- When you get hurt or are in pain, the area involved has many parts: the joint that moves and is held by ligaments, the muscles that move the joint and are held on by tendons, the nerves through and to the area, and the blood vessels that feed it.
- When an area hurts, you feel the pain and can't do some things you want to do like walk, sleep, work, etc.
- When I see you hurt, I think of all of the parts of the injury. I see the muscle in spasm; I see the swelling causing pressure, pain, and irritation. I see the nerve compressed, irritated, or overloaded with signals. But most of all, I see the underlying most fundamental and basic part of the injury— the joint. For almost all of the things I treat, the joint (and its movement) is the most important part of what is hurt and the most necessary thing to make work right so that you feel better.
- As a chiropractor, I have been taught to assess and treat all the parts of your injury. Most important is to assess and treat the joint part. This is called a subluxation. This word describes the joint not working, not moving, or a partial dislocation. Since the joint is the underlying base of your body, if the joint is subluxated, areas around it may have a problem also. The area swells; then the muscle spasms to protect it. Any nerve in the area is going to react, and in the case of the spine, the nerve gets compressed (pinched).
- The most important part of the treatment I give my patients is adjusting the joint to make it work right. Once this happens, the muscle doesn't need to be as tight, the body takes the swelling away, and the presssure can come off the nerve.
- The adjustment is the most important part of treating your injury. If that is all I did, you would most likely get better. The body has that ability to heal and recover.
- In my office I have added things to make you get better faster and stay better longer. These include physiotherapy, like electrical muscle stimulation and ultrasound, to remove pain spasm and swelling; massage therapy to help relax muscle and break up knots and trigger points; and exercises to strengthen and stretch the injured area.
- A commonly heard phrase is," You pulled a muscle in your back." If you survived high school biology, you probably learned that the only reason we have muscles in our body is to move the joints. In understanding this, you will see that you can't just hurt the muscle without affecting the joint. And as a matter of fact, the muscle is usually in spasm protecting the joint.
- Think about a low back. Someone has recurrent low back spasms from a pulled muscle. All of a sudden the person has surgery on the disc, which is a joint. That seems odd, doesn't it? The reality is that each time the person had low back pain because of small tears in the disc, the body felt pain so it spasmed the muscles to protect it.
- This shows you the value of chiropractic care— adjusting the joint so it can heal and not accumulate damage to become surgical.
