Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, practitioner of functional medicine and doctor of non-force chiropractic.
Last week for the past two episodes, we talked about neuropathies, problems with nerves,
especially in the lower extremities, in the low back, hips, legs, all the way down to
the tips of your toes.
So I thought this week we'll talk about the arms, the neck, shoulders, arms, pain in the
nerves that usually come from the neck but can show up in any part of your arm, even
something as simple as numbness in your pinky and the finger next to it, or the thumb, or
just pain in one finger.
Numbness, tingling, burning, these are all signs of pressure on or some kind of disease
process or ailment or nutrient deficiency oftentimes to the nerves in your upper extremity,
in your shoulder, arm, hand.
Problems that are caused by disc herniations in the neck or simply patterns of tension
in the muscles of the neck, this is actually more common than disc herniations.
But also we're going to talk about thoracic outlet syndrome.
You may have heard about where there's pressure on the nerves just underneath the collarbone,
rotator cuff injuries, which can cause pressure, nerve-like symptoms anyway.
Tennis elbow, which isn't really a nerve condition but can also cause similar symptoms.
So we want to sort of debunk any confusion between those two.
And of course everyone's heard of carpal tunnel syndrome, where supposedly there is pressure
on the nerves as they pass through this little outlet in your wrist and also that is often
not actually caused in the carpal tunnel.
So we'll talk about all of those things.
But before we do that, we're going to get into some recent news.
This is a story that came out in medical press.
It's pretty exciting.
It's entitled, Which Probiotics Are Effective in Irritable Bowel Syndrome?
And this is kind of a compendium of research from France, from Ireland, from Sweden, an
upgrade actually to the recommendations of the American gastroenterology community.
And it's pretty exciting because what they're doing is naming specific strains, specific
strains of probiotics, specific types of lactobacillus, bifidobacteria, other types of beneficial
bacteria that are often in probiotic products.
And these have been studied by top shelf manufacturers of probiotics.
The functional medicine practitioners have been using for years, but it's just really
unusual to see this in the medical literature.
And so it's pretty exciting because they go on, it's a little bit technical.
They go on to describe several of these different strains and different populations and some
major studies, randomized controlled trials showing huge differences with specific types
of rhamnosus is another type of bacteria that is in some of the top shelf products.
And we've been using these things for years, but to see that it's actually working its
way into mainstream medicine is pretty exciting because a lot of people are going to benefit
from that because most people who have irritable bowel syndrome, and first of all, that's often
kind of a catch-all diagnosis or a diagnosis of exclusion if you have certain symptoms.
It's not the diagnosis of it can vary a lot depending on what doctor you go to.
But if you have a chronically irritated gut, oftentimes people will sort of diagnose themselves
with irritable bowel syndrome, especially if you have alternating constipation and diarrhea
and just chronic upset for a long period of time.
But there are ways to diagnose it more specifically.
But the most important thing is in the big scheme of things, most people, when they go
to most doctors with irritable bowel syndrome, they get treatment with drugs, anti-diarrheal,
from the Mayo Clinic.
The treatment that the Mayo Clinic recommends is fiber supplements, good, laxatives, maybe,
anti-diarrheal medications, anticholinergic medications, tricyclic antidepressants, SSRI
antidepressants, pain medications, Lote-Ronex, there's a whole list of things that just treat
the symptoms of the irritation, that calm the nerves that are overstimulating your bowel
and causing it to become irritated or treat the symptoms of constipation, diarrhea, inflammation,
etc., and those just never work long term.
They certainly do nothing to correct the problem, whereas probiotics, powerful specific strains,
not just the, this is another good reason to, I talk a lot about, you know, some supplements
are fine to buy anywhere.
Vitamin C is the best example.
If you can tolerate plain old ascorbic acid and you need extra vitamin C for any condition,
buy it at Costco.
It doesn't matter.
But there are some things that you should never buy in any store or other than a health
food store, and probiotics is another one on that list because cheap probiotics are
a waste of money.
The most money you'll ever waste on a product is something that you purchase for any price
that has no effect on your physiology.
So cheap probiotics don't work, and the ones that do work are expensive, but you shouldn't
need to take the big guns, the really expensive probiotics, for more than a few weeks or a
few months.
So that varies for everyone.
But anyway, it's exciting to see in the literature that they're finally naming some of these
specific strains that are well documented to reverse inflammatory bowel syndrome and
other inflammatory conditions of the gut.
There is another fascinating paper in the literature connecting chronic pain to accelerated
brain aging.
I've often talked about how anything you can do to improve your heart health, regular exercise,
eating right, reducing stress, keeping your blood pressure low, keeping the pump strong
will also heal your brain, keep your brain effective as long as possible.
It's all about supplying nutrients and oxygen to the brain, but this is really interesting.
This is a study linking arthritis in the knee to accelerated brain aging.
So it was a study that's on 9,000 adults from the UK Biobank.
Investigators developed a model to compare an individual's brain age with their chronological
age and those with osteoarthritis in the knee showed a much faster rate of brain aging than
healthy individuals.
So you heard that right.
Osteoarthritis, the plain old arthritis that you get with aging that most people get over
time in the knee was connected to a faster rate of brain aging.
So it's probably not just arthritis in the knee, but arthritis in general, the inflammatory
debris that is produced by osteoarthritis, inflammation from arthritis is affecting your
brain because when you have arthritis anywhere in your body, you have it everywhere in your
body and those inflammatory cytokines and other inflammatory irritants affect every
part of your body.
But they studied this specifically and it's interesting that just osteoarthritis in the
knee was directly linked with acceleration of brain aging, especially in the hippocampus.
If you've listened to my episodes back a few weeks ago when I was talking, I did four episodes
on cognitive decline and dementia and the hippocampus is the part of your brain that's
kind of like the file clerk.
When you experience something, the hippocampus has to decide where to store that memory and
that's often the first part that goes so even though you still experience things, it drives
people around you crazy because you just saw something happen and you can't remember it
because of the damage to the hippocampus and your brain didn't store that memory.
So this is associated with arthritis in the knee.
This is fascinating to me because there are lots of things you can do to reduce arthritis
anywhere in your body and therefore potentially reduce another common cause apparently of
damage or acceleration of aging to the brain.
So chronic musculoskeletal pain affects 40% of the world's population and has been shown
to have harmful impact on cognitive function, although the exact mechanisms remain unclear.
Prior research suggests that inflammatory markers associated with brain aging are higher
in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain.
So it goes both ways.
The markers for brain aging and the markers of osteoarthritis are higher in both of those
populations suggesting a strong link.
But there's several types of common musculoskeletal pain that can be involved, knee pain, but
also chronic back pain, chronic neck pain and chronic hip pain.
Chinese, Dr. Yi Hing Tu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has announced a biomarker that
they've developed to chart the progression of this and it revealed the specificity of
accelerated brain aging in knee osteoarthritis, but also provided longitudinal evidence suggesting
that the ability of this marker to predict future memory decline and dementia risk is
directly associated with arthritis.
The good news is there are well established ways to keep your brain sharp.
Most importantly, regular exercise, a healthy diet of mostly vegetables and staying mentally
stimulated are all proven strategies to reduce dementia risk.
Think of chronic pain management and addressing arthritis throughout your body as another
tool you can add to keeping your brain healthy.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge and
today we're going to be talking about neuropathies in the upper extremity.
Damage to pain, any kind of irritation to the nerves in your neck, shoulders, arms,
elbows, all the way down to your fingertips and some exciting case studies that I've
been able to help people with these situations.
But for starters, let's just define, what is neuropathy?
Let's define neuropathy.
So neuro means nerve, pathy means disease or disability.
So any kind of problem, pressure on, nutrient deficiency, anything that irritates or prevents
the normal function of a nerve is a neuropathy.
And the most common symptoms of damage or pressure or irritation to a nerve are pain,
but also numbness, tingling, a feeling of ants crawling on your body and the most important
thing to understand is if you have, and we talked about the legs last week, in your arms
and your hands, if you have burning, tingling, numbness, any kind of sensation that's especially
very difficult to define, to identify exactly where it is, if it feels like it's moving
around or if you know it's in your hand or in your elbow or in your shoulder or down
your whole arm somewhere, but it's hard to push on a specific spot and find it, then
that is just classic for a situation where you have pressure on a nerve.
It's hard to feel exactly where it is, but there are only a limited number of places
where that irritation can occur.
And of course, in the upper extremity in the arm, one of the most common causes of any
kind of nerve irritation from your neck all the way down to your fingertips is pressure
on nerves where they exit the spine from a disc bulge, from arthritis in the spine, or
just from tight muscles.
So everyone's heard of disc herniations.
If you go to most doctors, especially if you've had an accident and you've got, say, radiating
pain down your arm or numbness and tingling or burning, one of the most common things
they're going to do is an MRI to rule out a disc herniation, and that's important to
do.
Also, if you're older, arthritis, or if you've had repeated injuries over a long period of
time, arthritis, just when your body lays down extra bone to try and fortify an unstable
joint, then arthritis, spurring of the bones, can rub on and irritate nerves.
But what often gets left out of the evaluation of these situations by many doctors is patterns
of tension that build up in your muscles, patterns of tension in the muscles of your
neck and your upper back.
Your upper back is the foundation of the neck, so patterns of tension in your upper back,
especially if your shoulders are rolled forward and sticking up, or if you're carrying your
shoulders up around your ears and you have a little bit of a hump in your upper back,
that's a disaster waiting to happen for your neck and is very likely to increase your risk
of pressure on the nerves in your neck, which can cause radiating pain down your arm, numbness,
burning, tingling, etc.
And those things, if it's the pattern of tension in the nerves, then that's always reversible,
at least reversible enough that you can get rid of the pain and stabilize it so that it
stays away by first loosening up, restoring your brain's ability to relax that pattern
of tension and then doing some regular stretches to maintain that mobility.
Even if you've got arthritis in the neck, it's those symptoms, the symptoms of arthritis,
even if there's some bone spurs that are rubbing on the nerves going down your arms, that's
always in combination with tense muscles around it that often cause that arthritis in the
first place.
And if you can relieve the pattern of tension in those muscles that's built up over time,
which you don't even feel, you don't feel it until it gets to a certain point when you
do.
But when people come into me and they say, oh, you know, this pain just started two weeks
ago and I do a physical exam, the causes of that have obviously been there for 20 or 30
years.
It takes a long time for joints to get to a certain level of tightness or not.
It might be a more, if it is a recent situation, then there'll just be a little tension in
muscles and it's much quicker to relieve.
But most of the time when people come in with situations like this, the palpation findings,
the physical exam findings strongly suggest that these muscles have been tight for 10,
20, 30 years and they just don't hurt until they do, until the pressure gets just a little
bit more to press on the nerves, cause the burning numbness, tingling pain, radiating
down your arms, hands, et cetera.
So it's important to do a proper physical exam to identify that.
And oftentimes it is reversible, even if, for example, you've been to a neurologist
or some other doctor who's told you, for example, if you've known someone who's been told they
have thoracic outlet syndrome.
So thoracic is the middle part of your back and thoracic outlet is a place where the,
this bundle of nerves called the brachial complex, you don't need to remember that.
It's just a collection of nerves that go from your base of your neck down to your arms.
So all the nerves to your arm branch off of several different levels of the spine in your
neck form, and then they sort of cross over in this brachial plexus, which is underneath
your collarbone and then extend down through your arm to your fingertips.
And mostly from bad posture, from just having your shoulders constantly rolled forward and
up and having a little hump in your upper back, bad posture basically is what causes
most thoracic outlet syndrome.
And that is often completely reversible just by doing some stretching and a little bit
of work on the table to take the pressure off of the bones in the spine in the, in the
upper thoracic spine, the base of your neck and just below the base of your neck and between
your shoulders.
So thoracic outlet syndrome, sometimes people get surgery for this and that's just in my
30 years experience almost never necessary.
Another common cause of nerve type pain, people have rotator cuff injuries and you know, the
rotator cuff is a collection of four muscles and the, the ligament and connective tissue
cuff, little structure that attaches those four muscles to your, to your upper arm bone.
And that's not a neuropathy, but you can have neuropathic like, you can have nerve type
symptoms from the pattern of tension that results from that.
It's also really important again to check those muscles, releasing tension on those muscles
can often, it often involves nerve pain and it can be relieved by reducing the tension
on those muscles.
Tennis elbow, tennis elbow is an irritation of the ulnar nerve, usually sometimes people
misdiagnose pain in the nerve on the other side of the elbow.
But if you have pain in your elbow, it can be caused by having tight muscles and playing
tennis a lot.
That's why it's called tennis elbow, but it's really just pressure on a nerve from a pattern
of tension in muscles and irritation of the place where those muscles attach.
So muscle, muscle pain, muscle tension and nerve pain go hand in hand together.
Tennis elbow is not a neuropathy.
It is a problem with a muscle and the muscle attachments, but it can also contribute to
nerve like symptoms.
That's why I'm talking about it here today.
And then of course, everyone has heard of carpal tunnel syndrome, the carpal tunnel,
the carpals are the bones in your wrist.
So you've got two bones in your forearm and you've got all the bones in your hand.
And then in between where your wrist or your wrist bends, there are eight little bones,
two rows of four between your arm bones and your hand bones called the carpals.
And they basically form a C shape on the back of your wrist.
And then on the inside of your wrist, like the palm of your hand side of your wrist,
there is a ligament that bridges, that crosses over that C and keeps all of the tendons and
ligaments in place.
So these carpals are in kind of a C shape.
And then you've got this ligament on the underside of your wrist, on the palm side of your hand
that crosses and closes the circle of those C shaped bones to form the carpal tunnel.
And the median nerve is one of the most common ones that gets pressure on it from repetitive
stress like if you're working at a keyboard all day long or especially a cash register
and just constantly moving your fingers, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
The friction of constantly flexing your fingers can cause inflammation and irritation and
scar tissue around the median nerve that passes through the middle of this carpal tunnel.
And that is the basis.
That is basically what orthopedists and surgeons are looking for to diagnose if you have numbness,
tingling, burning pain in your hand and fingers and they press on the median nerve for a certain
amount of time in your wrist and that hurts, then okay, there you go.
You've got a diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome.
But guess what?
Everyone who does those repetitive types of strain, working on a keyboard, 10 key entry,
data entry, cash register, all day long tapping their fingers, when those people are doing
that activity, look at them.
They're also raising their shoulders up and forward and they end up in this same stuck
posture.
And most of the pain that gets diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome, those nerves are actually
being pinched where they exit the spine and your neck.
And oftentimes just fixing that posture in the neck and shoulders can get rid of the
pain in the wrist and the hand.
I met a hand surgeon, a top hand surgeon in Santa Barbara at a conference a few years
ago and I asked him, how often when you go in and do carpal tunnel surgery, do you actually
find any evidence of scar tissue around the median nerve?
And he said about a third of the time.
That's huge.
I thought, really?
I mean, he said, oh yeah, yeah, most of the time there's nothing there.
We just cut the ligament, wait for it to grow back, creates more space.
The point of carpal tunnel surgery is theoretically to identify scar tissue around the median
nerve.
But you know how they fix it?
They just cut this ligament that closes the carpal tunnel, the technical term is the flexor
retinaculum.
You don't need to write that down, but it's just this ligament on the inside of your wrist
that closes the carpal tunnel.
And the carpal tunnel surgery is usually they just cut that ligament and wait for it to
grow back.
And it grows back a little bit longer and creates more space around the median nerve.
So you no longer have pressure on that.
Well, how crazy is that?
Especially when only a third of the time is there even any evidence of scar tissue around
that nerve?
Most of the pressure comes from your neck.
So there are lots of ways to reduce and reverse that.
And it just requires a proper physical exam to identify the patterns of tension.
I talk about this a lot.
There are patterns of tension in your muscles.
We all have them just from posture, from sitting, from working on computers all day, looking
at screens, driving.
Our shoulders go up and forward and the tension builds up in and around the joints of the
neck and the upper back.
Creates this pressure on the nerves that can cause pain to radiate, numbness, tingling,
burning all the way down to your fingertips.
And that can often be reversed.
I've had so many cases over the past 30 plus years, thousands of people with symptoms like
this that are reversible just by identifying patterns of no snapping, cracking, or popping
of the neck, just identifying the patterns of tension that build up in the neck, releasing
those, showing the patient and usually their loved one, the spouse, especially to help
them stretch at home.
So we release the patterns of tension in the office and then show you some stretches to
do at home to maintain those changes.
And some really dramatic cases.
I had a man who came in, was already scheduled for surgery.
His whole left arm was numb, couldn't hold a pencil, couldn't pump gas into his car.
He was scheduled for surgery.
I told him he had such a bad disc herniation that he would probably need the surgery.
But when I examined his upper back, it was so tight, his entire upper spine was locked
up six segments in a row.
And I said, if you don't release this tension, even if you have the surgery, it's not going
to go well.
And I worked on him for about three or four weeks.
After about three or four weeks, half of his pain was gone.
The numbness was half and he was experiencing such an improvement in function in just a
few weeks by never touching his neck, never touching that damaged disc in his neck, but
just working on the segments below that in his upper back.
His surgeon said, okay, keep going, keep doing what you're doing.
And they canceled the surgery.
So we're about out of time.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you again.
I hope you'll tune in next Friday and tell your friends to tune in right here every Friday
at 4pm on KDAR 98.3 FM.
Have a fabulous weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4pm for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The Word,
KDAR.