The Misdiagnosis of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
The tingling in your hands may be due to something other than your wrists.
- Does anything other than your thumb and 1st finger tingle?
- Do you have pain in your elbow, shoulder or neck?
- Have you been treated for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome with no or little relief?
If you said yes to any of these questions, you might have something other than Carpal Tunnel Syndrome!
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) was the diagnosis en vogue in the early 1990’s. Everyone had it from the receptionist to the electrician to the homemaker. The symptoms were easy to recognize — pain and/or tingling in the hands.
Workman’s Compensation claims soared and premiums went up as people went to physical therapy, surgery and anything else that could rid them from the disabling pain. If the problem got bad enough, some people started to have weakness in their hands forcing them to become unemployed. The treatment for CTS was extremely successful in some cases and also extremely unsuccessful in others. After spending thousands of dollars on surgery, some people still had life-altering pain in their hands. How could this be? The surgeon just released the carpal tunnel. There should be no symptoms.
Part of the reason people had residual symptoms was because the pinching of the nerve for the hand was occurring at the neck, shoulder or elbow joints (or a combination of the three) and not at the carpal tunnel.
There are two problematic nerves, the medial and ulnar nerves, which supply the hand. They originate from the neck, where they exit the spine and travel down through a tunnel in the shoulder called the thoracic outlet. After leaving the outlet, they go their seperate ways through either the cubital tunnel (ulnar nerve) or under the pronator teres muscle (median nerve). After this area, they enter the wrist and travel through either the carpal tunnel (median nerve) or the canal of Guyon (ulnar nerve).
Dysfunction or scar tissue developing at any of the sites can cause nerve damage and therefore be misdiagnosed as CTS. This being said, there are still cases of CTS and compression at the carpal tunnel. But in my experience, only 25-30% of cases with hand nerve symptoms are due to CTS.
Scar tissue and nerve damage at the neck, shoulder and elbow are usually treatable using conservative therapies utilized by chiropractic physicians. Medical acupuncture can be extremely effective at minimizing pain due to the nerve damage.
Published 07/01/2008.