By: Dr. Michelle Irwin

Let me ask you this, have you ever had a “dead arm”?

You know the one where you have that combination of pain and numbness from sitting or sleeping in an awkward position that thankfully goes away quickly.

Well, if you have cervical radiculopathy, that same feeling of pain, numbness, and weakness in your arm isn’t likely to go away on its own.

This intense pain is usually caused by a neck injury. If a disc, bone, or ligament irritates or compresses a nerve root in your neck, it can create symptoms in your arm and shoulder.
The nerves that exit the spine in your neck are responsible for the sensation and strength in your arm, and when those nerves become aggravated, here comes the pain.

Because the symptoms are in the shoulder, arm, or hand oftentimes it can be misdiagnosed as something else. However, if left untreated at the source, your neck, it can lead to further joint and nerve damage leading to more pain and nerve damage.

Poor posture, bad biomechanics of the spine, sports injuries, and how gravity pulls on your spine can all lead to this situation.

Meaning, even if you didn’t feel the pain while you were planting that new garden, setting up your home office, organizing your house, or getting out to water ski for the first time, the structure of your spine from years past may have led to the perfect storm of pain in the neck and arm.

But what do we do now that it has happened?

1. Get checked out by the Chiropractor 😊
2. Remember your posture, there are some simple exercises to reverse the rolled forward positions created with working with arms out in front of us called Upper Cross Syndrome.

• Stretch your neck in all directions like in our Neck Stretches 3 Ways video found on our YouTube channel
• Do your neck retraction to get your ears back over your shoulders
• Open up your chest with the pec stretches in the doorway in 3 positions up, down, and neutral.

Chiropractic care focuses on healing the body naturally, holistically, and without the use of medication from the inside out. If you need help getting out of pain, schedule an appointment today!