- Acute and chronic back and neck pain: The spine is a complex interconnection of vertebrae, the spinal cord, nerves, muscles, blood vessels and ligaments, all of which have the potential to contribute to pain. However, your treatment does not have to be equally complex. We will quickly and effectively identify issues that may be adding to or causing your spine pain using the best current evidence for evaluation and treatment, while providing appropriate manual therapy techniques and exercises to get you moving pain free.
- Whiplash is not just a result of a car accident but potentially from any fall or impact that results in your head and neck changing direction rapidly. During this rapid change in direction, the muscles and ligaments that support your neck are stretched sometimes further than they would like. Some of the pain also comes from the muscles pulling one way and gravity or momentum pulling your head the other. The good news is we have plenty of treatments to help calm them down and restore your normal function.
- Positional neck pain: There are various underlying issues such as stiff joints, tight muscles, and/or sustained postures or positions, which can contribute to neck pain. The extra stress on the muscles, joints and ligaments that support your head and neck build over time resulting in pain and limited motion. A thorough evaluation of the movement, muscle tension and joint motion of your head/neck, shoulders, ribs and upper back will show us where the imbalances are and get to the true underlying cause of your pain. Sometimes the source of the pain lies in other areas such as the shoulder or upper back.
- Stenosis/arthritis/degenerative disc disease: are all normal radiologic finding as we get older, so do not panic if you just found out from your physician or radiologist that you have one or all of them. It is actually less common after the age of 50 that you will not have these findings, and to make it even better many of the people that show these findings, across several studies with large samples of people have no history of neck or back pain or current pain. What that means for you, is we can likely get you back to the activities you love without pain, limitation or worrying that it will always be there, just because the x-ray showed something “abnormal” that as it turns out is very normal!
- Radiculopathy: a fancy word for pain that radiates from your neck or back. It can radiate into your shoulder, upper back and or all the way down the arm, sometimes to your hands and fingers from your neck or hip, thigh, lower leg and into the foot from your low back. The underlying cause of this radiating pain can be a few different things, or a combination of things. The usual suspects are a disk that is pushing out into the area the nerve exits the spinal cord, a stuck/stiff joint with the muscles around the nerve becoming very tight and putting pressure on the nerve, or resulting from an injury that stretched the nerves causing irritation to them as well. The goal of treating radiculopathy is to centralize the pain, meaning get it out of your arm or leg and back to the spine. As the pain is centralizing we work on getting the pain out of your neck or back and restoring normal strength, range of motion and mobility of the joints as well as the nerves throughout its entire path.
