The Hidden Reason Your Hands Go Numb — It’s Not Always Carpal Tunnel

Many patients assume numb or tingling hands mean carpal tunnel—but that’s not always true. In today’s episode, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explains why the real cause is often found in the cervical spine, not the wrist. If you wake up with numb hands, lose grip strength, or feel tingling in your fingers, this episode walks you through the nerve pathways and explains how chiropractic care helps restore normal function.

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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. Hello. Thanks for tuning in Today, I wanna talk about carpal tunnel, and whether that's actually carpal tunnel. People describe carpal tunnel as having weakness, tingling, numbness, soreness, achiness in their hands and rest. And I want to talk about carpal tunnel. Truly is. A carpal tunnel is truly, there's a ligament that goes across the inside of your wrist, like the underneath your palm, and that ligament can become too tight on certain individuals and it actually crushes the canals, the tunnels that your nerves, arteries and veins go through, choking them. So carpal tunnel surgery is usually to go in and find those tunnels and free them of this. Now, this could happen several different ways. Trauma, repetitive use. There's various different reasons why people develop carpal tunnel, but there's a lot of people who get their carpal tunnel surgery, and it turns out it's not carpal tunnel. You'll see before, usually you have a carpal tunnel surgery. They want to do what they call like a a muscle test on you where they put a bunch of probes up and down your arm trying to figure out where the compression's happening. If they find it's happening in your wrist, they usually proceed. That's the best test they have to see if it's truly coming from your wrist, and they really are doing their best to make sure it's coming from your wrist. So let's talk about if you had weakness in your hand, if you had numbness, tingling in your hand, how that could come. If I have tingling or numbness in my hand, it's usually from one or two reasons. The number, there's really two big reasons. It's either the vascular issue or a neurological issue. So either I'm not getting no blood in my hands, making my hands go cold and numb, tingling, or I'm pooling blood in my hand. Or it's neurological. Before we had all kinds of fancy equipment to see if people are having vascular issues in their hands. We would just simply have you open your hand and squeeze your fingertips and see if the color comes right back. When you push 'em, you push the blood out and we watch the color come back. You can also squeeze the wrist, have somebody pump their fists and let go of one side, let go of the other side and wash the color. Come back in. That's the way we used to do it before we had fancy equipment. It. Now, if you were keeping blood in your hand, it would be easy to see'cause your hand would become swollen. Then we know the blood's not going back up. Do we have a venous flow problem? So if you do these tests, they look normal, then we assume it's probably neurological. Now I'm not saying that's the end all be all. There's definitely other things, other autoimmune issues and other things that could be happening, but I'm just talking about the most common. So the nerves aren't getting to your fingertips. It's making your fingertips have issues, whether it's fine mortar movement, like pinching and moving your fingertips, whether it's numbness and tingling, whether it's cold, whether it's achy and sore. The nerves are talking. The nerves are saying something's wrong. So the question begins, where is this nerve being compressed? Typical tunnel, carpal tunnel, like I said, would be the ligament underneath your. Your palm of your hand on your forearm, be, the very, very far end of it. And they would go in and they would do surgery on that tendon and try to alleviate the pressure. But this could happen many different other places. And so as chiropractors we have one area that we like to focus on, and that's the base of your neck, your, the base of your cervical spine. It. If you have bad neck posture, if you have misalignments in your cervical spine, we call these misalignment subluxations. When the vertebrae is rotated out position and it's creating a stress response, which is hitting the nerves, coming and going from the joints, this becomes what we call subluxation. And chiropractors have a unique ability to train, to find and correct and detect these subluxations and only chiropractors are trained this way. So what we'll do is you'll come in the office, we'll kinda see how far you can turn your head to the left or right, bend to the left and the right. Look up, look down and see if any of those range of motions bother you. And if they do them, I'll want to proceed at a deeper test. Now my office will take x-rays of your neck and thoracic area. Thoracic is where your ribs are, and we'll want to see what goes on between the junction of these two spots. The very bottom of your neck and the very top of your thoracic spine or where your one two ribs are. You see what happens is from the neck, the C 5, 6, 7, and eight nerves come out and they form together and make a thing called the brachial plexus. And the brachial plexus. Think of about it like sciatica of your leg, but it's a little different'cause in the sciatica, all the lower. Verte Vertebraes have the nerves that come out and they form one big, thick nerve and they go through your pelvis, down your legs, but in your neck. They don't really form this great big, thick nerve and go down your arm. Instead, they just form like a weave of nerves going back and forth, and that's called the brachial plexus. It travels outta your vertebras and pass a couple muscles in your neck, one of them being your scaling medias muscle, your medium scaling muscle, and it goes down your shoulder, down your arm to your fingertips. So let's talk about posture first. If you have what we call like a military posture, there's many different ways this could affect your fingertips and your hands, or your brachial plexus. One is if you're neck, straight up and down, you lost your good curve. That means you're putting excess force in your bottom vertebrae. When you have a nice curve, the weight's distributed evenly amongst other vertebras. When you lose your curve from having bad posture. Now gravity's pulling straight down a couple of vertebraes and the vertebras, the effects. This are the ones that go down your arm and your hand. So if you lose your posture, you have a very straight neck. Over time, these discs start to suffer. They start to lose their height. Now the problem with the disc losing its height and this. Issue that you have with the nerves is the fact that half the height of the hole, the nerve comes out of, is made up of your disc height. So if your disc goes flat or starts to flatten out, you start to lose a big part of the gap when the nerve comes out between the vertebra. And this can create some mild irritation on that nerve going down your arm. That's one posture issue. The other posture issue is, I talked about a muscle a minute ago called your median scaling muscle. The one that goes from the, basically the angle of your jaw down to your collarbone area. And when you change your posture, you change the way this muscle's being used. And if this muscle's being used wrong, it's easy to make it inflamed. If it gets inflamed and inflamed tissue becomes sticky, and the sticky tissue adheres to things like the nerves that go down your arm and your hand. So it's very possible the brachial plexus either goes above, below, or in some unlucky individuals through this muscle. And if this muscle's irritated and flame, they can grab a hold of that nerve and irritate it. Just like I've discussed many times about the piriformis muscle in your hip, it can become misaligned and hit that sciatic nerve and create problems on your leg mimicking sciatica. So the posture right there alone can two different ways it can affect this nerve. Not only that, but when your posture's bad, your head goes forward, your shoulders come forward too. Now we've got issues in moving things around the shoulder area where those nerves go through too. So the chiropractor definitely has to assess your posture. This is an issue. Now, the good news is that the posture is fixable. The bad news is it takes time and work on your. Not just with the chiropractor. You can't just get adjusted five times a day and have your posture get fixed. The chiropractor has to make the chiropractic adjustment to free the vertebras up, so then you can do your posture exercises in order to get it back. The problem we run into a lot is practicing chiropractors is we can do that adjustment. We can teach you the exercises. But you gotta do 'em. So most of the time we feel like these don't work good because the patients don't comply with the exercise we give them. So if the chiropractor should give you these, please make sure you comply with them. It's very important if you want this to go away. It's like I went to the gym one time, I exercised, I didn't lose any weight and I told everyone, I don't believe in the gym. The gym's don't work. They're now good. No, you gotta continue, keep going and keep doing the things that you learn at the gym in order to have the gym be successful. This is the same with the chiropractic adjustment for the posture issues. You must do your homework at home in order to get your posture back. Let's move on to another reason besides posture. The chiropractic could do an assessment. The X-ray not only show us your posture, but they show your alignment issues. Let's say you have a rotation at the C six vertebrae, above the C six vertebrae comes a nerve that makes up your brachial plexus and below the C six vertebrae. It makes a nerve that makes up your brachial plexus. So if you have a misalignment here, there's a lot of stress going and that stress. Dumps chemicals, and those chemicals hit that nerve. They go down that nerve and they scream for help in the forms of pain, numbness, tingling, and everything else you see in carpal tunnel. So the chiropractor has to find these misalignments, these subluxations, and do the chiropractic adjustment in order to correct these vertebral subluxations and help restore the range of motion in the neck. Now the good news is that this is your problem, that chiropractor can easily see these on film at least easily help the chiropractor determine that there's an issue in these areas and that chiropractor can make the chiropractic adjustment. Now, when the chiropractic adjustment is made, you should initially start to feel a little bit of relief. The reason you go back to that chiropractor several times in a row is because we want to try to make this verb right, not just give you a temporary relief, or we temporarily fixed it and it goes right back 'cause it's learned to be in that behavior. But we wanna retrain the muscle memory so it starts to hold in place. And so you get the relief going down your arm. So that's why you go in so frequently is we have to retrain the muscle memory that learned, allow it to be misaligned, to go back to being straight again. So the relief should happen. Pretty fast, but in order to have long lasting relief, it takes several visits. How many visits does it take? I know people call all the time, Hey, I've got carpal tunnel down my arm. How many times do I have to come? That depends. How healthy is your disc? How healthy are your vertebras? How bad is your posture? How good is your posture? How rotated is it? Is it just slightly rotated or is it completely spun around as maybe part of a scoliosis? So we cannot answer those questions until we get to know you and get to see how you respond. Once the chiropractor has determined that you have a misalignment or a subluxation with these lower vertebras and or a PO posture issue with these vertebras, the chiropractor shouldn't give you a care plan or a schedule, what he thinks it's gonna take to help make these subluxations in your lower neck start to heal and start to correct themselves and start to get better. Once that done, the nerves going down your arm and your shoulder should improve and so that your symptoms, so a chiropractor doesn't treat carpal tunnel. A chiropractor looks at the vertebra on the base of your neck and your upper thoracic spine. It makes the correct chiropractic adjustment to fix the subluxation, and by correcting the subluxation, in turn, your bone should be that your arm and shoulders have to feel better and your wrist and your hand. If you do all this and that chiropractic determines you have this issue and you don't get better, then is it possible there's still something going on in your wrist? Absolutely. It's very possible. There's always possible more than one thing is true at one time. But if you go to the chiropractor and you say, Hey, I'm gonna have carpal tunnel surgery. I want to make sure you as a chiropractor can determine it's not coming from my neck before I have the surgery.'cause I can't go backwards on the surgery. The chiropractor should be able to do a chiropractic exam, a posture check on you and in my office A instead of films. And that part of your spine looks great. You have a great curve, your posture looks good, your disc look good. There's no bony changes to your vertebrae from arthritis. There's very little misalignment then I would think. I'm much safer to go and having my surgery, but if I solve those problems first, I want to get that corrected first. I wanna get it corrected first before the surgery for two reasons. One, maybe if it's corrected, I don't need the surgery. But two, if I have the surgery and I've gotten a subluxation, the base of my neck, and those nerves innervate my wrist and my hand, the surgery would be more successful. And heal faster, better, quicker if the nerve impulse wasn't interfered with before the surgery. So having your neck corrected first, then having the surgery should improve the odds of the surgery being more successful and attaining the goals that you're looking for. And again, a lot of times we do this and the people don't need the surgery after we're done. And that's a win. Now you might want to ask your orthopedic doctor about this. Go for it. But I can tell you, working with orthopedic doctors for over 23 years, working with the hockey team and stuff like that, they don't really know. They really don't know. They don't study chiropractic. They don't know what we know and what we look at, how we look at it. They know to look at things the way they look at it, but they don't look at things the way we look at it. So it's just not safe to rely on any other healthcare provider for a chiropractic evaluation. Now, the good news is, should your orthopedic doctor had taken x-rays of your cervical spine to look at this, see if that was a contributing factor. We can use those x-rays. You don't have to have more x-rays as long as you weren't laying down. We can definitely use those x-rays. If you're laying down, you can change your alignment by how you lay down. So if you're thinking about having carpal tunnel or if you're having these issues like this, go into a chiropractor's a great place to start. One, maybe you don't need the carpal tunnel surgery. And two, even if you do your neck and correct your neck and you're still having the issues and you have to have the surgery will have a better outcome for having the chiropractic care first. This would make your orthopedic doctor look good too. And again, I stressed that.'cause last night I was at the, I saw game and one of the medical doctors told me he had a patient ask him about chiropractic care for after surgery, asked whether or not that was safe or not. And I explained to him, of course it's safe. And he's that's what I told the patient. And I explained to him that Here's my cell phone number. If somebody ever asks you about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only expert to answer that question is the chiropractor. You yourself can reach out to me directly and ask me the question. I'll give you the best answer. So I tell the medical doctors that, I tell the orthopedic doctors that, and I'm telling you the same thing. So if you have a question about whether or not chiropractic or care can help you or whether you should try a chiropractic, there's only one qualified person to answer that, and that would be a chiropractor. So make sure you check your chiropractor well, thanks for tuning in, and if you have a question, leave it wherever you're watching and listen to this. And maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. Thank you.