This is Dr. Alex Hernandez from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture here in North Bergen, NJ). Today’s topic is: Should you do Carpal Tunnel surgery?
What is Carpal Tunnel surgery? That is when they basically do surgery in the wrist because somebody is experiencing numbness and tingling of the hands that is causing them to drop things and lose strength. Today we’re going to talk about if you should you do this procedure or if you should you do conservative treatments like chiropractic treatment for carpal tunnel.
So to address Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, obviously the first thing we do is we get a good case history of what the person is feeling, how they got their Carpal Tunnel symptoms, which include numbness, tingling, and burning that travels sometimes from the neck and affecting the wrist. People pay attention to what is happening to the wrist but they don’t focus on the root cause, which is pinched nerves in the neck, radiating down to your hand and creating those symptoms.
Today I decided to show you an x-ray of somebody who is experiencing Carpal Tunnel symptoms. The x-ray is the person’s face and neck from the front. We can obviously see that the neck is crooked, this person is experiencing pain on the right hand side of the body. The spine, all the bones of the neck, have shifted out to the right side. So this is creating the numbness and tingling going down this person’s hand.
So a brief anatomy of what happens here is when we look at the nerves in the neck, there’s a bundle on the left and a bundle on the right. So if you’re pinching the nerves, you can get symptoms radiating down into your hand. This bundle of nerves travels down to the arm and can produce those Carpal Tunnel symptoms.
So, what to do? Let’s analyze and see what’s happening with the person’s neck. In order to get to the root cause of the problem, we take it from the top, from the root cause, and many many times the problem is that the nerves are being pinched.
Are there times we do have to do a surgery? Absolutely. There are times when you have just damaged this nerve so much that it’s irreparable. For example, something heavy dropped onto your wrist and you crushed the nerve; that’s an appropriate time to do a Carpal Tunnel surgery. If you’ve had the problem for so long and you already tried chiropractic, acupuncture, physical therapy and you’ve exhausted all of that, then it may be time for you to do Carpal Tunnel surgery. But for the most part in general, there are a lot of these cases which can be solved by simply looking at the root cause which is, what is happening in the neck.
So if you have any questions about Carpal Tunnel syndrome or you need to know more information. Contact us and make an appointment and we’ll see how we can help you out. Thank you.
