Carpal tunnel can be successfully treated without surgery. Watch this video to find out more details.

Carpal tunnel is associated with repetitive stress injuries such as mail handlers that are constantly sorting mail, people that sit at an office all day and type and people involved in car accidents due to bracing themselves for impact and injuring their wrists.

This is a condition that I treat successfully in my office and I do this by evaluating the wrist and knowing that the one nerve that is involved is the median nerve which runs down the arm to the wrist and is one of the nerves that is the nerve supply to the hand. It supplies the thumb, the index, the middle finger and half of the ring finger. The medical approach to treating carpal tunnel syndrome is most oftentimes with anti-inflammatory drugs, or a wrist brace. If that doesn’t work, they are left going to surgery. What surgery does is they will actually clip this band that goes around the wrist that is like a big rubber band, if you will, that is called a retinaculum that holds the eight carpal bones together. You have two rows of four bones that holds the wrist together. They will cut the band which relieves pressure from the nerve. That leaves you with a wrist that is unstable and can lead to degeneration down the road. One of the common orthopedic tests that I do and many doctors do is called the Phalen’s test. I have a person bring their elbows up about to chest level and bring their wrists back to back and hold them there for about a minute. If a person experiences any pain or numbness or loss of feeling, that’s a classic diagnosis for carpal tunnel syndrome. In my office, what I do to treat carpal tunnel is I evaluate the muscles, the wrist flexors and extensors and I adjust the main bone and that’s the one that is putting the pressure on the nerve. I am an applied kinesiology chiropractor and this is one of the techniques I use. Applied kinesiology has to do with muscle testing. What is happening here is when people have repetitive stress, they are causing rapid firing of the muscles in the wrist. The carpal tunnel which puts pressure on the nerves. There are trigger points in these muscles that I find and I work with them as well and do trigger point therapy on them. There can be weak muscles involved with the wrist and so I do a lot of muscle testing. When I do the testing, I find what will make the muscles strong to help to support the wrist. And this is the approach I take throughout the whole body. Anytime you have muscle dysfunction, it is going to lead to joint degeneration which leads to pain. That is worthy of my repeating, because I want you to understand that it is a very simple concept. And that is if you have muscle weakness, it is going to joint degeneration and leads to pain. Very often I find this in whiplash patients.