Hi, are you trying to treat a neck disc bulge? This video is perfect for you. My name is Dr. Molly and I’m with Your Goals Physical Therapy.
If you have just recently gotten back the MRI report or the consult with the doctor, that tells you the unfortunate news that you definitely have a disc bulge in your neck and that explains some of the symptoms that you’ve been having.
Those symptoms really could vary for some people it’s numbness down an arm, for some it’s just a really strong ache in their neck.
Either way, the pain, whether it’s going down your arm or just staying in your neck, could be interfering with everything in your life right now. It can interfere with your sleep, your work, and being able to concentrate. It can make you a bear with your family members.
It is a big deal and it’s not just a big deal because you saw that something in your anatomy is different. If you’re possibly debating surgery or injections. It’s a big deal because it’s causing all these disruptions in your life and you just want everything to go back to normal.
Especially if you are an active person and you really want to get back to running, biking, hiking, you have a vacation planned with your family and you’re not even sure that you can make it to that.
This pain, no matter what’s causing it, is truly disrupting everything in your life and sends you on a tailspin. I have just worked with so many people that come in feeling several versions of the way that I just described, but in the end, they’re back to everything that they want. They got to go on the vacation without any problems, they’re able to go back to work.
I just want to talk about a few more solutions because many people aren’t aware of any solutions other than surgery or injections.
In this video I’m specifically going to go over the anatomy of your neck and then I’m going to give you some suggestions on how to mitigate your pain or stop your pain. Then we’re going to get into how you keep that pain from going away. Bear with me at the end and I’ll tell you the fastest way that I found to help you get rid of neck pain.
Okay, let’s get started. Now, like I said in the little intro there, people come in when they find out that they have a disc bulge and it’s typically not like a set of events.
They didn’t come in necessarily right after having an automobile accident or some other catastrophic event that happened that day. The neck pain sort of progressed over weeks, months and some people years. They have tried many things.
They’ve tried massage, they’ve tried chiropractic, they’ve tried all sorts of over-the-counter medications, ice, heat, they’ve done the gamut and the pain either pro comes and is progressively getting worse. It can be very frustrating, especially when it interrupts your sleep because sleep is precious. Do not want anything interrupting my precious hours of sleep.
I feel like many, many people believe the same thing. This is where people come in and when I meet them.
The first couple things that I work with people are I want to explain the anatomy. What is actually physiologically going on and what has changed and then how does that matter or if it matters, right?
Because that’s where we should always start. Get a diagnosis, okay, what does that actually mean? Then like functionally for me, what does that mean? With a neck disc bulge, what that means is the anatomy of your neck has changed a bit.
In your neck you have seven vertebrates, That’s what’s called your neck. Obviously your spine is longer than that. Between each bone you have something called an intervertebral disc and that is a squishy little disc that allows for compression up and down.
It also helps us be able to move our heads forward in a bending motion sideways. Even actually rotations are not so bothered by it, but there is some assistance with that just by having a little break and a cushion there inside that cushion.
What that cushion’s really made of is a bit of a gel. When it squishes down and comes back up, that’s when water comes in and out. It helps to hydrate these discs. It helps keep the overall health of your bones and that disc, which means the overall health of your neck really is related to us moving and having it compress and bend and twist and move.
Movement is really good for your spine. What happens though is that over time, because of many things, us being on phones, the way we sit, the way we sleep, any number of things, instead of moving equally at each one of those joints, each one of those intervertebral discs, we tend to hinge at one spot. Over time that spot gets worn out faster than other areas. In that area you can create what they would call a bulge.
If we think of your intervertebral disc as a donut, or a jelly donut. Specifically, what we think of is that there’s jelly inside that donut. Because of this uneven wearing, we’ve now caused a bubble to develop on one side of that jelly donut. Now the jelly is still inside the donut, but it is a misshaped donut at this point.
Depending on where this happens, it can be encroaching on the space that nerves also like to reside in and nerves do not like it when they’ve been crowded they tend to flare up, get inflamed, get very annoyed. Let us know all about it in a whole lot of different symptoms such as numbness, tingling, weakness, just pain. So that is the actual anatomy.
So if you just received an MRI report that says that you have a disc bulge, that effectively is what’s happened. Something has caused uneven wearing on one of those in intervertebral discs and it caused it to bubble. Right?
Now what does that mean? Unfortunately that can mean a lot of things for everybody. In a global sense that means that your spine specifically in your neck is not as stable as it was before it had the disc bulge because that bulge is going to be pushing on a ligament nerve, something to make it less stable in that area.
It is also a symptom that you weren’t necessarily stable to begin with because that uneven wearing would imply that you’re not equally distributing all the work. Some things are not working as hard as others, some are working too hard. There’s been something globally happening in your neck to allow that. Because like I said earlier, most people come in and it’s not that they were just rear-ended, it’s not a car accident. It’s not that they fell off of a ladder and now they have neck pain.
For many, many people it’s something that’s slowly been happening over time and just now this is the absolute most painful. It is interrupting everything in their life and they’re here looking for answers.
Now, how do you treat that if it’s not surgery, right? I just told you that something in your anatomy changed. How is it that you can treat this and it not be surgery or injections?
Surgery and injections can go in, surgery will – if it is possible because I’m not a surgeon. They would have to see your MRI and determine if it’s even a surgery candidate. Then they would go and fix whatever needs to be fixed in the anatomy and hopefully that would resolve your symptoms.
For the injections, typically what you hear about is two different, like a lidocaine and a steroid. A steroid injection or ie: a cortisone injection would be to get rid of the inflammation in the area.
If you’re having severe acute pain right now and you need that pain to go away, that’s what a cortisone shot will help with hopefully. That can resolve a whole lot of symptoms. People can get rid of numbness, they can get rid of tingling, they can get rid of the strong ache. That is what the hope is from, a cortisone injection.
Then a lidocaine injection is really a pain like the pain medication that’s being directly injected. The idea is that it’ll help you get rid of your pain with that particular medication versus a steroid.
I’m a movement specialist so we don’t prescribe medications so our form of that is a little bit different. This is how I would suggest starting with a treatment for cervical disc bulges.
One I would look at somebody’s ergonomics. How is your office set up? How is your car set up? That is it, is it forcing your head into a position that is less advantageous? It makes your neck work harder throughout the day than if we altered a few things.
That really is for many people one of the sore spots because it’s that little thing that you’re doing all day long that just sort of builds up annoyances.
It’s not one dramatic thing that happened or one dramatic thing that you do. It’s typically a bunch of little things. Ideally with ergonomics, which really leads right into my next one, which is posture.
I’m kind of going to do a two-for here, whatever situation you’re in. If you’re sitting at the kitchen table, whether or not you’re sitting in your car at your desk, you’re checking emails, playing on Facebook, the idea is that you want your neck to do the least amount of work, which means you want to try to get your shoulders to be relaxed, you want your ears to be over your shoulder and you want your nose as best you can to be pointed forward.
This posture is not ideal. Having your head in front of your shoulders and with the ergonomics, that’s what you’re trying to do.
You’re trying to set it up to where you don’t have to move your head a whole lot to get things done in your work life. When you’re thinking about ergonomics, most people are thinking about their office setup but also in your car because some people have to do interesting things in their car setup so that they can see all the things that they need to see.
If you’re at your office and you’re starting to sit at a desk, you don’t want to have to move your head a whole lot. You don’t want to have to go up and down on the screen as often.
If you can come up with ways that you’re looking straight at the middle of your screen and you’re not having to lower your eyes or lower your head to get all of your work done. Like I said, this goes right into posture. Everything that you do, whether sitting, standing or laying, you really want to maintain that same position.
You want to try to get your ears over your shoulders and you want to have your shoulders be relaxed. You want to try to avoid this position at all cost and you really want to try to keep your head not in front of you, but right over you because that’s the least amount of work for your neck muscles, your back muscles. It allows your neck bones to be stacked in the most anatomical position or the most ideal position for them.
If you can kind of take away some of the annoyances throughout your day, which is what those first two really help with, then these last four get rid of the pain and keep it gone.
Like I said in the intro, number three is to improve your neck stability. So doing exercises or activities that help you stabilize your spine. I didn’t misspeak there, not just your neck.
You need to make sure your whole spine is stable, whatever happens at the top of your spine affects what happens at the lower end of your spine and vice versa.
If you’re having lower back problems or you have a hard time stabilizing your lower back while you’re moving around in space, it’s going to affect your neck and vice versa. If you’re always stuck in this extension, it’s going to affect what happens lower down in your spine.
You really need to make sure that you’re improving the stability and strength of your whole spine. Exercises like that can be found with yoga or Pilates if you’re looking for someplace to draw from because both of those two disciplines really involve keeping your whole trunk upright stable. Now it may not seem as obvious, but what’s happening at your shoulder is very important.
Suggestion four is making sure that your shoulder is flexible. What I mean by that is you should be able to raise your arm all the way up in the front and all the way out to the side and you should be able to turn it out and then in, keeping your elbows by your side, if any of these positions are tight or you find difficulty with them, that can be translating up into your neck and causing, or helping to promote rather some imbalances in your neck.
Which one came first? We may never find out, but they definitely bleed into each other. If your shoulder is stiff and tight, it’s going to be hard to keep your neck in the right position. The same thing is true if your neck is stiff and tight, it’s hard to get your shoulder in the right place. You really do need to address those two kinds at the same time. That way you get the best out of it.
Then to go along with the flexibility, you need to have strength. If every time you raise your shoulder, your shoulder has to shrug because there’s a little bit of weakness or some imbalance that directly ties into your neck. Then the muscle that helps you shrug your shoulders also helps you extend your neck.
Every time this comes up, you’re still stressing out the backside of your neck and every time you do this, you’re stressing out the top part of your shoulder.
Overall strength of your shoulder is very important. That means the side muscle, the front muscle, that back muscle that everybody seems to forget about. They’re all very, very important in helping the overall health of your shoulder and your neck.
My last suggestion is seeing a movement specialist for a few reasons. One, this is what I do all day and I absolutely love helping people get back to their favorite sports. But in truth, there’s a lot that’s going on.
Being able to find a video that says I strengthen spines is great, but if your spine doesn’t move the way that you think it does, then watching that video and trying to do it, you may be continuing on with a pattern of movement that you’re not intending to.
Having somebody help you process through how it should feel, what it should look like can be a game changer. It can help catapult your recovery from months to weeks, which if you’re in pain every day I don’t even have to explain that to you. It also helps you understand if you’re doing the right things, it helps you problem solve. What I’m doing is adding extra stress to my neck.
Random story just because I thought of it right now. I was working with a gentleman that had a neck disc bulge and he said, “I don’t understand. Every time I eat my neck starts to hurt”. We went through, “okay, well let’s act this out. Show me how”. He’s like, “okay, seriously, this is just silly”. I was like, “okay, well bear with me, something must be happening. Let’s just see how you set things up and what’s happening.“
I noticed that every time he brought his fork to his face, his head went down. So every time he was eating, he was doing this. Well, he may never have gotten there on his own, but I was able to point that out. Even though it took him a very long time to break that random habit, that was one of the things he was doing throughout his day. Unbeknownst to him, that was irritating his neck. I don’t know that anybody would’ve told him about that because that’s just what he did when he ate.
I’m sure that everybody thought it was perfectly normal, but that one thing was really driving his neck crazy.
Finding things, little tips like that. Not to mention just a personalized exercise program that’s going to take a look at exactly what’s happening at your neck and your shoulder to get you the fastest and the safest results possible to, and my goal is always to stop somebody from having to have surgery or having to have injections.
Ultimately my biggest goal and it’s in the title of my company, is what are your goals and how can we get you there as fast as possible?
So if that sounds amazing to you and that’s what you’re looking for, I’m going to leave a button at the bottom of this blog that says ask about cost and availability. When you click that button, you’ll be brought to a form. That form will have you fill out a couple quick questions and it so that we can call you back and find a good time to call you and to answer all the questions that you have and hopefully get you booked.
Then the other one I’m going to put down because I’m not sure where you are on this process and that might have been a lot of very new information. I have actually put together the best tips for how to overcome neck and shoulder pain into an ebook.
Some of them are the same, but not all of them as to what I went over today. I will go into a little bit more detail because it’s a book. I’m going to leave a button for that. The book is free, you just click the button, fill out a form, and then check your emails until I have a time to talk to you. I hope that you’re having a good day. Bye.
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