Chronic Neck Pain Treatment

Long-term neck pain relief is difficult to find. You may think you’ve discovered how to relieve neck pain, only to have it return as severe neck pain the next day. Neck pain treatment varies and includes medications that also treat chronic headaches and neck pain. If you tried physical therapy for a pain in the neck, upper neck pain or lower neck pain without relief, try stem cell therapy for chronic neck pain relief. This chronic neck pain treatment is less invasive and often more successful than surgery.

While your boss may be a real pain in the neck, he can’t compare to actual chronic neck pain. Neck pain can be distracting and cause other parts of your body to hurt as well. If you have a job that requires you to sit for long periods of time, chronic neck pain can severely limit your ability to complete your work. Chronic headaches and neck pain can also make you feel irritable.

Medically, doctors refer to your neck as the cervical spine. It’s a complicated system of nerves, bones, joints and muscles. And there are a lot of reasons it can cause you pain. Additionally, problems along the nerve pathways in your neck can cause pain in your:

• Head
• Shoulders
• Arms
• Hands

If the irritation is in your spinal cord, it can cause pain as far down as your legs and feet. Most types of neck pain pass in a couple of days or weeks. But chronic neck pain is different. It can last for months, years or the rest of your life.

Getting to the Source of Your Trouble

The stiffness, soreness and decreased mobility associated with chronic pain can be mild or severe. Your neck pain can be caused be several different conditions or disorders. Some of the more common ones include:

• Degenerative disc disease
• Cervical facet joint issues
• Cervical spinal stenosis
• Whiplash
• Bulging or herniated disc
• Pinched nerve
• Arthritis
• Bone spurs

Whether it’s disc material, bone, or tissue inflammation, these conditions are taking up space in your neck that’s designed for your nerves. When your nerves are compressed, they become irritated and inflamed, leading to a pain in the neck or in other parts of your body.

Associated Conditions

Chronic headaches and neck pain can simply be two symptoms of the same problem. Headaches are generally the result of upper neck pain. This could mean you have a problem in one of your three upper neck joints, spinal cord coverings or neck muscles.

Chronic lower neck pain that travels to other parts of your body is probably a bigger problem than simple muscle sprain or ligament strain. Lower neck pain also can be caused by degenerative conditions like the ones listed above. It’s important that you consult a medical expert because these conditions can deteriorate further if left untreated.

Trading One Problem for Another

Until recent years, your choices for dealing with severe neck pain were limited at best. Pain management, a common method of neck pain treatment, basically tries to help you live with your pain and make it tolerable. This is usually done by using medications to cover your symptoms.

Depending on the nature of your specific neck pain, surgical procedures may also be an option. If your case involves more severe nerve compressions, causing numbness and pain in other parts of your body, surgery may help. But some surgical procedures can result in chronic pain and dependencies on medications.

Treatment Alternatives

Other non-surgical methods aimed at chronic neck pain relief aren’t always considered orthodox by the medical community. They also don’t always provide relief. These include:

• Acupuncture
• Massage
• Yoga

And while these alternative therapies may help to strengthen your neck, relax your muscles or increase your mobility, they fail to treat the root cause of your pain. But there are new alternatives that do just that.

How to Relieve Neck Pain

Stem cell technology is now opening the door to better options for neck pain relief. Stem cells taken from your bone marrow have remarkable anti-inflammatory properties. This aspect alone has the potential to significantly reduce your pain by easing the pressure on your nerves.

Stem cells are your body’s natural response to healing. But if you’ve suffered an injury or are getting older, it’s harder for your body to deliver your stem cells to areas that need repair. Injection therapies like stem cell therapy are designed to help your body heal itself.

The growth factors that stem cells contain encourage your damaged tissues to heal themselves. And stem cells also have the unique ability to become other types of cells. That’s why they’re being used successfully to treat so many different issues and conditions.

How It Works

Chronic neck pain treatment with stem cells is a minimally invasive outpatient procedure. Your highly skilled stem cell specialist uses a needle to extract some of your bone marrow. This is normally taken from your hip. The area may be sore and tender for a couple of days after the procedure. This is completely normal and you can take Tylenol to ease any discomfort.

Your NYC pain specialist separates the stem cells from the rest of your bone marrow and injects them directly into the area responsible for your pain. Since your body is healing, it takes time to experience the full results. But the inflammation reduces significantly in the first few weeks, which is a big step toward easing your chronic pain.

The results of your healing can be partial or complete. Your doctor or pain specialist in New York may schedule follow-up injections or additional treatment with platelet rich plasma, which uses the healing properties of your own blood.

Not for Everybody

If you’re tired of living with pain, it’s time to consult the leading NYC pain specialist for regenerative therapy. But stem cell injections are not for everybody. You’re not a candidate if:

• You have blood-borne cancer and haven’t been in remission for at least five years.
• You have other types of blood-borne diseases.
• You’re currently suffering from any kind of active infection.
• You have multiple medical issues.

Non-surgical healing of chronic pain with regenerative therapy is now available in Brooklyn NYC. And while these innovative procedures aren’t yet covered by most insurance policies, they are so easy to perform that they are surprisingly affordable.