Do you have pain, tingling, numbness, or burning pain in the feet or hands that hasn't responded to treatment? Perhaps a surgical team offered you a decompression of the nerves in your foot and ankle area or on the leg, but you did not get the relief that you were hoping for. Maybe you did not get any relief at all, perhaps you were able to get a modest amount. It is possible that you might be experiencing double crush syndrome—a condition where nerves are compressed at two or more locations, magnifying your symptoms and making traditional treatments less effective. Unfortunately, this is not as uncommon as many doctors think. We see this routinely in our practice.
We have seen patients who have been taken care of by some very fine surgeons who have had a nerve in the leg operated on who either received very little improvement or no improvement at all, but when we have examined them, we find that there seems to be a nerve compression upstream or a nerve compression down stream from the location where the first “partly” successful or “unsuccessful” operation was performed.
Many people with this type of chronic nerve pain suffer for years before getting a second evaluation and receiving a proper diagnosis. They try many different medications, undergo tests that show "nothing wrong," and begin to wonder if the pain is just something they'll have to accept.
Dr. Eric H. Williams, a peripheral nerve surgeon in Baltimore, specializes in identifying and treating double crush syndrome (DCS). This is a fancy way of just saying that we like to look for other areas of compression along the nerve that may have been missed by other doctors. His expertise helps patients find lasting relief when other approaches have failed. Not every patient has this problem, but many do.
Keep reading to discover what double crush syndrome is, how it's diagnosed, and the surgical solutions that can help you reclaim your life from chronic nerve pain.
