If you’ve ever found yourself having constant or even occasional pain in your arm or leg, you probably had trouble completing your daily tasks. Unfortunately, this can cause even simple activities like walking, exercise, or riding a bike to hurt your body and create discomfort. Understand your arm and leg pain by learning more about the causes, symptoms, and treatments for this kind of pain.
Causes Of Arm Or Leg Pain
The most common source for arm and leg pain is nerve inflammation in your spine. Arm and leg pain is typically associated with an irritated or pinched nerve from a disc protrusion or disc herniation in the neck or back. Degenerative discs in your spine can result in stenosis or narrowing which compresses the spinal nerves. Nerve compression frequently results in inflammation and subsequent severe pain, numbness, or even weakness.
Treatment Of Arm Or Leg Pain
The Doctor may do an MRI, CT, or EMG in order to determine the cause of your arm or leg pain. Once the source has been identified, non-surgical treatments may be recommended including but not limited to trigger point injections, physical therapy, epidurals, selective nerve blocks, laser therapy, core sculpting, scrambler therapy, medications, or spinal cord stimulator. Our goal is to help you avoid surgery.
What is Arm Pain?
Arm pain is any type of pain or discomfort in the arm, which is considered the area from the shoulder joint to the wrist joint. Your arms are made up of bones, joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves and blood vessels, all of which are subject to injury, infection, or other conditions that can be painful.
Arm pain may last briefly or be constant, and it may affect your entire arm or only a particular area. Your pain may feel achy, piercing or tingly. Pain-like sensations, often described as pins and needles, prickling, or burning are called paresthesia.
Arm pain may be simply irritating and uncomfortable, or it can be so debilitating that you cannot move your arm. Arm pain can arise from a variety of conditions ranging from accidental trauma to nerve conditions.
Arm pain can also originate in another part of the body such as the neck. This type of pain is called referred arm pain.
It is always a good idea to rule out the neck as the cause of arm pain. The nerves that exit the neck come together and go down the arm. You can treat the arm all you want, but if the cause is coming from the neck, then you will not experience permanent relief.
What is Leg Pain?
Seek immediate emergency medical care if you have leg pain that originates in the lumbar area and travels down the buttocks, accompanied by loss of bladder or bowel control. This serious condition should be evaluated as soon as possible in an emergency medical setting.
Leg pain is any type of pain or discomfort in the leg, from the hip joint to the heels. Leg pain is a fairly common complaint. Your legs are made up of joints, muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves and blood vessels all of which are subject to injury, infection or other conditions that can cause leg pain.
Leg pain may last briefly or be constant and affect your entire leg or only a particular area. Your pain may feel achy, piercing or tingling. Pain-like sensations often described as pins-and-needles, prickling, or burning sensations are called paresthesias.
Leg pain may be simply irritating and uncomfortable, or so debilitating that you cannot put weight on your leg or walk. Leg pain can arise from a variety of conditions ranging from accidental trauma to nerve conditions. In the absence of trauma or other symptoms, leg pain is commonly caused by a muscle cramp, also called a “charley horse.”
In some cases, leg pain can originate in another part of the body such as the low back. This type of leg pain is called referred leg pain.
Get The Help You Need
Due to the complexity of the joints and the vast number of possible causes, it is important that you see someone who is trained in these areas to get an accurate diagnosis.
Dr. Landess will use a detailed and complete approach to figure out what is exactly causing your pain, and as a result, the best possible treatment solution for it.
Typically, our office will use a combination of a thorough history, physical examination, and advanced imaging to get to the root cause of your problems.
Through their education and experience Dr. Landess is also able to use the location of the pain, aggravating or alleviating factors, type of pain sensation, and other symptoms such as swelling, skin changes, and bruising as other tools to assist in the diagnosis.