If you experience numbness, tingling, or shooting pain going down to your arm, it's actually not an arm problem—it's a neck problem. There are nerves coming from your neck going down to your fingers, which is how you're able to control your hand motions with your brain. That's also why if people severely injure their neck, they can become paralyzed and lose complete function of their arms. In those unfortunate cases, treatment should focus on the damaged spinal cord rather than the arm.

Keeping that in mind, if you have weird sensations going down to your arms, your neck should be the focus. The reason you're having symptoms going down to your arms is that the nerves originating from your neck are affected. The medical term for that is cervical radiculopathy. The best thing you can do is maintain good posture consistently and ensure you have good desk ergonomics, especially if you have a desk job. If you do that and you're still having problems, it would be time to seek help from physical therapy.

How do you know if you actually have an arm problem? Typically, there is a clear mechanism of injury. You hurt yourself, you know it, and you will probably see it too. The nature of the discomfort or pain is usually localized, and you would know how to “make it worse”. If the pain is non-specific and tends to be intermittent, it's probably not an arm problem.

Human bodies are complex. If you'd like a detailed assessment of your symptoms and to understand what may be causing them, give us a call and we can help.