3 Best at Home Traction Devices for Cervical Radiculopathy – Dr John Brockway Chiropractor in Denver – Glendale Chiropractic

3 Best at Home Treatments for Cervical Radiculopathy and Avoid Surgery

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Denver, CO – If you have pain in your neck and shoulder radiating down your arm, you might have cervical radiculopathy. Of course, it’s best to confirm a cervical radiculopathy diagnosis by talking to a doctor first. In this video we’ll talk about the best cervical radiculopathy traction to use at home, and the same tools we send our patients home with to help with their recovery. These are a really good supplement to the cervical radiculopathy exercises, and stretches mentioned in our other videos in addition to chiropractic care. We’ll talk about our three favorite neck traction tools: the neck hammock, posture pump and denneroll. So you have cervical radiculopathy or cervical radiculitis. You’ve tried home care options, but they’re not quite getting you the results that you’re looking for. You also want to avoid surgery. Well then this video is for you. In this video, I’m going to be talking about my top three tools that we recommend for our patients in office and for home use. They’re going to help to address those cervical radiculitis symptoms that you’re feeling, including the neck pain that travels down the arm, the wrist, and the hand, maybe in between the shoulder blades or underneath the shoulder blade. Now these have been battle tested by me, by my patients, and by numerous others. They’re the easiest to use with the best compliance rate, and you’re going to love them.

First thing we’re going to talk about is the neck harness. This was created by a Doctor of physical therapy, Dr. Steve Del Jr. Great product, very easy to use, very compact. You’re going to love it. Let me show you how to use it. You take the loop of the harness. We put this into the door handle of our door. We close the door and then we take the rest of it and we attach it like so, and then we adjust the harness so that it’s sitting approximately four inches off the ground and then we simply lie in it. That’s the extent of the instructions that come with this. I’m going to supplement that. We have a slightly more advanced version, and the reason for that is that there’s some confusion on how to use this or some complaints. A lot of people are saying, it’s not really working for me. I don’t really feel anything. If that’s the case, then what you want to do is you want to move your body slightly away from the door as we’re doing this.

The idea with that is it’s going to help to induce an additional traction element to our neck, and that’s one of the primary causes of cervical radiculitis is due to compression of the spine, so that really addresses that component. Now, the one pitfall about this that I don’t really care for is it doesn’t really help out with the curve component of our neck. That’s very important. We’re not necessarily going to cover that in this video. We’ll cover that in an additional video when we have some more time, but again, very important when we are moving our body away from the door, we only want to do that for about 15 seconds and then scoot our body back towards the door because that can be slightly more advanced and more intense than simply resting on this. I recommend our patients do this for about three to five minutes. Initially, they can step it up incrementally by about a minute each time they use it. That is each day until we’re using it for up to 15 minutes. That’s the maximum amount they recommend that you use.

This next item that we have is the posture pump from Posture Pro. Now, this is slightly less portable than the neck hammock, but I do like this for a couple of different reasons, more so than the neck hammock. So the neck hammock is fantastic, but it does not address the curve element of our neck. This posture pump from Posture Pump does help out with not only the traction element but the curve as well. Very easy use. Let me show you. We are going to set this down on the ground and we have the head harness and head strap here. We use this to help to hold our head back. In an ideal world, our head is going to be touching the flat of the ground. If it’s not, this is going to help out with that. We use the bladder here to inflate it, and we’re going to decrease our pressure. So we’re going to inflate and decrease our pressure like so. Inflate and decrease our pressure. So we’re going to do this until we get to a point where we’ve done this about three times, and then we’re going to hold that position for about three to five minutes.

Be sure to set a timer because we don’t want to do this for too long. It’s very easy to potentially fall asleep, and that’s really not a great situation for our neck. Now, a lot of patients aren’t quite ready for the posture pump, or maybe they’re in a situation where there’s degeneration in their neck. They kind of have this kyphosis going on and they simply cannot use one of these. If that’s the case, then the neck hammock is going to be ideal for you.

Next up, we have the cervical Denner roll. This is from a company called Ideal Spine. I didn’t name thing, but it’s very effective. Now, this is probably my favorite. Let me tell you why. So this is very compact. It’s very easy to use. It has the highest compliance rate amongst our patients because it’s so comfortable and it’s probably the most researched of any of these products with helping to get the curve back into our neck and helping out with those cervical radiculopathy symptoms that we talked about. Very easy to use. Right here. You can see it says Shoulders this side. Guess what? That’s the side that’s going to touch your shoulders. Here’s what that looks like. For most people. There is different positioning. For most of our patients, it’s going to be at the bottom base of our neck and we’re going to extend on this. Again, we want this to be done on a floor surface or a hard surface, and we want to make sure that the back of our head is touching the flat of the floor.

If it is not, we’re either not quite ready for this or you need a different size, and that’s really best evaluated by a healthcare provider, this is going to be usually a chiropractor. Again, we want to make sure you get the proper sizing and that it’s most appropriate for you given your conditions. That’s the other thing about this is that this is only available through a licensed healthcare professional. So if you’re interested in one of these, be sure to ask your chiropractor and they can certainly help you out. I’m Dr. John Brockway. I’m a chiropractor in Denver, Colorado. I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, be sure to share and subscribe as this channel is really about helping you to stretch, strengthen, and stabilize your body so that you can move without pain and get back to life again. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to check out our video here on Sleeping with Cervical Radiculopathy.

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