Nerve Pain
Typical nerve pain comes from pinched nerves as they exit the spine. However, there are many other sites of entrapment that may be contributing to your symptoms. Diagnosing and treating all sites of entrapment has a very calming effect on your entire nervous system and often a reduction in pain and stiffness.
Nerve pain can happen to people of any age and affect any part of the musculoskeletal system. Nerve pain usually occurs if a person’s neural system has become irritated and therefore hypersensitive. This can be due to a variety of reasons from acute disc injuries in the spine to poor postural patterns affecting the body globally.
A person with nerve pain could also be experiencing other neural symptoms such as pins/needles, numbness or weakness. Nerve pain can also be present in a separate area of the body to where the nerve is irritated, i.e pain/tingling in the shoulder from nerve entrapment in the neck. A nerve can be trapped/irritated centrally in the nerve roots at the spine, i.e neck causing a cervical radiculopathy, or peripherally in common entrapment sites such as the pecs, jaw or foot. Any of these entrapments/irritations can cause pain in the body. Nerve pain may present in a dermatomal pattern, an area of skin which is innervated by a specific nerve.
Here at EastWest we use comprehensive neural screening techniques to assess which nerve is irritated. This will usually guide us to determining whether it is central (in the spine), peripheral (limbs) or both. We then use a variety or techniques which include gentle joint mobilisations to address nerve root alongside myofascial/trigger point releases of common nerve entrapment sites. We then follow this up with holistic whole-body treatments consisting of both manual therapy and exercise to address musculoskeletal imbalances to prevent it from returning.
This systematic approach is embedded in EastWest’s methodology termed “Release, Restore, Retrain”. This incorporates releasing the irritated nerves to desensitise the nervous system, restoring myofascial balance through manual therapy and retraining the whole system through specific exercise.
