Chiropractors Examine Neck Pain and Arm Pain
Discover how your arm pain may be caused by your neck!
| Wolf’s Law and Davis’ Law | 00:04-02:02 |
| Connecting the Neck and the Arm | 02:03-05:52 |
| Drawing the Links | 05:53-08:40 |
| Structure Dictates Function | 08:41-14:31 |
| Cause and Treatment | 14:32-15:21 |
| Process NOT Procedure | 15:22-19:28 |
| Conclusion | 19:29-21:20 |
Transcript:
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Wolf’s Law and Davis’ Law
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:00:04] We’re good, that’s the last time I’m sitting in the front row.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:00:10] There in this morning, actually, you see them at nine o’clock, they’re going for an appointment. There you see everybody, man, although it is kind of weird, you know, the theatre is only there, open or not. But, man, that’s good. That was a good job. Better than my joke, actually. I like that. All right. Go, buddy.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:00:28] Ok, so this week’s Sunday conversation is talking about, is your arm pain related to your neck pain or is your arm pain coming from your neck? So let’s proceed. We’ll go to the opening slide here. So last week we talked about this sort of bump on the back of the head and the growth, the. Yeah, the growth of the EOP. And I just want to emphasize again, Wolf, law and Davis law and how the body responds to the pressures that are placed upon them. So bones will grow. If there are always muscles pulling on them, tissues will get tighter if they’re in positions that promote tightness or tissues will get looser if they’re in positions that don’t promote their activation. Look at this thing. Oh.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:01:14] I’m going blue the.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:01:16] Hey, it sticks out a little bit more, so just keep that in mind as we move forward that the body is always adapting and just like it’s been able to adapt into a position that’s causing mal alignment. It can also adapt into positions that can improve health and promote healthy behaviors and posture.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:01:32] Yeah. So, guys, this is all to do with having your head down all the time doing whatever you’re doing, whether it’s a computer. We had to commandeer the bend that it doesn’t really apply to texting and phones. Right. That it’s everything anything that you’re looking down. It could be a book. And we don’t like this straight neck. Not good to have a straight neck like that. You’re supposed to have a nice curve. And this is our third time saying that. So if it hasn’t sunk in, it will never sink in. Curves are important in the neck. Ready to go to the next slide. But yeah.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:02:02] Yeah, next slide. All right. So so we can explain.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Connecting the Neck and the Arm
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:02:07] Then what this orientation is like for the x ray.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:02:12] Yeah. So this x rays is actually an oblique x-ray, is what we call it in chiropractic terms. And so Clayton’s is going to stand up and just sort of position. So you see how his body is turned to roughly forty-five degrees from head-on. And so the x-ray is being shot at that forty-five-degree and so you’re better able to see where the nerves actually come out. So if we could just get the cursive up there, we can circle some of these little holes there. And that’s where you can see those are called the intervertebral Forman.
And those are the spaces in which the nerves actually exit from the spine. So there’s one in between each of the vertebrae in the neck, and because we have eight cervical vertebrae, there are actually eight foremen. And so the cervical nerves come out of both sides and exit through the holes.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:03:07] Foreman, foramen
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:03:09] Foreman, foreman.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:03:12] See, we’re not getting a long time anyway. All right. Go ahead.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:03:16] So. What can happen is in a condition called cervical ridiculous apathy, and now that’s essentially when you get this sharp shooting pain into your arms. So the description is when a nerve in the cervical spine becomes inflamed or damage, it results in a change in the actual function of the nerve. So the result is, well, numbness, altered reflexes, weakness. The pain may travel through the shoulder, into the elbow and sometimes into the wrist and hands, a lot of the times into the wrists and hands.
And it can feel like pins and needles and it can range from achy and sharp, just like a lightning bolt. And so you can sort of see on the picture to the right there that there are different distributions of numbness and tingling and shooting, depending on which level is actually which hole is blocked.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:04:19] So let’s talk about this. OK, so here are the individual holes. So, you know, we have two, three, four, five, six, seven, each one of these holes. Is going to represent a different area on the arm. OK, so when people come in and see us and they say, jeez, you know, my numbness and tingling is in my thumb and index finger, that to us lets us know potentially which whole. Has issues, right, and the issues can be from we’re going to talk later on about what can include that whole right, Ben?
Exactly. So we’ll talk about that. But it’s so important to understand which part of the arm has that sensation, whether it be numbness and tingling, pins and needles, pain because that lets us know what part of the neck, which hole is occluded, which means it tells us which nerve is irritated.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:05:21] Exactly, exactly, and so we can also go in there and test the sensation, so sometimes we’ll have you in a physical exam and we’ll be touching certain areas and we’re looking for those levels. We’ll also be testing the strength of the muscle, because as soon as those nerves exit those little holes there, they supply the muscles that are surrounding them. And so we’ll see if we adjust the spinal segment so we can actually create a little bit more space and it’ll influence the impact that the nerve has on the muscle.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Drawing the Links
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:05:52] Do you want to draw the links there, then we’ll just go through each one. Sure, yeah, so I think I’ll draw I’ll draw the link there, but I think it’s important for people to understand that. Guys, if you’ve learned something so far, just give us a few thumbs up, because want to make sure we’re on the right track here for you guys. So let’s start with C five. So then this is two, three, four and five, right. All right, this year is number five. If this hole right here is occluded and the nerve is irritated, guess where you’re going to notice it? You’re going to notice it right to the elbow in the arm, OK? And it’s on the outside of the arm.
OK, so that’s fine. So if you come in, you say McCain goes right to my elbow, but it doesn’t go further than the elbow. We know that. We’re probably looking at a problem right here. And a little further, we have C6. Right, C and C six is going to be. Right there. OK, so now it goes beyond the elbow and then we follow with the middle finger, we’re not going to show you which one this is. But if you flip the bird or if you can’t flip the bird, you’ve got a problem with your C7. All right. That’s the middle finger we continue down here.
The fourth and fifth finger, right to the elbow on the inside, all the way to the armpit is going to be your Tone. All of these relate to also muscle, so when you come into the clinic and we’re muscle testing some of these, if your bicep is weak, we know we need to check. We need to check a certain nerve. So it all leads us down the path of identifying where this is. Then you confirm it by an X-ray because the X-ray is going to show that hole on that oblique view, right?
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:07:38] That’s right. Yes, exactly. And it’s really you won’t get this anywhere else but Humpday conversation. So give us a little bit of love here. This is some first year anatomy that we learn in chiropractic college. And it really is helpful in determining well, if I test your strength from side to side and you’re a little bit weaker when I ask you to hold your arm up in this position here, it gives me a hint that this the C5 segment is likely involved and that there needs to be some work done at that particular level or some for an X-ray to check to see is there anything including that area in the spine
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:08:12] And you know, how many people will go to other places and they’ll say, you know, how they will work in my arm because I was numb. And meanwhile, nobody’s ever checked their neck. Right. So it was just about basic anatomy and knowing where those nerves coming from that could be supplying that area. All right, are we done with the slide?
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:08:31] I think so. That’s the great that was a great explanation of the connection between the neck and the muscles that they supply as well as sensation. Let’s move on to slide three right on.
Bedford Chiropractors Discuss Structure Dictates Function
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:08:45] So now, again, this is deep.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:08:47] This is a lot of anatomies here, so I’ll just run through briefly what we’re actually looking at. So if we look at the photo, that’s furthest to the left. This is the regular spine that we would look at. The regular review that we’ve been looking at for the last couple of weeks at Humpday. But you can see that the disk space is. Ah, a little bit irregular there, see the two lines in the center that Dr. Drew the disk space there is narrowed, as we would say, and also if we checked George’s line, it’s pretty straight there.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:09:29] So George is lying. So what I want to mention here, Ben, when you don’t have a beautiful. You guys remember what that curve is, how many degrees? Forty to forty two degrees at the apex of that curve where the curve is at its most is going to be Seifi five six. OK, sorry. One, two, three, four, five, six. Right here. Sorry guys. That’s usually where you’re going to see the first signs of degenerative. Disc. Disease.
OK, usually it starts at C five, C six. If there wasn’t any trauma, and it’s just basically that people have lost their curve, so now go ahead in the middle one. So this is from front to back. If you’re on the X-ray, they’re shooting you from front to back. This is from the side we call that lateral. And this is a. To p. a. to post your front to back go ahead, Ben.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:10:35] Yeah, so what I really want to go over here is we can look at the black arrows there. It’s pointing to these cat ears. Dr. Roach is going to just eyeball like just draw them out there and you see how sharp they are, we call them cat ears, but really they’re the uncle vertebral joints. And those are the joints that are like your disk sits on those bony prominences. But we look at the level below where the white arrows are pointing to. And we see that those carriers. They’re not nice and sharp, they’re blunted. So this is indicative of an arthritis and a portion of degenerative this disease where it’s actually setting in and it’s causing those UNCA vertebral joints to blunt and basically off the sides of them are bony outgrowths. Yeah.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:11:29] One thing I want to mention, just for normal anatomy here, this is the trachea. So this is where your ears coming in. OK. Is also right here. Right. And this is where we saw in the first X-ray where people developed that huge. Horn, which we don’t like. All right, now go to the bleeping,
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:11:52] Yes, so the oblique again, this is the one that shot at that forty five degree angle. And we can see the holes again here. But let’s look at the C five, C six. You can see on the on the on the vertebral body there, it’s labeled C six.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:12:07] So let’s look at the nice hole,
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:12:09] Nice hole and look at the size of that one. So you see the little bony outgrossed that are causing that IVF to enclose. And that’s due to that uncle vertebral joint blunting, as well as a degenerative disease at that level, you can see the reduced disk space height there.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:12:32] So, guys, imagine you’ve got a nerve here, plenty of room. That nerve there doesn’t have a whole lot of room. And if it’s C six again, you’re going to feel that in your thumb index finger right up to the elbow. OK, so this is basically what Ben and I see every single day. There’s not one case that comes in. Sorry, there’s not one data passes by that we don’t have a case of somebody who has numbness and tingling in their arms. And how we’re going to get them better is to do. A better looking cervical structural spine. That’s how we’re going to do it, because we need to create more space in between this area right there.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:13:18] Exactly the most common cause of this traveling pain, this ridiculous apathy, are when nerves become inflamed. There’s bone spurs in between those joints, yeah, or when there’s improper cervical alignment and structure, and so we talk about when we when we actually restore cervical alignment or vertebral alignment, it decreases inflammation. And so already we’re on the right track and then we can restore that that spinal structure and it decreases that pain.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:13:51] Yeah. So that’s that’s a great segue into this slide here, Ben.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:13:55] Yes, this was a study that was performed in twenty seventeen poor posture and cervical ridiculous the study. This study was published in the Journal of Physical Therapy and demonstrated the relief of cervical ridicule following a dramatic reduction of forwarding head posture and restoration of the cervical lower doses. So in other words, they got rid of that straight spine. Restored the 40 to degree curve, essentially, and the patient’s cervical ridiculous apathy vanished.
Bedford Chiropractors Examine Cause and Treatment
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:14:31] So what we’re seeing here is actually a reverse curve, right? So people go from a 40 to degree curve to straight. This little guy here has basically a reverse curve that’s actually curving the other way. So through care during this time period, 40 adjustments, I think you said, yeah, here’s where the curve should be. He’s now starting to get better. And lo and behold, the ridiculous hoppity, the pain going down the arm is gone. So unless you fix the cause of the problem, you are going to be going around in circles trying to figure out what’s going on.
And then they put you on gabapentin and they give you Celebrex, everything to reduce the inflammation. But I’ve never seen a pill move a spine and better align. Right. It just doesn’t happen. So we need to make sure that we’re looking at the structure. We’re looking at the right things.
Bedford Chiropractors Explain Process NOT Procedure
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:15:21] Absolutely. It’s just another way as well, guys, to sort of help you guys understand what it is that the goal is for treatment here because as you could see in that previous study, the spine was getting that reversal or dosis like Doctor Roach was talking about. And with the 40 treatments over 17 weeks, they saw a reversal on that curve. And so we normally say it takes about a year to change the structure. It takes time, takes time. Everybody’s different. And it’s true, it’s a real thing and it happens every day in practice, and that patient saw a complete resolution of symptoms and was able to go back and bridge the gap between the person that he was when he was in pain to the person that he is now.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:16:06] So let’s talk about philosophy a little bit, because everything that we see and everything that we’ve been with, that we’ve grown up with is is a procedure. So in other words, you get a pill and on the pill it says take three times daily until symptoms subside. OK, so once the symptoms subside, what do we do? We stop taking it. Antibiotics take for seven days, you stop, so everything is procedure in chiropractic, we have that philosophy that things are a process because you didn’t get like this overnight, you did not lose that curve in your neck overnight. So it takes time for that process to happen, to regain that curve where it’s not a procedure.
And sometimes people come in and they say after the second visit, I always laugh at this. And it happened to be actually not too long ago. The guy says, you know, things are going great, but I’m still in pain. I’m like, man, two visits and you’re still in pain. Like, you know, somebody must have told you that I was the messiah or something, right? And he laughs. But people have it in their mind that, you know, the problem started the day they had the pain. But unbeknownst to them, the problem started when the structure started to change slowly but surely. So in other words, the the toothache, if it started Tuesday, that’s not the date of the cavity started.
The cavity started way back. So we got to talk about the process instead of a procedure because that’s really what we’re doing, is through a process for changing that structure. And that’s why we get phenomenal results when other people have not. Because they treated it like a procedure, and as soon as there was a limit, you know, less pain, they tell the patient, OK, well, we don’t have to come here anymore.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:17:47] And the pain comes back. And over time, you look at that X-ray, if it was like five years ago and you take one today, the X-ray looks worse. So nobody stopped that degenerative process because nobody addressed the structure. So I hope that makes sense with you guys. I really I really enjoy sharing this information because I really feel that we don’t hear enough of this. Right. We have so many people the other day, but I didn’t tell you this. A patient walked in. She gave me your medication lists, 19 medications. 19 like his just I guess there’s place and time for everything, and I don’t want to go into the details of it, but when there is another option that’s less invasive and I’m going to tell you, a lot of those medications were for pain stuff.
So obviously somebody missed a ball along the way where we didn’t deal with the cause of the problem. And now we’re taking a concoction every single day. So I want to really, really thank you guys for showing up tonight, because obviously, you’re committed to hearing information that might be against the grain. But, you know, only dead fish swim with the currents. Sometimes we need to go against the currents. And obviously, by you guys being here, you guys are part of that group of people that want to go against the current learn because the quality of the questions you ask determines your life.
And you can ask quality questions if you understand. Right. So tonight, we want to talk to you about normal anatomy, abnormal anatomy. This is stuff you need to know. So that’s my thing. And I appreciate every single one of you for chiming in tonight and showing us your love.
Chiropractors Wrap Up Discussion On Neck & Arm Pain
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:19:30] Yeah, absolutely, it’s been great to hear from you guys and hearing all the feedback has been awesome, and that’s why we want to show you guys all these really cool images. And I hope you guys have enjoyed all of those images. And you can go back and check them out as well. Each of those images were taken at the same level that had the same problem at each level. And so you can kind of tune in and compare and contrast those images. So it’s pretty cool in that way. I could have put any sort of image on there, but I decided to keep it consistent. So it was a little bit easier to follow. So return back and check the video out and kind of learn for yourselves.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:20:05] And so tonight, Ben and I had a challenge. When everybody wants this live, the spinach, we want everybody to share. We had over twelve hundred views last week. That is fantastic. We want to thank you guys because. You guys are doing it, so we want to thank you guys for doing that and for reaching people outside of our practice, we had listeners from every province last week, so across Canada, through covid, you know, we’re reaching people. And that was our goal. So we want to thank you guys for doing that.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:20:39] One listener from New Zealand.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:20:42] Yes, that’s right, that’s right. So. Ben. Are we done,
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:20:51] We’re done, we’re done this week. Thank you all so much for tuning in and tune in again next week for coming up with more and more and more cool stuff for you guys. Humpday conversation number 10 right on.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:21:02] So give us a love share or this information. You never know. Somebody might come up to you one day and say, man, because you share that information. I don’t have any numbness in my six or seven. Oops, sorry. Seagate or Taiwan? All right, take care, guys. We love you and appreciate you, and we’ll see you next week, Wednesday, at nine o’clock Atlantic time. You go to Seattle any time because people are watching from all over Atlantic time. Yes, there is an Atlantic time. Take care. What’s up?
Listen, if you like this episode, you’ll probably like the other ones. Chances are pretty good. So here’s what you need to do. You need to like us and follow us on Facebook. Following means, you get notified when these two guys are alive. Next, family, friends. You need to share these episodes because you never know. You might help them because they need this information as well.
Dr. Ben Boudreau: [00:21:47] If you ever miss an episode, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube. That way, you can watch the episode over and over and over again.
Dr. Clayton Roach: [00:21:54] Guys, we love you and appreciate you. Take care.
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