Orthopedic Rehabilitation
Balance & Vestibular Therapy
Hand & Upper Extremity Therapy
Workers’ Comp & Auto Injuries
Neck Pain
Your pain may be recent…perhaps a sudden event in the past few months or years. Or it has been getting progressively worse over time with some good days, and some bad days.
Neck pain symptoms
Neck pain can occasionally lead to radiating pain, weakness, numbness or tingling into your arms. All of these symptoms are a sign of nerve involvement, and should be addressed immediately by your doctor prior to starting a physical therapy regimen.
PHYSICAL THERAPY FOR NECK PAIN
To help get your life back on track, Gold Coast Physical Therapy works to first identify your main concerns, determine the functional causes of your issue, and then we prescribe routine motions and simple activities that help recirculate your blood flow, retrain your muscles, your nerves and your daily habits of motion. More important, however, we listen to you and your body’s pain as you begin to recover over time. We monitor the success of each therapy session and adjust treatment where needed to reach our goal of reaching your body’s potential for a full and happy, productive life.
COMMON CAUSES OF NECK PAIN
WHIPLASH
Car accidents account for a majority of whiplash injuries, but this can also happen with athletic injuries or falls. It is common to experience increased symptoms the following day due to muscle spasms as your body works to protect the injured area.
text neck
Although this is not an official medical diagnosis, it is a term commonly used for a stress injury where excessive mobile device use is believed to be the primary cause. Head forward posture adds additional load and strain to our neck muscles as seen below. Over time, this can lead to pain, rounded shoulders, reduced mobility, and pain.
DEGENERATIVE CHANGES
Over time, we all experience some degenerative changes throughout our body. In our neck, these changes can be labeled as cervical degenerative disc disease (Cervical DDD), cervical stenosis or arthritis. This diagnoses can be made by diagnostic test (X-ray or MRI). People with this condition might start to experience pain down into the arm if the joint spaces become too small and start impinging on nerves.
HERNIATED OR BULGING DISC
A disc herniation happened when the disc material has broken through the exterior wall of the annulus fibrosis and is sitting on the neural canal. If it is sitting on the nerve, there will be constant pain as the disc is herniated and does not have the ability to bulge back in.
A bulging disc, the disc material begins to creep backwards and put pressure in the posterior aspect of the spine. The posterior aspect of the disc is highly sensitive and pressure on this nerve is painful. Progression of this leads to radiating pain.
