Trapped Nerve or “Pinched” Nerve.
Having a trapped nerve in the neck shoulder or back hurts, often feeling like a severe, sharp, excruciating and intense pain. A trapped nerve could happen nearly anywhere in the body, but there are a number of common sites that a nerve may get trapped such as the neck /arm, mid back / chest or low back / leg. The trapped nerve can result in either pain, pins & needles, numbness / deadness or a hot /cold feeling into the neck, head, shoulders, arms, fingers, wrists, back, legs, muscles. “Pinched” or trapped nerves can affect your health, posture, vitality, resistance to disease, even your emotional health. “Pinched”/trapped nerves can make life a misery.
Trapped?
Do nerves really get trapped? Actually directly trapping the nerve is quite rare. Much more common is what chiropractors call the vertebral subluxation complex or subluxations. Other terms for this are: nerve impingement, nerve irritation, nerve lesion, spinal stress and meningeal tension.
Even though there may be no actual trapping, people like the word because it’s so descriptive. It can really feel like something is being trapped in there. Some health professionals even use it. People at times seeing a chiropractor’s saying their GP, osteopath, massage therapist referred them because they had a trapped nerve and should visit a chiropractor to get the trapped nerve freed.
What Can Cause Subluxations?
Nearly any kind of stress can cause a subluxation: a fall or an accident (even a very small one that happened years ago); a poor sleeping position; poor posture; fatigue; emotional stress; poor nutrition or a combination of stresses. A subluxation need not happen all at once. It could set in the body over time.
Trapped Nerves Don’t Normally Hurt
Chiropractors sometimes say that people with painful Trapped nerves might be considered lucky they know they have a problem and they (hopefully) will go to a chiropractor.
If You Don’t Experience The Pain From a Trapped Nerve? What Would Be The Outcome?
Some patients may watch their body suffer and their health deteriorate for years without the faintest idea that the problem may be coming from their spine. These people desperately need to see a chiropractor but because they don’t have spine or nerve pain they may never receive the care they need. This is the big job facing chiropractors today educating people about vertebral subluxations and the need for periodic spinal checkups.
Treatment of Trapped Nerves
Trapped nerves do not get un-trapped by themselves. No amount of painkillers or muscle relaxants can fix them. Only doctors of chiropractic are able to analyze your spinal column for trapped nerves or vertebral subluxations and use spinal adjustment techniques to gently realign the spine, release the internal stress and free the body from the trapped nerves.
Chiropractors are health care practitioners who are most experienced in freeing body of vertebral subluxations.
Nerves Travel through the Body?
Individual nerve fibres are tiny. Although they may be many inches long they are so thin you need a powerful microscope to see them. Nerve fibers are also found in large bundles called nerves. Billions of nerve fibers are bundled inside your spinal cord – an extension of your brain, which passes through the spinal column. Nerves branch off from spinal cord and exit spine through openings between the vertebrae to connect to every cell in the body.
Life without Nerves
Without nerves you couldn’t see, hear, touch, taste or smell or feel hot, cold, pleasure or pain, and no messages could come in and no messages could go out; without nerves no muscles could move.
Nerves Keep the Body Alive and Healthy
Nerve messages also help regulate the body’s activities such as breathing, heartbeat, digestion, excretion, blood pressure and immune system so that the body can respond to germs, changes in temperature and all kinds of stress. In addition to nerve impulses, nutrients flow over your nerves to nourish the muscles and tissues. If this flow is blocked it may cause your muscles to waste away.
If the nerves are trapped, “impinged” or otherwise interfered with, the flow of messages and nutrients over them can be disrupted and the body can become “diseased” or weakened. When you are diseased you have less energy and vitality and are less able to deal with physical and emotional stress.
Lowered resistance to disease, infection, colds, flu, allergies, ulcers, constipation, diarrhoea, asthma, fevers, headaches, seizures, bedwetting, hearing, balance or visual disturbances and many other health problems have been related to an unhealthy nervous system.
How Do Nerves Get Impinged or Trapped
The skeletal system, especially the spinal column, protects the spinal cord and other nerves. If the spinal bones (vertebrae) are misaligned even slightly they may “pinch,” impinge, irritate, compress or stretch the nerves they are supposed to protect.
This in turn can affect other structures in the area including blood vessels, discs, ligaments, joints, muscles, fascia, tendons and meninges. As mentioned earlier, this is referred to as a subluxation.
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