Carpal Tunnel Syndrome – Neck Pain

Transcript

Patients often experience numbness, tingling, weakness, and pain in their hand. For a variety of reasons. Carpal tunnel syndrome is not the only reason those symptoms occur. In fact, people often come to me with carpal tunnel symptoms and also complain of pretty significant neck and shoulder pain. Because they’re having the two problems simultaneously, it’s not uncommon for people to combine them in their mind and think that they’re directly related when in fact it’s not at all uncommon for both carpal tunnel syndrome and neck pain to be occurring at the same time. They’re both very common problems. However, carpal tunnel syndrome in and of itself cannot cause pain in the neck. It’s simply a matter of two problems coexisting in the same patient. That having been said, there is something called double-crush phenomenon, which is when you have a nerve that’s affected in more than one location at the same time. In this case, we’re talking about the carpal tunnel and the neck. They’re both places that contain nerves and the nerves can be effected at both sites. When that happens, the combination of the two sites will magnify the symptoms that would be experienced from one site or the other, and it can be quite uncomfortable.