Identifying Spinal Issues With X-rays | Holistic Healthcare Chiropractor in Manahawkin, NJ
Hey everybody, its Dr. Nicole with Healing Hands of Manahawkin and welcome. Question for you. Why is it so important that a chiropractor take X-rays before adjusting you? Let me tell you why.
As Chiropractors We Are Spine & Nervous System Specialists
So let me give you a little bit of background first about what we do and what we’re looking for. Number one, chiropractors are doctors, physicians who specialize in the spine, but specifically in the nervous system. Let me explain. Your spine has two very important jobs to do for you. Number one is responsible for holding up your body weight. It’s the core strength of your body. And that’s what we call your posture, we can use posture as not only a window to your spine, but we can actually use your posture as a window to what’s happening in your overall health. Let me show you why. The second job that your spine does for you is it houses and it surrounds your very delicate spinal cord. And in order to have a healthy functioning body and healthy functioning organs, you have to have a healthy spinal cord. Let me show you why come on over here.
Subluxations and How They Affect Your Nervous System
So the way that your body works is your brain, it controls every single organ in your body. And it even controls the movement and the strength in your arms and your legs. The way that your brain controls your body is that your brain sends electrical signals through the spinal cord, the electrical signals flow over the spinal cord exactly like electricity flows through an electrical wire. And then those signals have to be able to exit the spine travel over the smaller nerves to all of the organs in your body, telling them what to do, how to behave and how to be healthy. And what happens is, from the day that we’re born, we have stress to our body. And when our body is under stress, it can be an impact, like when you’re a little boy or little girl and you fall off your bike or you fall off a trampoline, or it can be things that happen gradually and are less dramatic, like sitting at your computer or sleeping the wrong way on the couch or something. Anyway, regardless what it is, when you have these stresses to your body, what it does, is it causes regions of the spine to shift out of its normal alignment. Chiropractors call that condition A subluxation. You can see that word right here. It’s sub-lux-ation subluxation.
When we do an examine the chiropractic office, that’s the condition that we are looking for subluxation. Now the reason why a subluxation is so important to you, is because when the spine shifts out of alignment, it causes a lot of stress to the spinal cord. And when the spinal cord is under stress, the impulses that are traveling through that part of the spinal cord become diminished. Why is that a problem? Well, everything runs on those signals. So if we slow the energy into the body down, everything else in the body slows down. Does that make sense?
Why We Use X-rays with Our Chiropractic Care
So X-ray is a really important tool that chiropractors use to be able to locate the subluxations. I want to show you a quick example of one of our patients. Now, I’m going to warn you, this person’s correct. This person spine is pretty severe. And he came in with a slew of health problems, maybe like 17 or 18 different health concerns, and he’s only in his 40s. And I also want to warn you that he’s not done with his correction yet. So there’s still areas of the spine that need to be corrected. But in just 12 weeks, I want to show you the type of correction that specialized chiropractors like us can do for people. And then we’ll talk about what it can do. So come on over here. Let me show you.
X-rays Allow Us To See Our Patient’s Progress
So this is the side of our patient’s spine when he first came in. So you have a point of reference, the green line that you see is where the spine is at its strongest. It’s where the posture is at its best. And it’s where the nervous system is most relaxed, delivering energy from his brain into all of his organs. The red dashes is where his spine was, and as you guys can see, that is significant subluxation the neck and the upper back is shifted forward, the upper back is collapsing forward. And then we when we look further down this whole lower part of his spine the whole lower part of the spine is actually collapsing on him. In fact, the subluxation has been here so long, the front of his vertebrae is is actually collapsing. Okay.
Small Changes on X-rays can Have a Big Impact on Health
So after only 12 weeks of advanced spinal correction, this is where we got his fine, you can see that the neck and the upper back came way closer to the green line than where it was. That’s a significant change in only 12 weeks, the upper back stopped collapsing down. And this area right here actually got significantly better. Now, granted, he still needs a lot more correction in this part of his spine, he had some major damage. But he went from 105 millimeter translation or shift here, all the way down to a 74 millimeter shift in only 12 weeks. Now, guys, I know that in our brains, that doesn’t sound like a big difference. But in the nervous system world that is huge. And what that does for him is it increases his core strength and improves his posture. But most importantly, it starts to relax the entire spinal cord, which now allows more energy to flow from his brain into his body so that he can be healthier not only now, but in the next 5, 10 and even 15 years.
So hopefully that gave you some brief information about why chiropractors take X-rays why it’s so important. And if you’re looking for a chiropractor, one of the first questions I would ask is does that doctor take X-rays?
