Month: March 2025

One of the things I found very helpful if I have another patient in the office who’s recovering from a similar surgery to what I’m recommending to a patient and those two patients don’t mind, I’ll have them talk about what their experiences are.

Spine surgery is scary to most of my patients. In fact, it’s very normal for patients to tell me that they don’t want surgery, and I understand that. One of the ways that I help patients deal with that is try everything else before surgery, when I can, before we get to surgical intervention, and then discuss the risk, benefits, and trade offs, and then together we make the decision about whether or not they should have surgery.

So a pinched nerve, like any condition of the spine, in most circumstances, treatment starts with conservative treatment, including medications, physical therapy, and/or chiropractic treatment, sometimes home traction in the neck works, and then it progresses often to injections, and then ultimately the treatment for any resistant condition that’s bad enough is surgical intervention.

When patients present with what we would call a pinched nerve in the back, that would typically be pain shooting down the leg. Everybody knows about sciatica, which is pain shooting down the back of the leg from a pinched nerve. When patients have a pinched nerve in the neck, it’s typically pain shooting down one of the arms.

And the pain is experienced where the nerve runs, where the nerve, the body parts the nerve is responsible for.