Transcript
Sean Riley:
I recently treated a good friend of mine who was complaining. I think she had a three-day history of radiating pain down into her arm. And we’ve talked about sciatic in the past, very similar, radiating pain down into the leg. And she was so concerned about the arm itself, rightfully so. She was pretty uncomfortable. But I explained to her that when we have radiating numbness, tingling, sharpness, it’s likely an issue in the neck or potentially in the low back.
There’s essentially compression, pinching, irritation of a nerve. It could be from the disc, inflammation, whatever the case may be. She was quite uncomfortable. And so we went through some protocols. She said, Sean, what should I expect? What are the outcomes? What are some things that we could do? And the first thing that I told her that we need to be making some good decisions. She needs to be interrupting her sitting, moving around. We’re going to use some rest. Initially, we’re going to use some type of an NSAID or an anti-inflammatory.
In those types of cases, I don’t think manipulation’s going to be the best treatment option because we want to allow that area to have a chance to heal. We don’t want to get in there and move it around and potentially irritate it. Therapy is a fantastic option. We simply want to work on as gentle stretching and maybe some stability stuff, strengthening to the neck or the low back region. And from there, we want to see how they respond.
Unfortunately, three to four days later, she wasn’t doing that well, not responding as quickly as we had hoped. So from there, I think we made the appropriate recommendation of an MRI. And what an MRI does is it’s going to give us some more information if there was a little bit of disc involvement. Ultimately, we got her into a steroid dose pack, some medications really to reduce that inflammation. She’s feeling much better.
Now, there’s some importance on stabilizing that neck and low back, so I’m a big fan of therapy or activity after that steroid has kicked in. And then unfortunately, in some cases, if the oral steroid doesn’t work as well as it should, injection therapies with pain management physicians could be an option as well. So if you have radiating pain down into your arm and leg, I think it’s important you need to consult someone, obviously get worked up correctly, hopefully rest, exercise, maybe use some medications to get it under control. If it persists, we might want to look into some imaging and ultimately some additional treatment options from there.
