Ultimately, the chiropractic approach to alleviating pain and promoting optimal health is a holistic one. If you’re currently seeing a chiropractor for back pain, or intend to use chiropractic care as part of your ongoing pain management, you should know that back injury healing is available in these environments as well. According to the chiropractic method, good health often starts with the spine. After all, this is the very highway along which vital messages are relayed to all parts of the body. When alignment and other spine-related issues exist, nerve signals can become compromised or delayed, problems like chemical imbalance and diminished immune system functioning can rear their heads, and both primary and secondary pain can spiral out of control.
When you work with a chiropractor to alleviate chronic or recurring pain, the overarching goal of treatment will be to both identify and resolve the underlying source of your problems. In this way, pain relief and back injury healing go hand-in-hand. If you’ve sustained any injury as the result of a jarring, impact event, then you know that seeking care in the emergency room is really only one small part of the treatment and recovery process. Emergency room visits after any significant impact event are intended to accomplish just four basic things:
- Ensure that your injuries are not life-threatening
- Assess the level of internal injury if any exists
- Provide pain relief to support the body’s natural healing process
- Document your injury for claims purposes and to collect information for your primary doctor for any follow-up appointments
When no internal injuries, major lacerations, or broken bones exist, people are often sent home with instructions to simply follow up with their regular doctors. Once an emergency room doctor has documented your problems and determined them to be non-life-threatening, you will be discharged. You might leave the hospital with the recommendation to use over-the-counter pain-relieving agents such as Ibuprofen, or you may receive a prescription for a more potent pain-relieving product. Although certain drugs can both reduce pain and alleviate the related inflammation, none of these products are designed to address impact-related injuries directly at their source.
Conversely, chiropractic doctors take a hands-on and entirely natural approach to both reducing pain and promoting healing throughout the injured area. These services also address problems with joint dysfunction that are the result of impact events such as whiplash. In addition to alleviating pain and helping to expedite the recovery process, in these instances, chiropractic care additionally reduces inflammation, restores mobility, and facilitates better overall health. Given the vast range of functional and pain-relieving benefits that this care provides, people have successfully used chiropractic treatment to address a vast range of problems including:
- Carpal tunnel
- Scoliosis
- Lifting-related injuries
- Sciatic pain
Impact events and other stress-causing activities disrupt normal alignment of the spine. The sudden and forceful shifting of the vertebrae results in subluxations that can lead to pinched or compressed nerves, difficult movement, sharp and shooting pains, dull and aching pains, and many other issues. When proper alignment is gradually restored to the spine via manual or computer-assisted adjustments, inversion therapies, massage, acupuncture, or other chiropractic methods, the body’s natural healing abilities are improved, and patients can recover in greater comfort and at a much faster rate.
There Are Numerous Options In Chiropractic Therapy Available
While many people associate chiropractors solely with hands-on, spinal manipulation, there are actually many different therapeutic services that can be received in this environment. These include but are not limited to:
- Manual spinal adjustments
- Computer-assisted spinal adjustments
- Inversion table therapy
- Ultrasound therapy
- Recommendations for dietary changes and other lifestyle changes
- Therapeutic Massage
Inversion or inversion table therapies are designed to totally invert the body so that spinal pressure and stress are temporarily eliminated. The inverted position achieved during this process allows displaced vertebrae to naturally migrate back into position. It can also enhance the efficacy of both hands-on and computer-assisted adjustments. Chiropractic massage can alleviate the tension in all muscles and other musculoskeletal structures that surround or support the injured area, particularly when these structures are experiencing the pain and fatigue of having to overcompensate. In fact, each of the available therapies provided by chiropractors offers its own unique range of both short and long-term benefits.
As such, it is not uncommon for chiropractors to use personalized and carefully integrated treatment plans to address a single issue. All chiropractic patients are given needs-specific and wholly individualized treatments to ensure the best possible outcomes. As such, this care always starts with a comprehensive examination that includes questions about recent impact and injury events, and questions about the patient’s medical history. This approach allows patients to achieve success even when other more general methods of pain management and back pain healing have fallen short. If you have back pain or problems with a back injury, we can help. Call us today at 205-637-1363.
