Focus Physical Therapy

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What Caused My Neck and Shoulder Pain, And What Can I Do About It?

This month, we have been focusing on neck issues. When we develop neck and shoulder pain, it’s common for us to worry and jump to conclusions! Is it this, is it that? Actually, it’s more common than you think! Nine times out of ten, our neck pain is coming from daily life. For instance, your daily commute!

When you’re driving in the car and you need to look over your shoulder to check your blind spot, are you able to turn just your neck? Do you turn your entire body? You could actually be having a couple things going on in your neck. Typically you’ll have to move your entire body while driving because you just don’t have that range of motion in your neck.

You could have arthritis, which is limiting your range of motion and requiring you to turn your body because your neck doesn’t have that range of motion. Your muscles could be tight, which is doing the same thing; restricting that motion. You could also have a joint out of place in your neck so it’s not allowing that full rotation. Typically with the joint in your neck, you’re going to have pain when that’s what’s going on. 

The best thing for you is to come to the clinic and work one-on-one with a physical therapist. We will be able to assist you in building up your range of motion, your muscle tightness and your joint stiffness. We want to increase that range of motion, because once you start losing that, it’s really hard to get it back. Not only that, but it tends to progressively decline as you get older. Because of that, we really want to focus on getting it to a good place that you’re able to maintain. In the clinic, we do a lot of treatment to help increase that motion. This way you can keep it and then you don’t have any problems.

If you’d like some one-one-one attention from one of our doctors, visit https://physicaltherapylouisville.com/free-discovery-visit/ to secure yourself or a loved one a free hour long consultation.

The second big thing is ice and heat. You really need to start making sure you use ice if you have a really bad condition that’s radiating a lot of pain. I usually tell people try to put it closer to the neck area.

You can follow it up with heat if you want to, if you strongly dislike ice. Put the ice in the back of your neck and put the heat right below that. This way you can avoid being too chilled, but still take advantage of the natural anti-inflammatory properties of the ice.

The last thing is obviously physical therapy. Not only are we going to be able to tell you exactly where this is coming from and why, but also with our treatment regimen we’re going to be able to work on it immediately. We’ll show you all the things you need to do for self-care, for exercise and better long-term maintenance.

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