What Neuralgia Means
Hi, I’m Dr. David Rowe from Rowe Chiropractic Offices, and one of the most common questions that patients ask me is, “What is neuralgia? Where does it come from? Why does it hurt so much? And what’s going on there, and how can I help it?”
Now, neuralgia literally means nerve pain, “algia” being pain. And nerve pain can come in different areas of the body and for different reasons.
Probably the most common neuralgia is sciatic neuralgia, commonly known as sciatica. It’s pain down the back of the leg. But we could also have neuralgias in the upper extremity, in the arms, like brachial neuralgia. That’s the nerve that goes down the arm. Or we could even have a terrible condition called facial neuralgia, which involves a nerve that comes across the side of the face.
But the nerve pain, the neuralgia, signifies that there’s some stress on the nerve creating nerve inflammation, commonly known as neuritis. That creates this intense pain: neuralgia.
Common Causes of Neuralgia
Now, what are the common causes of this?
By far, the most common cause of neuralgia is pressure on the nerve, some kind of a biomechanical stress, commonly caused by disc inflammation where the disc is swollen and it’s causing pressure on the nerve.
There could be other less common, but certainly complicating, factors like diabetes, like autoimmune problems, like infections.
But by far, the most common cause of neuralgia, of nerve pain in different areas of the body, is that there’s something pressurizing the nerve, something compressing the nerve that’s creating nerve inflammation that then causes this intense pain. The most common of all those areas is when the disc in the spine swells.
Spinal Anatomy, Posture, and Pressure on the Nerve
Now, let’s review our anatomy.
In the normal posture, from the front view, we should be straight. The spine should be straight like this. From a side view, we’re supposed to have these three slow, sweeping curves. That’s the built-in shock absorber to help us manage gravity.
But we get very granular here, and we look very closely. That nerve right there comes outta the spine and sends signals. These bottom nerves send signals down into the legs, send signals into the bladder, send signals into the reproductive organ.
If a disc swells—and the disc is the spacer between the vertebrae—if there’s mechanical stress, if there’s postural misalignment, we commonly call it, scientifically, subluxation. If there’s a subluxation, a misalignment in the spine, then the disc will swell and it’ll put pressure on the nerve, and that pressure creates nerve inflammation.
If it goes uncorrected for long enough, then that nerve inflammation, that neuritis, turns into neuralgia. And it can come and go. There can be times of relief and times of intense pain. But trust me, if there’s enough stress on the nerve for long enough, that’ll create nerve pain.
Why Pain May Not Show Up Right Away
That’s really interesting. You think, “Well, if that first happened, why wouldn’t you get pain all the time?”
Only about 7% of the nerves in our body are pain-sensitive, which means that—it sounds funny to say it this way—but you almost have to be lucky enough for the pressure from the disc to hit the pain-sensitive nerve so that you know that there is a problem.
Now, that’s a mechanism of protection. But what if that pressure goes on for literally weeks, months, years? It could go on for decades without really affecting the pain-sensitive nerve.
And so this situation would keep breaking down and degenerating. This subluxation would keep causing damage. If the pressure gets intense enough and it finally hits those pain-sensitive nerves, then red alert, red alert. Your body’s mechanism of protection says, “Hey, you’ve got a problem.” And it manifests as neuralgia.
Postural Correction and Relieving Pressure
Now, we’ll talk later about how we correct these things. But just to put it in broad strokes, if the problem starts from a postural misalignment, then the correction’s gonna be a postural correction.
If we fix the posture, it takes stress off the nerve. The inflammation in the disc and in the nerve goes down. And as that inflammation goes down, then the nerve stops sending that red alert that we receive as pain, and then the body starts to return towards normal.
The neuralgia comes from stress from the disc on the nerve, typically. And if we can correct that pressure from the disc on the nerve by fixing our posture, it takes the stress off the nerve, the nerve heals, and the pain recedes and eventually goes away.
That’s the story with neuralgia.
