Are you experiencing nerve pain down your arms or legs? Many practitioners assume that nerve pain is caused by spinal disc injuries that compress the nerves, sending pain down the limbs. Disc injuries may be the cause of your nerve pain, but with about 40% of our patients, this pain actually stems from somewhere else. This is called nerve entrapment syndrome.
What Is Nerve Entrapment Syndrome?
Nerves travel down your arms and legs, bobbing and weaving through muscles, joints, and crevices. They can get hung up and compressed by surrounding muscles and connective tissue, causing pain. Since nerve entrapment issues cannot be detected on the most advanced diagnostic procedures (MRI, X-ray, CT), we must use a process of elimination to get to the root of the issue. This is done through active diagnosing.
How Is Nerve Entrapment Treated?
When it comes to diagnosing the origin of a nerve entrapment, it can take some poking and prodding through active diagnoses. Nerves are much like a freeway in that there are several points where traffic jams are common. For example, people with nerve pain down their arm could actually experience pain originating from tight scalene muscles in the neck, a tight pectoralis minor in the chest, or an overactive infraspinatus (rotator cuff) muscle in the shoulder.
We treat nerve entrapment by using manual pressure over one of these three muscles that often causes nerve entrapment or “traffic jams.” We know we have found the problem-causing muscle when the pressure on it significantly increases nerve pain down the arm. Once the source has been identified, we use manual therapy and scar tissue breakdown techniques to manually lengthen the muscle tissue and relieve tension and pressure on the nerve.
Who Would Benefit from Nerve Entrapment Therapy?
People who typically benefit from this type of therapy are those with nerve pain in the arm, forearm, hand, thigh, leg, or foot. If your nerve pain has been unsuccessfully treated through traditional spinal disc injury therapy techniques, specialized nerve entrapment therapy technique may be exactly what you need to safely eliminate your nerve pain.
If you have any questions about this technique, or if you’d like to schedule an appointment with us at CaliSpine, contact us by filling out this form.