Can you heal neck pain and cervical radiculopathy naturally and avoid cortisone injections and surgery? Yes! It might have started with a stiff neck after you slept weird or it could have happened gradually over time… but the pain, numbness, and tingling that come with cervical radiculopathy is something you don’t have to live with, even if it comes and goes and you only experience it at night or after a long day at work. The good news is that you have more options that are proven to work outside of simply managing it with drugs like Advil/Aleve/Tylenol, muscle relaxers, steroid packs, cortisone injections, burning the nerve (ablation), or spinal surgery. Let’s dive in and I’ll tell you how I help people with cervical radiculopathy in Tampa, FL every single day with tools like dry needling, acupuncture, and prolotherapy.
What is Cervical Radiculopathy?
“Cervical radiculopathy is a disease process marked by nerve compression from herniated disk material or arthritic bone spurs. This impingement typically produces neck and radiating arm pain or numbness, sensory deficits, or motor dysfunction in the neck and upper extremities.”
Basically nerves get irritated from something and it causes a bunch of annoying to debilitating symptoms that get in the way of you being able to live your best life.
The most commonly affected cervical nerve roots are C7, which occurs about 75% of the time and C6 which occurs about 25% of the time.
What Causes Cervical Radiculopathy?
Everyone you go to is going to focus on the irritated or impinged nerve – yes that is cause your pain. What I care about is what’s causing the nerve to get irritated or impinged. To get better, we have to treat both the symptom (your pain, numbness, and tingling) but we need to take it another step and treat the cause of the impingement or irritation too.
Muscle imbalances causing tension in the wrong areas (like those chronically tight shoulders you have that feel like the weight of the world is sitting in on top of you) and loose ligaments in the cervical region will lead to instability which causes irritated nerves. When you combine these problems you get a recipe for disaster. So to fix the problem, we have to treat the symptoms but ultimately treat the cause.
By taking this multi-layered approach, Dr. Josh Hanson, DACM is able to help you avoid harmful drugs, ablutions and surgery and get back to living your life.
The Good News
Dry needling, electro-acupuncture and prolotherapy are well studied and have been proven to treat cervical radiculopathy. I treat these issues on a daily basis and get consistently excellent results, allowing people to avoid harmful and unnecessary surgery.
