Three Questions to Ask Yourself Before Going to a Chiropractor!

You try to be an educated consumer when you’re choosing a car, house, or TV, but what about when you’re choosing something else that is also very important… such as a chiropractor? There are some key questions to ask yourself before choosing a chiropractor to care for your spine and nervous system. After all, your nerve system is a very important part of your body that controls all of your functions; picking a care provider is not something to jump into without careful consideration.

So, here are some questions to ask yourself when choosing a Doctor of Chiropractic:

1) Why Am I Looking For A Chiropractor?

This is the first question that you want to ask yourself to help you choose the type of chiropractor you go to. If you have a surface-level ache, pain, or strain, and you simply want a quick fix so you can get back on the road again, you’ll want to look for a chiropractor who will take care of you for the immediate issue. When you see a chiropractor for this type of objective, he/she generally will not do a complete assessment of your spine or nervous system, but will rather work on relieving acute pain/muscle spasms and improving range of motion.

However, just like any other area of your health, there’s a difference between a quick fix and sustainable change. If you are looking for sustainable results or improvement for your spine or nervous system, or to get to the root cause of a recurring health concern, you would want to find a chiropractor to perform a comprehensive assessment.

2) Do I Want Less Or More… Or Maybe Both?

Very often people are motivated to go to a chiropractor because they want less of something that they don’t like: back pain, neck pain, arm pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, something that is disturbing how they are living. They just want to go back to the way they were before. If that’s you, make sure you have the right expectation when you go in to the chiropractor that you really just want to experience less of something that is disturbing you.

Some people want more. In addition to eliminating something that they don’t like, they would like to have more of what they do want: more energy, more joy, better sleep, better mental state, more life enjoyment and improved quality of life. When you want more of something, you want to look for a chiropractor who is going to be able to help you improve your overall function, retrain and reorganize your nerve system and not just get you back to a prior minimal state. The state that led to you ending up where you are now.

3) Am I Looking For A Conventional Experience Or An Outstanding Experience?

The majority of conventional chiropractic practitioners, physical therapists, and other healthcare providers related to the spine are focused on eliminating the condition the patient is presenting with on the surface. This is generally working on temporary range of motion improvement, bone re-alignment, or muscle spasm and pain relief. If you want to have an outstanding experience, then find a chiropractor who can identify and focus on the underlying Structural dysfunctions that may be at the root cause of the structural and behavioral shifts which are affecting your health and life experience. Go for outstanding in your chiropractic care and your health.

If you would like to have your nerve system checked for its Structural integrity, a consultation to discuss your concerns may be a great place to start. Find out where to go from here by contacting our office at248-287-8700

Symptoms - The Iceberg Model

Most people are familiar with the image on the top. An image of a lowly iceberg. It looks so simple to simply steer around and bypass it on the way to smoother seas.

But if our past was a good teacher, then we know that by only paying attention to the surface, we can miss a dangerous obstacle in the depths.

Our bodies are equipped with an incredible array of signals to let us know that something is wrong. Sometimes it comes in the form of a pain in the back, draining fatigue, or chest pain. The purpose of these signals is to tell us that something is wrong, but it’s up to us to look within to identify the cause.

As long as we continue to exist in a healthcare system that only seeks to reduce symptoms, then we will continue to get the same results as those who only saw the tip of the iceberg.

Unless we look towards the body’s healing capacity, and why it’s not operating at 100% full function, then we are missing the boat on the health challenges of millions of people. And there’s no amount of drugs, natural medicine, surgery, or insurance money that can save that ship from sinking.

What a 10 mph car accident does to the neck?

Pain after a car accident can be very strange and confusing. Take a look at these examples and tell me if this reminds you of a situation that you or someone you know.

Person A: Healthy and fit 37-year-old man in a car and gets hit at 45 mph+. The impact drives his car into the car in front causing extensive damage.

Person B: Healthy and fit 29-year old woman. Sitting in line in a parking lot when another car runs into the back of her at 10 mph or less. Minimal damage to the car and wore a seat belt.

Which one do you think had a worse whiplash injury and had pain immediately and which do you think just had soreness that they wanted to get checked out?

Both had substantial biomechanical changes on their x-ray and MRI, but only one had a significant amount of pain immediately after the incident.

If you guessed that Person B with the parking lot bumper tap had the most pain, then you win! Congratulations!

The Deceptive Nature of Pain

Pain is one of medicine’s greatest tricksters. To this day, researchers and scientists don’t have a strong grasp on the nature pain disorders.

Why is it tricky? Because the pain someone feels isn’t necessarily related to the amount of damage in the body. Patients with fibromyalgia have crippling pain despite not having any visible damage to their bodies.
Pain is the most important factor to a patient, but it can be the most deceptive factor to a clinician. When it comes to taking care of people after an accident, we have to measure a patient’s function regardless of their pain status.

What Happens to the Neck After an Accident?

Insurance companies will only consider it an accident-related whiplash injury if you see a doctor within 14 days of the accident. So if you have no pain after the accident or the pain wasn’t bad enough to drive you to a physician until day 15, then you didn’t have a whiplash (I know how silly it sounds).

But going back to the previous example, we know that both Patients A and B had biomechanical flaws as a result from trauma to the spine. Despite the fact that there were 2 very different accidents and 2 different pain statuses, there are similarities in what can happen to the neck even after the smallest collisions. Take a look at the video below which simulates an accident less than 10 mph.

 

What Happens to the Neck in an Accident?

After watching the video, you can get the impression that a collision at just 5-7 mph causes rapid movement of the head and neck.

Despite the fact that your body is encased by a 2 ton metal box, it’s easy to see that even though the vehicle stops moving, there is still a transfer of energy into the body. When you’re wearing your seat belt, it causes a rapid deceleration of your body, but your head will continue to move forward and backward very rapidly.

In fact, a large enough force to the neck can actually produce a concussion even if there’s not direct contact to the head! These accidents would need somewhere around 90 G’s of force to the head.

While that would cease to be a small accident, the smaller 10 mph accidents can produce 3-5 G’s of force which is enough to damage the tissues of the neck. The way your head accelerates and decelerates can put 3-6 G’s of force into the cervical spine. This force gets transferred into the ligaments, muscles, discs, and joints of the neck more than any other piece of anatomy.

While the body can tolerate large amounts of force in brief periods, a large amount of force applied to a small region of anatomy as seen in a car accident can damage the tissues of the neck.

Ligament Injury

Ligaments are like the rubber bands of the spine. They can be stretched, but once they stretch too far, they can’t go back to normal again. As ligaments are damaged, scar tissue is used as a patch, but it’s not as functional as the stuff you were built with.

Just like when you sprained your ankle as a kid and that ankle never worked the same, damage to ligaments of your neck can happen the same way. Fortunately, true sprains of the neck take a lot of force and don’t happen with most accidents.

Muscle Strains

When muscle works beyond its capacity, or gets stretched beyond its end range, it forms small tears within the muscle belly. That’s why there’s no consensus as to whether you’re better off knowing about a coming accident and bracing, or if you’re better off being surprised.

Either way, damage to the muscle tissue can happen depending on the nature of the collision.

Muscle strains can be painful, but they can and do heal with time. Strain to muscle tissue is one of the most common sources of pain from whiplash injuries and resolve well with chiropractic and exercise.

Disc Damage

Accidents are one of the most common ways that people under 30 can suffer herniated discs in the spine. When the force of an accident overcomes the resistance of the disc material, small tears in the disc can result in the inner fluid spilling into the spinal canal.

Sometimes this results in a pinched nerve, but most of the time it does not. A disc problem doesn’t have to be a big problem. Many people have disc damage and have no idea because it’s not symptomatic.

Structural Shifting

The muscles, ligaments, discs, and nerves of the neck help dictate the Structural Positioning of the spine. The force of an accident can deform one or all of these tissues leading to abnormal positioning of the head and neck.

This leads to abnormal neurological input to the brain and what manifests as poor posture (slouching, head tilt, antalgic lean). While poor posture is not the problem that needs to be treated, it’s an objective sign of a nervous system is operating at less than its full capacity.

Remember That It’s Not About Pain

Remember at the beginning of the article we talked about how pain can be deceptive. The reason I wanted to point that out is because you can experience damage to all of the above structures and not feel an immediate onset of pain. Pain is just tricky like that.

Whether you feel immediate pain or not, your neck should always be evaluated even after minor accidents because it gives the earliest and best opportunity to correct a silent problem.