Do you have persistent numbness and tingling in your forearm, wrist, hand and shoulder when you turn your head. When you put your hands on the steering wheel, does your hand go numb or feel like it’s falling asleep?
If this sounds like you, then you may have an impingement of your cervical spine nerves coming down the tracks as they go into the shoulder, elbow, wrist in hand.
Stick around at the end of this video as we explore where nerves can become entrapped into our arm and hand and what to do about them.
Hi, my name is Michael Ricchiuto MPT, EMT-P from Physical Therapy Now. For over 15 years, my team and I have been helping people to solve problems of numbness and tingling into the hands into the wrist, which may be coming from your cervical spine.
Now here’s the problem. You have these nerve tracts. They’re kind of like cables like cable wires, and they could get pinched off at certain sources along the path, coming from the spinal cord, going out of the neck, coming down the shoulder into the elbow, wrist and hand. When these nerves are trapped off what happens is you end up having a break in the connection that creates numbness and tingling hot and cold sensations.
If your neck is painful with any movement or you are having difficulty with persistent neck pain then let’s figure it out on a phone call with a FREE 30 minute conversation. Click Here Now!
Also, the nerves do two things: they create sensation and motor control, which means you’re the strength of your muscles in your arms.
So when this happens along the pathway, you end up having problems where you may have numbness and tingling. You may have a numbness where you feel like you, your arms asleep, or you may just have straight out weakness.
These are all big problems. So let’s take a look at some of the sources. Here’s the overview of how nerve tracts come out from the cervical spine at the neck and go down into the into the upper extremity.
Excuse the very, very, you know, simple artwork because I certainly i’m not an artist. And that’s obvious.
So I always tell people that nerve pain generates from a source. That source always comes back to the to the spinal cord. But in the cable coming out of the spinal cord might be fine. The impingement might come at certain points along the path of the arm. So I always used the theory of the polluted river.
And what that means is, if you have a river at the source meaning the neck and the source is polluted, you’re going to get pollution all the way down the limb or all the way down the river.
Under the clavicle is a big one. From tight muscles in the neck, also under the armpit. We have something called the brachial plexus.
Once again if your Neck is painful with any movement or you are having difficulty with persistent neck pain then let’s figure it out on a phone call with a FREE 30 minute conversation. Click Here Now!
And then the path comes down into the elbow. There are entrapment places at the bony prominences of the elbow on and from that point some of the nerves come down and and into the wrist and at the wrist, a lot of people have, know what carpal tunnel is so there’s carpal tunnel. There’s other places within the wrist and hand that there’s entrapment.
And so that’s kind of the overview of where these places can be that cause impingement once again, impingement caused with any pressure on the nerve that might be occluding the normal nerve electrical nerve flow.
It might be blood supply to this region or other sources. So a question that we get all the time is… Well, where do you tell where the impingement is?
And that’s through physical exam. A lot of things that we do at our clinic are we’ll, look for the source of the problem and this does not require medication or surgeries or shots.
But a good physical exam. If you feel that you could benefit from knowing where an impingement is happening. If this has been going on with you for a long time and you’d like to come in, then you can call our office at (412) 794-8352
You can also email us at physicaltherapynow@gmail. com. If you just want to discuss your condition, we have a free 30 minute consultation. If you call our office, we can go ahead and do that for you.
So I hope this has been helpful. And I hope you have a great day and we’ll see next time, thanks.
Michael Ricchiuto MPT, EMT-P
Physical Therapist
