Greenville’s Neck Pain Specialist

Neck Pain – What is it?

Neck pain is most commonly of mechanical nature, meaning how we move and use our body. If your neck pain changes (for better or worse) with varying movement and positions accompanied by stiffness or loss of range of motion, you likely are suffering from mechanical neck pain.

Acute neck pain is an episode lasting no longer than six weeks, which is more common than chronic neck pain lasting longer than three months.

Because the nerve supply to your arms stems from the spinal cord within the spinal column, poor spinal mechanics can alter the signals from your brain to the muscles. It is not uncommon to experience symptoms such as pain, muscle weakness, or numbness and tingling anywhere down your arm(s), with or without local neck symptoms!

Neck Pain – What it isn’t!

The pain we feel is simply a request from our brain to change. Pain is often not associated with damage, rather a very apparent alert we need to change our physical behavior or else physical impairment will proceed.

Mechanical neck pain does not have to be debilitating.

Just because you have neck pain doesn’t mean you need an MRI. Just because your MRI shows “degeneration,” “disc bulges,” or “arthritis,” doesn’t mean it’s generating your pain. And just because you have neck pain does not mean you’re broken, needing to be “fixed”. Neck pain is often unassociated with the aforementioned structural changes commonly found from imaging, e.g. X-ray, CT scan, MRI.

Common Treatments for Neck Pain

The most common treatments are rest, medication, physical therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, massage, and other various conservative therapies.

While most acute bouts of neck pain will resolve on their own within a few weeks, the risk of recurrence is very high. The greatest risk of injury is the previous injury — if you’ve done it once, it’s very likely to happen again.

Few individuals need surgery for neck pain. Have a disc bulge? Even if it’s relevant, disc herniations have been shown to resolve on their own without surgery.

If you have intense and unrelenting radiating pain down the arm with progressive muscle weakness, or specific structural problems not responding to conservative therapy, surgery may be warranted.

At Upstate Spine & Sport there are no cookie cutter one-size-fits-all scenario treatments for neck pain Greenville. Each individual case is different and requires a unique treatment plan.

Our Greenville chiropractor, Dr. David Jolson, assesses your condition to determine how we can best provide you rapid results and sustainable recovery. This includes a thorough physical examination of the lumbar spine, hip, and knees, including muscles, joints, posture, and gait, as well as a history of past injuries and lifestyle habits that may be contributing to your condition. Biomechanical, neuromuscular, range of motion and functional tests are conducted to determine why. Other tests such as MRI, X-rays, blood tests or nerve conduction velocity testing may be ordered if necessary.

What to Do for Neck Pain

With all mechanical pain, there’s a ‘what’ and a ‘why’ — what the problem is and why it’s occurring in the first place. To achieve resolution it’s crucial to not only identify and correct the problem at hand but address the behaviors which lead to the issue’s occurrence.

Our approach isn’t to just temporarily “fix” the problem, rather understand what it is and what it isn’t, so the correct treatment is applied to the right problem — only then can we achieve a solution. Why use a hammer if you’re not positive it’s a nail? The last thing you want is to hammer away at a screw!

At Upstate Spine & Sport we initiate treatment for neck pain by utilizing the Mckenzie Method (MDT). MDT is a proven system of examination, treatment, and classification of spinal, joint, and other musculoskeletal pain, backed by years of research, evidence, and practice. We then use hands-on care to speed this process up, releasing tight muscles and joints to get you back to what you love ASAP.

If your problem is something we are unable to treat, our assessment will tell us this within the first few visits, and then we recommend the next best course of action to find you a solution.