Top 4 Causes of Numbness and What to Do About It
Tingling, crawling, numb, pins and needles, asleep. The fancy, medical jargon word is paresthesia. No matter what you call it, it’s not fun. This blog is about the four most common causes of numbness and what you can do to resolve it!
The network of nerves in our body are not unlike networks of computers. Their job is to be our body’s information superhighway from brain to body and body back to brain. When nerves are not able to do their job, one of the first overt symptoms we experience is a tingling sensation. This is your body’s way of telling you that there is a problem with your ability to have normal sensations, especially of light touch or pressure.
But why would that happen in the first place?
Injury
Usually if you’ve had an injury that has severed a nerve, you already know about it. Sometimes that’s from a surgery or from an accident. While nerves that have been cut can heal, the growth rate of nerve cells is extremely slow. So the prognosis of getting feeling back to the area supplied by the injured nerve is poor.
The best thing you can do is increase the nerve flow that remains. Also, make sure any obstacles in the way of that information flow are removed with a chiropractic adjustment.
Illness
A well known complication of long term, uncontrolled diabetes is numbness and tingling of the extremities. Sometimes this is referred to as diabetic neuropathy. Diabetic neuropathy mostly affects the feet and legs and can go from numbness, to pain, to fully debilitating.
Your best bet for this type of numbness is to avoid it before it starts! Prevention is key. Maintaining a healthy weight, eating a diet that is well balanced with mostly whole foods, and keeping physically active all contribute to your body’s ability to process insulin. When your body creates and responds to insulin like it was designed to do, your blood sugar is maintained at appropriate levels - which is imperative for body function and processing food.
Sometimes numbness and tingling occurs when nerves are irritated from chemicals (inflammation) or when something is physically blocking the nerves (impingement).
Inflammation
Chemical irritation of nerves can also cause numbness. Inflammation is a chemical process that serves many productive purposes in our body. But chronic or long-term inflammation to our nerves can also create feelings of tingling and numbness.
The solution here is about solving the root of the long-term inflammation. Sometimes the inflammation is the result of an injury or misalignment. Dealing with the root cause and allowing your body to naturally decrease inflammation means that the irritation of the nerve will decrease too.
Impingement
Have you heard of people dealing with a “pinched nerve?” Studies have shown that it takes very little pressure on a nerve to decrease that nerves ability to function. Again, that function is to send information to and from the brain and body. When the information flow is decreased, our nerves can’t tell our body what we sensations we are feeling.
When we think about chiropractic and “pinched nerves” people tend to picture that our bones are squishing a nerve because they are not in proper alignment. While this can certainly be the case, the actual punching of a nerve between too bones is less common than you’d think. This usually only happens with more severe forms of degeneration or arthritis. More often than not, a smaller misalignment triggers the chemical inflammation cascade that irritates the nerve. Part of that process includes swelling and that increased pressure can also push on the nerves creating numbness.
How do you get the appropriate alignment to resolve the impingement/inflammation issue?
A chiropractic adjustment is the way to go! As chiropractors, we focus on the main “highway” of nerves traveling from through your spinal column. Hippocrates said, “Look well to the spine for the cause of disease,” and I couldn’t agree more! The spine is the first place we look and the most important place to adjust in your body. Whether you come for a gentle, low force adjustment at Beyond Chiropractic & Acupuncture, or visit any chiropractor local to you, alignment is key!
But I’m already well adjusted and I still have issues with numbness. What now?
It is important to remember that all of those nerves traveling through your brain and spinal cord (your central nervous system) have end points at every cell in your body! Once the nerves exit the spinal column, we refer to these as peripheral nerves or your peripheral nervous system. So anywhere along that path from brain, through spinal cord, to its end destination, the nerve can get a bit squashed.
There are two common causes of this kind of pressure on nerves in the peripheral nervous system — pressure from tight or spastic muscles, or pressure from scar tissue that has built up within connective tissue.
Your best option to work on the pressure coming from soft tissue changes is to have specific muscle work performed. We are big fans of massage therapy at Beyond Chiropractic & Acupuncture. Whether your preference is relaxation or therapeutic, this is a great first step for soft tissue issues. If a therapeutic massage is not resolving the numbness, it may make sense to do some focused muscle work with the goal of breaking up the texture and tone changes of your soft tissues.
Dr. Katie has extensive experience finding and breaking up these adhesions to make sure your nerves are able to slide freely between other layers of soft tissue. This type of muscle work has been shown to be incredibly effective at decreasing feelings of numbness or tingling caused by nerve impingement within the peripheral nervous system.
TL; DR: Top causes of numbness are injury, illness, inflammation, and impingement. If you suffer from numbness or tingling, have a doctor check you out for the root cause. A visit to your chiropractor for an adjustment is a great first step, and massage or focused muscle work may also be helpful.
Photos by Kate Hliznitsova, CHUTTERSNAP, and Angélica Echeverry on Unsplash
