If neck pain interferes with your day-to-day life, you’re not alone. Up to 70% of adults experience disruptive neck pain during their lifetimes. While many treatment options are available, physical therapy offers a highly effective and non-invasive route to long-term neck pain relief.
Maybe you’ve already sought treatment from your physician. Maybe your physician recommended surgery, chiropractic adjustments, or steroid injections to help mitigate pain. Or perhaps your neck pain is a new development and you’re still evaluating options. Regardless, you should consider physical therapy as a treatment option; it can be more effective than surgery.
If you’re looking for “neck therapy near me” in Western New York, you should visit the highly trained team at Advanced Care Physical Therapy. With nine locations to choose from, you can be sure our expert physical therapists will deliver personalized care to get you back to normal.
In what follows, we discuss the causes of neck pain and show you how neck physical therapy can help.
Causes of Neck Pain
There are many reasons you might experience neck pain. Below, we identify a few of the most common causes:
- Injuries: Injury is the most common cause of neck pain. If you were involved in a high-impact accident, you might experience whiplash. Whiplash is a strain that occurs when your head is jerked around (prevalent in car accidents), which affects the tissues in the back of your neck.
- Muscle Strains: Car crashes aren’t the only way to strain your neck. Simply sitting at your desk all day with your neck bent toward your computer screen can strain your neck muscles. As such, make sure to take regular breaks from desk work.
- Degeneration of Joints: Just like any other joint, the joints in your neck erode as you age. Conditions like osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease, cause the tissues and cartilage to break down, causing neck pain.
- Illnesses: Many diseases can result in neck pain, like rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, and meningitis.
- Compression of Nerves: If you have a herniated disc in your neck or a narrowing of the foramen, the nerves in your spinal cord can grow pinched or compressed, causing neck pain. Sometimes, patients may develop a condition known as radiculopathy, where pain extends from the neck to the hands and fingers.
Can Physical Therapy Cure Neck Pain?
While every case of neck pain is different, continuous physical therapy can permanently reduce neck pain. What’s more? Research has shown that physical therapy is a better long-term treatment option than surgery and opioids for neck pain relief. In many cases, physical therapy helps patients avoid surgery altogether.
Physical Therapy Treatment Process for Neck Pain
At Advanced Care Physical Therapy in Western New York, we pride ourselves on taking a highly personalized approach. When you come for your first appointment, our physical therapists will conduct an initial assessment of your neck and body to assess the range of motion in your neck and mobility restrictions caused by pain.
After the assessment, we provide a diagnosis that helps us determine the exercises and future appointments that will form your personalized treatment plan. Next, you will work with your trusted physical therapist to understand the expectations and goals of each stage of your care plan. Our goal is to help you overcome neck pain and make a full recovery as quickly as possible.
Your care plan will probably include manual (“hands-on”) neck therapy treatment. With this part of the treatment, your therapist will use skilled hand movements to joints and soft tissues to relieve pain, decrease stiffness, and improve range of motion. Another part of the plan will include homework in the form of special exercises to strengthen and build your neck muscles and tissues. The focus is often on improving your posture to aid recovery and avoid re-injury.
Advanced Care Physical Therapy is the perfect choice for neck therapy near you if you're in Western New York. Our highly trained team uses state-of-the-art methods, technologies, and equipment to deliver the best-in-class personalized physical therapy. Regardless of what’s causing your neck pain, we would love to help accelerate your recovery.
Give us a call at 716-282-2888 or schedule an appointment today.
