Most of the time, when a person experiences an ache or pain, they are going to assume that the symptom is being caused by something in that immediate area. In truth, this is a very logical way to think! After all, most of our day to day sensations come from our skin, and for our skin this tends to hold true.
If you experience a cut on your shoulder, your shoulder is going to hurt. The nerves around your skin collect that information, and do a fantastic job of relaying it to your brain accurately. You’ll never get a cut on your shoulder, and instead find that the pain from that shows up in your finger instead…that would be weird!
What about the inside of our bodies, though? We talk about structures inside of our body, specifically nerves, it IS possible for the above scenario to happen in some cases! You see, every single thing that we feel, we feel because our nerves are communicating that information to our brains. Nerves originate from our brain and spinal cord, and branch out throughout our entire bodies, in a very well mapped out manner. Some areas of our bodies have a lot of nerve feedback, and some have very little.
The fact that nerves are responsible for everything that we feel and follow very complicated paths throughout our bodies, mean that issues such as pain, numbness, and tingling can get a little tricky! When a nerve is irritated somewhere, that nerve can create these types of symptoms ANYWHERE along its pathway.
…Wait. What??
Because this topic is vast, I’m going to solely focus on the upper body today. Let’s look at one of the nerves that come out from your lower neck region. That nerve is an offshoot from the spinal cord, and is so long that it runs all the way down to the fingertips.
Let’s imagine that one of those nerves gets irritated near the neck itself. You may have pain in your neck from this problem, but you could also have pain in your shoulder blade, shoulder, upper arm, lower arm, and/or hand! The symptoms could impact all of those areas, or just a couple of them.
As you can probably figure, this phenomenon can make symptoms a whole lot more complicated. I’ve seen cases where nerves can mimic very common issues such as upper trapezius strains, rotator cuff tears, biceps/triceps irritation, tennis elbow, arthritis flare-ups, and a number of other things.
This is such an important thing to consider when it comes to having symptoms of pain, numbness, or tingling, because a problem referred from a nerve needs to be treated much differently from an issue caused by a structure in the area where you’re having the problem.
I’ve met so many people that have more or less given up on resolving their symptoms because nothing worked, only to find that this was because they weren’t treating the right area of the body in the first place!
But…how do you even go about figuring all of this stuff out?
Expert help is the best way to go. Basically, they’ll take you through a screening process to narrow down the possible symptom causes. There are a ton of things that can be looked at to help with this, but a big part of it involves figuring out what tests make your symptoms either better or worse. If, for example, you have a pain in your shoulder, going through an assessment of your neck should not make your symptoms change in any way if it’s truly irrelevant. If testing the neck creates some kind of symptom change, then there’s a big chance that a nerve around that area is involved in that shoulder pain.
I think that it’s important to mention at this point that even if symptoms are caused by a nerve, they typically do get better without surgical intervention (and if a specific person’s nerve issue is a major issue, it’s usually pretty easy and quick to tell even without imaging)! I believe that there’s a lot of bad stigma surrounding nerve issues, but truth be told I’d rather be diagnosed with an irritated nerve instead of a torn or strained muscle somewhere. Once the correct issue is pinned down and the right activities are started, nerve irritation can actually start to get better very quickly in many cases.
All in all, nerve pain versus local pain is a really involved topic that can confuse even seasoned healthcare providers at times, but I hope that today’s post at least gives you a solid framework to understand that the root cause of a symptom may not always be as obvious as it seems. But the good news is that, local or nerve related, most symptoms can and will get better with a solid evaluation and treatment plan.
Are you or somebody you love experiencing issues with neck, upper back, or arm pain, numbness, or tingling? We are well versed in understanding these types of issues, and would love to see how we can help. Get in touch via phone at (239) 232-8155, or send an email to contact@serendipityptw.com.
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