If you have carpal tunnel syndrome, there’s a good chance that a muscle in your neck is causing at least part of your pain.
The same muscle that causes carpal tunnel discomfort can also cause that old familiar “knot” in your back between your shoulder blade and your spine.
There is a set of muscles on each side (left and right) of your neck called the scalene muscles.
When the scalene muscles get tight, or aggravated, they can develop “trigger points.” Trigger points are areas of very irritated muscles that “fire,” or cause pain, elsewhere.
Trigger points in your scalene muscles can cause pain that seems like carpal tunnel syndrome. This is because the scalene trigger points fire into the thumb, the backside of the first finger, the outer side and back of the upper arm, the spine side of the shoulder blade (remember the “knot”?), the outside of the lower arm, and the chest between the armpit and breastbone.
That is one nasty muscle when it is aggravated!
These symptoms may be called thoracic outlet syndrome (TOS.) TOS causes carpal tunnel area pain, and might be misdiagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome.
As you can see by that long list of pain symptoms, the scalene
muscles affect a lot of your upper body. It’s possible that they are responsible for a lot of your pain.
These muscles get aggravated when you have a “forward head and shoulders” posture.
There are other muscles that can cause pain in the same areas as the scalenes. Some of them are easier to reach or to treat, and you may wish to try to release those muscles first.
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