Are you a victim of neck pain and its symptoms or have you been told by your doctor that you have cervical spondylosis and you will have to live with it or opt for surgery?
Enormous help are available for those suffering from mechanical pain in the neck. A lot of treatment options are open for victims of common muscular skeletal neck pain. However, there is essentially preferred treatment option, which is non-invasive or non-surgical, even nonmedical and meets with universal approval.
This common muscular skeletal neck pain has caused so much distress and agony to thousands of people. According to a retired Brigadier in the Nigerian Army in Abuja, Abrahim, Musa, who served in the military for 15 years, his neck pain started when he was a colonel. It started as a little pain that was dull in the neck and he would go for over-the-counter drugs, which relieved him. But with time, he began to feel some abnormal sensation in the hands, such as numbness and tingling.
Months later, he began to feel the inability to raise the neck and sustain the head. The head now drops forward. He visited several hospitals in Abuja to no avail. One morning as he woke up, he was unable to raise his hands with ease. His hands were sluggish to rise. This condition eventually led to his early retirement at the age of 41 years.
Years later, walking became difficult because it affected his gait. He was confined to a wheel chair. This time, his hands have become so weak and thin and the neck completely unable to raise the head.
This is the consequence of neglected or improper treatment of the neck pain at the early stage. However, the wife read a write-up in this column months ago and contacted me and immediately treatment was expedited. In less than five weeks, he got his extremely weak hands strengthened and fallen head raised!
Neck pain of mechanical origin has prevalent rate of less than 10 per cent, though small, yet has no quick fix medically.
Neck pain being so close to the head, makes the whole issue a personal one like headache. It is subjective and also invisible. It is a problem that only you as the victim know what you are passing through. It comes with pain and feeling of heaviness at the back of the neck and shoulder, numbness and tingling sensation along the hand and fingers, the inability to make a grip or a fist, and disturbance of your night sleep and distress. If you are a vocational worker, neck pain will restrict your activity, reduce your work capacity and would even increase your emotional stress.
Degenerative process of the cervical (neck) spine and strains/sprains of muscles and ligaments are the major causes of painful experiences in the neck. Neck pain starts as an acute experience followed by a feeling of heaviness at the back of the neck. It may become so disturbing that even to sustain a load with your arm would be labourious!
The experiences caused by either the degeneration of the spine or sprain/strain of muscles and ligaments may result to slipped disc, which could pinch on the cervical (neck) nerves roots.
Range of movement of the neck to the left or right side may be limited. The same too to the backward or forward movement, because of pain and stiffness. Sometimes there could be complaints of “shocking” or spasm along the spine when any of these movements are initiated. Disturbing neck pain is hard to ignore. It can be disabling. Many victims of chronic back pain have had their arms/hands so weak and even paralysed because of negligence or improper treatment when the neck pain was acute.
One intriguing relationship between neck pain and waist pain is that a high percentage of waist pain sufferers will likely develop neck pain and the neck pain will now become a serious concern to the victim.
The relationship is hinged on the awkward posture of the waist pain sufferer, which invariably brings about slight adjustment or compensatory movement at the neck joints unwittingly. This, over time, will give rise to pain in the neck.
Why a waist pain sufferer who also has neck pain is more concerned with the neck pain than the waist is simple because the neck is closer to the head than the waist and we know the importance of the head to the rest of the body. The fear of the effect of this pain being so close to the head portends some thing unpalatable.
The group of people that are likely to develop this pain in the neck are the office workers, who spend long years in sedentary lifestyle, long distant drivers and other workers whose job cause the head to always be positioned in a forward posture while at work.
Indeed, a good number of people who are suffering from neck pain are struggling on their own. They continue to suffer this because they are uninformed of the proper health facility to go and get appropriate help, where their neck pain will be put to rest.
Some people would quickly opt for surgery of the neck just to escape the pain. The fact is that most people with neck pain are treated without surgery. Really surgery helps more than it hurts, but some surgeries reduce only some of the patients’ pain and other surgeries are completely unsuccessful; range of motion is reduced and pain is not because of the metal (titinum) implant in the neck and on some occasions with screws, these foreign elements will be in the neck for the rest of ones life! The victim seems trapped and he still has months before he can even begin to do anything reasonable except to tell the story.
As a seasoned specialist in muscul-skeleta physiotherapy, I advise victims of neck pain to always consider the combination of a good medical and skillful physiotherapy approaches for their disturbing neck pain, if they do not want to be disabled and loose the functions of their arms and shoulder
Physiotherapy skillfully and thoughtfully performed will eliminate pain or at least dramatically reduce the pain within minutes, and put a stop to any developing disability in the shoulder and the hand,
The procedures are not complicated. A physiotherapist that knows his onions would be able to gradually put the symptoms to rest!