Raena Morgan: Im visiting with Dr. JaDean Anderson. What about carpal tunnel in chiropractic? How they work together?Dr. Anderson: Carpal tunnel is a very common problem that we see in our office.Raena Morgan: Oh, it is?Dr. Anderson: Yes. A lot of times people that suffer from carpal tunnel are people that are typing for long periods of time, hair dressers or barbers that are using their fingers and their hands a lot. Anybody that is doing constant work with their hands theyll start to feel numbness within their hands or even sometimes tingling. Ive had patients that wake up in the middle of the night because their fingers start to hurt and theyre numb. In most cases I always look to their spine first. I have special interest into their neck or upper back region and lots of times with adjustments to those areas help relived the carpal tunnel symptoms. Sometimes an adjustment to an extremity, in the wrist or in the elbow or shoulder can help relieve carpal tunnel symptoms as well. Sometimes if the neck adjustment doesnt clear it off, the nerve thats traveling down your arms and fingers can be inched or put pressure on by other areas within the arm thats where an adjustment to the extremity might restore proper nerve flow to the fingers. Another thing that I always recommend to carpal tunnel patients or people that have numbness within their fingers are exercises. The exercises that I like to share are wrapping or taking your fingers like this and wrapping a rubber band around them and doing exercises where youre extending your hand like this. And what that does is it helps build up the muscles that help do extension exercises because were constantly grabbing or putting your fingers this way and doing those exercises along with the spinal adjustments or extremity adjustments helps them recover a lot quicker.Raena Morgan: So the pain can be eased. And theres a lot of pinching involved, isnt there?Dr. Anderson: Yes. The problems could be like I said from the neck, from anywhere within the extremity causing the numbness or the pain and associated in the fingers.Raena Morgan: Well, thank you for that information.