more problems. So me as a chiropractor, if I was a patient coming in for a pinched nerve, I'd say what level are you adjusting me at? And how are you doing that? To make sure you're very specific on that level. I would have no problems answering this question. I would actually love if somebody asked me this question, 'cause I'd love to show you how I figured it out. And a chiropractor should have that attitude if a chiropractor doesn't have that attitude. I have a question. The chiropractor clinic that I'm at now, how often do we have people commit for a subluxation, creating a pinched nerve? That's all we do all day long. That's people come in all the time with 'em. They come in and say, I got this feeling here. I feel like I can't turn my head here. I feel like I can't do this. I feel like this going down here. And we look at their spine and we find the subluxation. We do the vertebral correction through the chiropractic adjustment by using your hands. So this is a chiropractor's everyday practice. This is something that we do constantly. I. So how do you know when you should get checked? You could wait till you're feeling the pain, numbness, tingling, burning, weakness, or maybe a lightning bolt pain, but don't think it's gonna go away on its own. It's not. Your spine's actually gonna adapt to the injury, and this will become more of a chronic problem that can lead to accelerated degeneration on top of it. Now, when I say accelerated, I don't mean the next six months, I just mean in general accelerated. So as chiropractors, we wanted to see if you feel like you got a stiff neck and then the next day you start feeling pain on your arm. If you were stuck in a weird position too long and now your legs are going numb. Let's say you had been a long car ride and now you have a little bit of lower back and now you're feeling, you travel further down. These are all signs. It's time to come in and get checked. Now will you have a, another healthcare provider probably tell you to go to see a chiropractor? Probably not. This is why I made this podcast. The whole idea of this podcast is if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only person qualified to answer you would be a chiropractor. So if you were to ask your family physician, if you're an athletic trainer, your. Physical therapist, your strength coach. Should I go see a chiropractor for this? They are uneducated on what chiropractors do. Now there's always exceptions. My friends down the street from me at Movement Fitness where I go work out every day, the coaches over there, they would be more than happy to tell you to go see a chiropractor.'cause the majority of them have understand, to know me and understand what I do. And I get to show them people they work with and I work with and we have a great relationship. So that time it's an exception, but for the most rule, the only person that can truly answer that question would be a chiropractor. So if you have a pinched nerve, I would tell you that 99 out of a hundred times chiropractic's probably absolute correct answer. As far as getting this looked at and getting it taken care of. That's is. Basically what we do is how we started as a profession. Dr. Palmer from Palmer College of Chiropractic, he the first chiropractic adjustment to a pinched nerve that was creating hearing deficit. Dr. Palmer did the adjustment the. Patient's hearing came back and chiropractic was born. So yes, you can definitely hear that. If you go to any chiropractor and ask 'em if they have any success stories dealing with a pinched nerve, they can probably pull out volumes of information of people they've helped with pinched nerve. You could probably sit in a waiting room in a chiropractic clinic and say, have you ever. Any of you ever had a pinched nerve that the chiropractors help you with and just the waiting room alone, people would tell you this exactly what they came in for and they got big help for it. So absolutely. Now, there other things that we would do along the way besides just a chiropractic adjustment? That's gonna depend on the individual. I. It's gonna depend on your exam findings and stuff like that. What are some things you might expect, maybe have you lay in a certain position to traction your back out to help decrease the odds of it going back after you leave the clinic? Perhaps using ice, perhaps using certain stretches, certain exercises. Perhaps working with a physical therapist or a strength coach in order to rebuild a musculature around that's allowing you to get pinched in the first place. So there's more steps sometimes after getting your adjustment. Sometimes there's not. Sometimes you just get your adjustment and life goes on. What should you expect? How many adjustments to come in? Again, that's gonna depend on your x-rays and your exam findings, but a chiropractor should be able to sit down with you and give you an estimated care plan of what they think it's gonna take to get you better. A chiropractor that says, just keep coming forever. That's when I have a question I want to know. Okay, I came in for this. You saw this on your exam findings. As a chiropractor, what's your estimate of my care plan? The chiropractor should be able to answer that, or maybe when there's gonna be a reexamination or redetermination if you need more or less care. Ask them that would ask for it too. So there you go. Does chiropractor help with a pinch nerve? Absolutely. Should you wait for a referral? No. Ask your chiropractor right away. Bring in your x-rays if you have 'em. Bring in your MRI studies if you have'em, or bring in anything that you have with you to your appointment. Do not assume that the hospitals or the local healthcare clinics are linked to your chiropractic clinic. That is a very rare thing to have happen. Most healthcare systems do not link up with chiropractic clinics. You have to ask them why. It's not my choice. It's their choice. So make sure you bring your images and your x-rays with you, and then the chiropractor should be able to sit down and give you a consultation, discuss what they see in these, and tell you a ballpark of what they think it's gonna take to get you better. If not, they should be able to start care with you and after adjustment or two, they should be able to tell you what they think it's gonna take to get you better. I hope I answered the question about the pinched nerve. I know this was a topic I did a while back, very popular topic. It's been a couple years. I thought I'd revisited it yet, so if you think you've had a pinched nerve, go see a chiropractor. Don't wait for a referral. Discuss the chiropractor, what's going on, and the chiropractor should be able to help you. And remember, if you have a question about this or anything else that you might want to ask a chiropractor, this is why we have the podcast. Feel free to leave a message or comment wherever you're listening or watching this podcast, and we'll make sure that maybe next time you'll be the question that we can ask the chiropractor. Thank you for tuning in.