Peripheral Nerve Injuries

Overview

Your peripheral nerves link your brain and spinal cord to the other parts of your body, such as your muscles and skin. Peripheral nerves are fragile and easily damaged. A nerve injury can interfere with your brain's ability to communicate with your muscles and organs.

If you feel tingling or numbness in your leg, arm or hand, you may have injured one or more nerves when you had an accident or broke a bone. Weakness in one of those places can also mean that you've injured your sciatic or radial nerve. It's important to get medical care for such an injury as soon as possible because nerve injuries can be repaired. Evidence suggests that you can heal better when you have a severe nerve injury repaired soon after your injury.

Why choose Mayo Clinic

• Experience. Mayo Clinic doctors have extensive experience treating people whose nerve injuries happened yesterday — or weeks, months or even years ago.
• Expertise. Mayo Clinic brings together diagnostic skill and comprehensive treatment by highly trained specialists.
• Team approach. Your medical team can include doctors trained to diagnose and treat nervous system disorders (neurologists and neurosurgeons); repair damaged bones, muscles and ligaments (orthopedic surgeons); restore function after injury (rehabilitation specialists); and treat pain (anesthesiologists or pain specialists).

Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is ranked among the Best Hospitals for neurology and neurosurgery and for rehabilitation by U.S. News & World Report.

Read more about peripheral nerve damage at MayoClinic.com.