Shoulder, elbow, and wrist pain: the missing link

Anyone who suffers from chronic shoulder, elbow, or wrist pain knows how it makes you feel: it’s like you’ve lost half your body.

Often certain positions will allow you to avoid pain, but move just a fraction of an inch the wrong way and the pain returns. After days of babying the joint the pain can subside, only to forget and use the arm for something you shouldn’t and the pain returns.

The maddening part is that there often isn’t any one major injury to point to as the cause. The medical doctor says that it was caused by over use: just take pain relievers and anti-inflammatory drugs or cortisone shots and then wait. He might say to wear joint braces while you sleep or during repetitive tasks. But often nothing seems to make it go away.

Medical imaging of the joint usually shows that nothing is wrong. Years later imaging may show a small tear or an inflamed nerve, “requiring” surgical intervention. Often even this doesn’t really completely make it go away. The nagging pain keeps you from sleeping at night. You start to think that maybe this is just what happens when you get old.

Not so fast. You don’t have to live this way.

The missing link 99% of the time is an irritated nerve in the neck from a jammed facet joint, or more commonly from a bulging disc called a hidden cervical disc (HCD). It’s called “Hidden” because most of the time there is no neck pain, just arm pain. Sometimes medical imaging of the neck will find the bad disc, but often it is missed on the imaging because they only scan you when you are lying down in a neutral posture. Were they to scan your neck while in varying positions, while lift, pulling, pushing, walking, or bending, they might see it encroaching on the nerve space.

The astute practitioner will be able to find a pattern of weakness upon examination in the muscles around your affected joints and trace it back to the specific nerve in the neck that is being affected. A surgeon may want to do surgery if he can find something on the imaging. But with correct chiropractic treatment to the neck, the nerve irritation can be alleviated after a series of treatments. Often the muscle strength will return before the pain is gone, which is a sign that the treatment is beginning to work.

Sometimes, additionally, the weak muscles will need to have specific digital pressure where they attach to the bone in order to speed up their recovery. The treatment to the neck is generally painless, but if needed, the treatment to the shoulder muscles can be sharply painful, but the treatment pain subsides immediately along with improved range of motion.

Once the nerve is freed up to function normally, then the muscles around the affected joint can enable the joint to track correctly during daily activities. Now that the proper function is returned, movement begins to make it feel better rather than worse.

When the pain has been there for years, often there can be layers of stuck emotional tension built up that needs to be released with the NET and homeopathic treatments (netmindbody.com). And if your diet isn’t perfect, then anti-inflammatory supplements may be needed temporarily to speed up the healing.

To recap:

Shoulder, elbow, and wrist problems are almost always caused by a hidden neck problem. Fix the neck and the arm problem goes away. Surgery is almost never needed when proper chiropractic neck treatment is given.