How To Tell If You Have Cervical Stenosis

Are you wondering if your neck pain could be coming from cervical stenosis? In today’s video, I’ll be covering three things to check on yourself to see if you might have cervical stenosis. Now just remember, this is not a replacement for going to the doctor having x rays having memorize to confirm if you have cervical stenosis, but these tests are pretty good at telling you if you likely have cervical stenosis. And if it’s a good idea to go get that neck pain checked out to see if there’s something more serious going on that you might need more emergency medical attention for.

So before I go into those three things, let me give you the two things that you need to look for that you should go to the hospital for right away. The big concern with cervical stenosis is that you might have something called myelopathy big words for your spinal cord is getting pinched by the stenosis because cervical stenosis is narrowing of the holes where the nerves go through inside the spine. And if you have cervical myelopathy, some serious things can happen.

Just as a disclaimer, it is possible to have an X ray or an MRI usually is what is what is done to the diagnosis, it is possible to have an MRI that tells you that you have slight myelopathy without the symptoms. And in that situation, you usually have a good chance of fixing the cervical stenosis problem with male apathy without surgery.

But if your cervical myelopathy is more serious, the two signs that you need to look for and go get emergency help for is one if you’re having trouble walking, like if if things change if more recently as your cervical stenosis suspected cervical stenosis got worse. And you stand up to walk around your house or wherever you are, and you feel like you just have some balance issues that are new, that’s a sign that you might have some severe cervical myelopathy.

The other one that’s real serious as well is if you’re having accidents, they call this bowel and bladder dysfunction. What that means is like you have to go to the bathroom and you haven’t made it a few times. Lately, you’ve had accidents where you’ve dirted yourself. That’s also a sign that you have cervical myelopathy in both these cases that trouble walking and the bowel and bladder problems.

What’s going on is your cervical I’m sorry, your spinal cord is getting so pinched that the nerves that control your legs and your ability to hold in fluids and solids down there is becoming involved. And it’s a serious thing. So you need to go to the doctor right away or go to the hospital, the urgent care and figure out what’s going on.

There’s a small chance that you might need to go have surgery to free up the space where the spinal cord goes through so that you don’t lose that function permanently or have trouble walking permanently.

Now with all that said, those are rare circumstances are very rare situations. And I don’t mean to scare you, I just have to give you the red flags you know the things to look for right away. And if you’re watching this video right now, and you’re like Oh, thank goodness, I don’t have I haven’t had any accidents. Nothing’s changed my walking recently. I don’t think that I have that then you probably have the type of cervical stenosis problem that can be helped without surgery.

Real quick before I get into those three things, my name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist El Paso manual physical therapy. This channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile. without unnecessary surgery injections and having to rely on pain medications. Please subscribe and turn on notifications so that you can get notified whenever we release a new video, we release content every week, so that you can become more healthy and active.

Let me tell you the three things to look for on cervical stenosis. Number one, if you have stiffness in your neck, not necessarily pain, because a lot of people with stenosis, whether it’s in the low back or the neck, they don’t really have back pain or neck pain. So you may have neck pain and that’s that happens a lot of times, but you may not as well. And if you don’t, it’s okay.

But if you have stiffness in your neck, like you can’t turn your head as much as you used to, especially if it’s one sided, that is a clear sign that you might have a stenosis problem.

It could be other issues too, could be arthritis, it could be a stuck joint that happens. But the difference is with a stuck joint it happens more suddenly it happens like you wake up from one morning to the next and you have a stuck neck all of a sudden that’s more like a stuck joint or even an arthritis situation. with arthritis.

It tends to be painful as well as stiff with stenosis. It could be painful and stiff because you could have arthritis, it also in addition to the stenosis, so you kind of have to look at it a little more closely to see if it’s truly stenosis or arthritis or both.

The second thing that you need to look for is if you’ve got pain going down your arm Or even in your shoulder, it could be pain, numbness, tingling, changes in temperature, like you feel like one side is cold or hot. All these are signs of nerve problems.

Whenever there’s stenosis in the neck, that means the spaces where the nerves travel are becoming pinched. And so the neck, the nerves that come out of the neck end up going into the shoulder, and down the arm all the way to the fingertips.

So it is common to have some sort of pain, some sort of weakness, numbness tingling, those symptoms. If you’ve got a Psygnosis problem, a common way to tell if you’ve got the weakness problem is when carrying keys like if you’re going to put a key into a door, or a car to turn the key and unlock the car, lock it, and you have trouble holding the keys or turning the keys or you drop things more often. were things that used to be able to do before relatively recently, no, within the past few months now all of a sudden become more challenging, like opening a jar, or opening something that’s stiff and tight.

Those are signs that you might have weakness that could be coming from an exacerbating stenosis problem. And then the third thing to look for is if your symptoms are coming on gradually.

So if your symptoms are slowly becoming worse, like you’ve noticed that there hasn’t been a sudden change or all of a sudden you woke up one morning you had all this pain down your arm into your into your hand, you can have a big amount of weakness that showed up all of a sudden, and there wasn’t pain that just showed up real suddenly from one day to the next even one week to the next.

It’s more gradual, it happens over the course of months, possibly even years to where the neck becomes a little more stiff, the arm pain becomes it’s there, but it’s manageable, and then slowly becomes more and more aggressive. That is a sign that it’s cervical stenosis. Because if you think about it, if your nerve pathways were suddenly pinched, you would feel it and you would know and it would be an emergency situation for you It hurts quite a bit to get a severe pinched nerve.

But if it’s a more of a gradual pinching, like the space is slowly narrowing, it kind of creeps up on people and people tend to deal with the problem, they tend to feel the pain and get by with Tylenol or ibuprofen or some over the counter pain medication.

But if it doesn’t go away completely, if it keeps them from being able to do everything they need to be doing throughout the day, they’re having trouble at night sleeping because of this issue, then that’s when they reach a certain threshold. And they look for they begin to look for help with this problem.

So if you’re there right now, if you’re thinking Alright, I’ve taken pain medication hasn’t really gotten better, it’s been progressively getting worse, then that’s also a sign that you might have cervical stenosis. But remember I said that it is good. If you’re in the situation as long as you don’t have the myelopathy symptoms of trouble the walking that comes out suddenly are more recent in the bladder problems

Then you’re going to be fine and you should be able to manage this cervical stenosis problem, just find this video today is intended to just have you check on yourself if you’ve got cervical stenosis problems, so that you can piece it together and figure out if it if it is or isn’t.

Now, of course, I recommend you go to the doctor if you think that you have this and go get it checked out. But if you’re looking for how to fix it, because most of the time this can be fixed naturally, I’ve got a video for you. It’s linked in the description below. It’s how to fix cervical stenosis and go check that out you can get we have three exercises on three well stretches and exercises and they’ll make a huge difference.

So go check that out to get more help. And you think you’ve got cervical stenosis and you’ll want a professional to check you out. We’d love to check you out, you can apply for a free discovery visit, all you got to do is scroll to the bottom of the page here and find the button that says apply for a discovery visit. And what that is a 20-minute visit with a specialist physical therapist.

We’ll take a look at your situation will listen to your story want to hear all the details about your cervical stenosis problem to see if that’s what it is, so we can give you the right diagnosis. We’ll look at the anatomy book we’ll look at the skeleton and we want to give you all the information that you need to make sure that you can make the best decision about your cervical stenosis problem moving forward, you’ve got a duty to apply for this free discovery visit is scroll down the bottom, click that button a form will pop up and you’re just going to leave your details there.

Once you submit your information there, we’ll get it on our end. One of my staff will call you back as quick as possible so that we can let you know about the next steps on setting up your free discovery visit. I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon. Have a wonderful day.