♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Howdy folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion of course, Bob.
- Today we're gonna talk about neck pain, pinched nerve,
when do you need to see a doctor immediately?
Brad, we're gonna actually break this down
into two categories.
So one, the first category is
not as urgent, is that you should schedule an office visit.
You should see a doctor.
But two is when you probably should seek
emergency medical care right away.
So let's start off with the first one, Brad.
For an office visit.
If your neck pain just keeps worsening,
despite your self care,
it's probably time to go in and see a doctor
and make sure something serious isn't going on.
- Right, right.
- You may need physical therapy,
so you need to see the doctor.
- If it's restricting your sleep,
and it's getting no better,
or worse after two or three nights
and you can't sleep.
I mean, you've gotta get sleep,
things don't heal well if you don't sleep.
- That's right.
- It's just, it's a bad situation.
- It landslides, in the wrong direction.
If the pain is radiating down your arm or legs,
especially your legs,
that means that could be really serious,
and it seems to be from your neck,
I would definitely go in and see a doctor then.
- And it, to be clear,
pain could be numbness, tingling, burning,
feels like cold water's running down your arm.
All those things are associated-
- Those weird sensations.
- Yup, with a nerve being irritated.
- Yes, it's amazing if you're
if you want a variety of different sensations,
get a nerve involved.
- Right, yup.
- If it's accompanied by headache,
numbness and tingling,
I would probably go in too,
especially if it comes on suddenly
and it's the first time you had it,
then it might be an emergency.
So if you're one that normally doesn't get headaches,
and all of a sudden you get a headache,
and a numbness and tingling, yeah.
- Especially you know, if you look up
and that gets you a headache,
or dizziness associated with some head movement.
Well, we should maybe save that for the latter one.
- Sure, sure.
If it's so bad the pain,
yeah like Brad kinda indicated before,
it's just affecting your normal activities
and your sleep, it's time to go in.
You know, it just, you're sick of it.
- Like, you know I had that pretty severe bout
a couple of weeks ago, but it happened on a Sunday night,
Monday night, Tuesday night were very uncomfortable,
but by Wednesday it started getting better.
- Well, you know what you're doing, too.
And you knew what caused it, too.
- Right, right. But probably
if it's not better within a week,
you know, that's, you gotta get it checked out.
- Yeah, that's the next one, Brad.
- Oh! - Is if it lasts for weeks,
it's time to go in and check it out.
We talked about tingling,
if there's any tingling in any part of your body,
emanating, it seems to be, from your neck,
check it out.
If it comes with urinary or bowel incontinence.
Now this is actually an emergency.
I don't know why I've got that in office,
I would say that's more of an emergency.
- Right, yeah if you cannot control your bowel movements,
or your bladder control is clearly thrown off,
and you have these other symptoms, you need,
that is an emergency from what,
and that's, I've only had two people over 20 some years
that actually went in and it wasn't,
they didn't need surgery.
- I had one person and it was the same thing,
and he went in and it wasn't that.
I've treated people after the fact, though,
that had it and became paralyzed.
- Yeah, so that is something obviously
we'd want to get at immediately.
- This one too, you know, could be an emergency
if it comes on real suddenly,
if you have weakness in your arm or leg.
If it's a gradual thing, comes on slowly,
then you can probably set an office visit.
But, you know, we're always worried about
whether or not it's a stroke,
or something like that, so you wanna make sure.
- Yeah, if you can't
pick something up that you normally could,
and you've got numbness and weakness.
Yeah, you gotta. - It's time to go in.
These are definitely emergency medical care situations,
and we'll go into these now.
One, if you've had a traumatic injury,
you know like a diving accident,
or you're in a car crash,
or you know, don't mess around with it.
Because you could have a fracture
and not even realize it,
and you could have what is called a hangman's fracture
and your neck is unstable
and you could actually become paralyzed.
So you really don't wanna mess around with it.
If you have a high fever,
along with your neck pain,
then we're worried about meningitis.
And the membrane covering your spinal cord and brain
can get an infection and you don't wanna mess with that.
- It builds up pressure.
- You wanna go in and have that treated, obviously.
If you have a severe, persistent headache
accompanied by nausea and weakness,
it's time to go in right away.
- Right. Particular if you're one that doesn't
have headaches, or headaches like that.
- Yes. Yeah, if you have migraines
and you're used to it, I mean, that's a different story.
Yeah, nausea or vomiting, I always,
that is probably beyond the neck pain,
so if you have a rash,
if you have sensitivity to light,
if you have a racing or irregular heartbeat,
these are all things, you know, along with the neck pain.
Difficulty breathing,
like we said before pain or numbness
radiating down the arm that just started suddenly,
and pain in your chest, or jaw.
Then we're obviously worried about a heart attack,
so you wanna make sure you check that out, so.
- And I think if you had all of a sudden
pain or numbness down both arms
at the same time,
then get in, because that's more unusual too.
So get that figured out,
it very well could be something that's not serious
but definitely get that checked out.
- You always wanna be on the safe side here, so.
Thanks everybody for watching.
- Very glad, oh!
What about our PDF, we'll skip it?
- Oh, sure, well this program by the way
is part of a series of videos on neck pain.
If you wanna check out the whole program,
go to bobandbrad.com, go to the programs section,
look for the neck pain.
There's about 30 videos,
you pick out the ones you wanna watch,
you don't have to watch each one.
They're all free, we don't require an email,
anything of you, you can just check them out.
- And they have a PDF printout,
a little review of exercises
and what we've talked about on the video.
There's, it's all free, there's no email or anything,
it's just our gift to you
and would hope that you improve
and become healthy, fit and pain free.
- Well, like this one now,
on this video you can look at the list, see
what symptoms you have and what you should be doing.
- Sure, right, yep.
- So you don't have to write them all down.
- Yeah, that's a good deal.
- All right, take care.
(upbeat music)