Pneumatic Cervical Traction in St. Louis

Traditional traction uses a hanging weight or a manual pulley. The force is harder to control, harder to reproduce between sessions, and it arrives less smoothly.

A pneumatic system regulates force by air pressure, which means it can be dialled to a specific value, held, released and repeated identically. Practically that lets us start well below the level that provokes symptoms and increase deliberately across sessions as tolerance improves.

It also allows intermittent traction — cycles of pull and release rather than sustained pull. Many patients tolerate intermittent traction considerably better, and the cycling appears to help with fluid exchange in the disc rather than simply holding it stretched.

Traction is most useful where symptoms have a clear mechanical component:

• Cervical radiculopathy — neck pain radiating into the shoulder, arm or hand, with or without numbness
• Foraminal narrowing from degenerative change
• Disc protrusion producing nerve root irritation
• Persistent neck pain with restricted movement and muscle guarding
• Symptoms following a motor vehicle accident, where whiplash has left persistent mechanical neck pain

A useful sign is positional: if your arm symptoms ease when you lift your arm over your head, or when you gently pull your own head upward, the nerve root is likely under mechanical pressure and traction is worth trying.

Traction is a conservative modality and we treat it as one. It is inexpensive, low-risk and non-invasive, which makes it a reasonable early step — but it is not a substitute for identifying which structure is generating your pain.

Where symptoms persist, electrodiagnostic testing establishes objectively whether a nerve root is affected and at which level. From there, targeted options such as a selective nerve root block or cervical epidural steroid injection address the inflammation around the nerve directly.

Traction also pairs well with the rest of the conservative program — it frequently makes physical therapy tolerable in patients whose neck is too irritable to work with otherwise.

Traction is avoided where the spine may be structurally unstable or where distraction could cause harm: after certain cervical fractures, in the presence of significant instability, with spinal tumor or infection, with vertebrobasilar insufficiency, in inflammatory arthritis affecting the upper cervical spine, and in severe osteoporosis.

It is also not the answer for every neck complaint. Pain arising from the cervical facet joints rather than from a compressed nerve root often does not respond, and continuing traction that is not helping simply delays the treatment that would.