Dr. Allan Horowitz, published newspaper article, The Liberal, Copyright February 6, 1988

QUESTION: My family doctor told me that I have a pinched nerve in my neck. My symptoms include numbness down my arm into my fingers, a burning pain in the top part of my shoulder, and my arm gets tired very easily. I don’t have any neck pain at all, and I can turn my head from side to side without any trouble. (My doctor was sur­prised when he saw that I could do this without pain.) From listening to my symptoms, and knowing what my doctor says, do you agree that my pain is coming from a pinched nerve, or do you think it is something else?

ANSWER: Readers of my ar­ticles often write to me to confirm or refute the diagnosis given by their doctor or perhaps another chiropractor. I always give the same warning, ‘’I cannot accurate­ly diagnose your problem without examining you, in person, face-to-face, preferably in the serenity of my own office where I have the lux­ury of hitting your elbow with a hammer, asking you to squeeze my hand, seeing you bend your neck, and so forth.”

After telling people that I can’t diagnose their problem through the newspaper, I usually proceed to tell them what I think their problem could be. To maintain consistency I will do the same for you. It sure does sound like you have a ‘pinch­ed nerve’ in your neck. I put pinch­ed nerve in quotation marks because it is unlikely that your nerve is really being pinched in the sense that you know it. A better, more accurate, descriptive term would be an ‘irritated nerve.’

SIMPLE ANATOMY

Here is some simple anatomy. Your brain sits in your skull. At the bottom of your brain is the spinal cord. This spinal cord travels through the group of bones known as the spinal column. During its course down the spinal column to the lower back, the spinal cord sends off branches of smaller nerves. These nerves are what ‘feed’ the various parts of the body nerve energy. Normally, the nerve roots, or branches, leave the spinal cord, travel through a small open­ing known as an IVF (trust me — you don’t really want to know what that stands for), and then goes to whatever body part it is destined for.

Sometimes, the nerve may be ir­ritated anywhere along its spinal path from the spinal cord. Maybe the nerve has been damag­ed by being compressed. Maybe the nerve is being irritated as it attempts to leave the spinal column through the IVF (trust me— you still don’t want to know). Maybe the nerve is being irritated in the actual body part where it is doing its job.

I am sure that your doctor did the tests which were necessary to pro­perly diagnose a ‘pinched nerve’ in the neck. Your sensation, strength and temperature feeling (burning or cold feeling) might all be af­fected to varying degrees with this condition. There are some easy tests, and then some more complicated tests which might be necessary. Ask your doctor about these.

There are many ways to treat a problem such as yours, and it real­ly should be treated. You didn’t indicate in your letter if you were hav­ing treatment of any kind for your problem.

If you, or any other reader out there, would like to know about some of the ways ‘pinched nerves’ affect your body write to me at the Liberal and I will respond.

Scan is cut