HOW MANY PLACES CAN THE NECK REFER TO ?

This blog came out of a fun quiz we designed during a recent business open house of a fitness facility to which we were invited. The idea was to engage the visiting public by having them take a quiz to earn ticket raffles for our door prizes. It became clear that this particular quiz question generated a lot of further questions and conversations, so I decided to turn that into an educational blog.

The question was pretty simply put: to how many different places can the neck cause referred symptoms? The answer to the question is for: the head, the arm, (most people got those to right), the upper back, and the chest. The latter 2 were less obvious to some people.

The cervical spine contains a variety of structure from the cervical disc, facet joints, and various muscular structures. Depending upon which structure is affected and at which level of the neck, it will have its own referral pattern, sometimes mixing and matching a variety of destinations. So the cervical spine should always be a place of investigation with ongoing and non-resolving symptoms in those 4 areas.