I’ve Already Had Spinal Surgery, it’s too late for you to help me?

Every year, hundreds of THOUSANDS of people will under go some form of spinal surgery. These surgeries range from spinal fusions, discectomies, disc replacements, and more.

I would like to discuss a popular misconception. Many people think that if they’ve had surgery on their spine, then there’s no way that they can see a chiropractor. Now, based on what many people perceive of chiropractic, I can’t say that I blame them at all. If you’ve had rods, plates, and screws placed into your spine, then the thought of someone wrenching or twisting the spine, causing damage in the surgical attachments…it sounds downright terrifying.

Not All Chiropractic Techniques Are the Same

Most people associate chiropractic with a move you’d see out of a martial arts movie. The truth is, there are many ways to bring about a correction of the spine, and some are very gentle and non-invasive. Some are so safe that they can be used on elderly folks with osteoporosis, new born babies, people with herniated discs, and even people who have had surgery. In our office, we use only the most precise and gentle chiropractic approaches so that we can take care of people of any population.

Needless to say, safety isn’t the main issue when you’re armed with the correct chiropractic tools. The big question that remains is: Can chiropractic help me even if surgery didn’t?

I was taking care of a patient who had had surgery on her neck for neck pain and arm pain. Since the surgery, her pain persisted. She was tired of trying to fix the problem and had basically given up on herself. Very unlikely that she would ever walk into my office of her own.

She was referred to the office to give Structural Correction care a try. After a consultation and an explanation of my adjusting techniques, she felt safe enough to give it a go. In a few short weeks, many of the symptoms she had before the surgery started to go away. Now here is a VERY VERY VERY important point:

The adjustments did NOT NOT NOT make her pain go away

Now this might sound crazy, but it’s not the adjustment that did the healing. Adjustments in of themselves have NO capacity to heal someone.

The problem was that her neck had shifted so far out of place, that the nerves in her neck were being compressed and irritated. When you add the surgery on top of it, it had locked the neck in a shifted position even further. The adjustments simply help to restore the NORMAL alignment of the head and neck. When the spine goes back to normal, then the nerves can work again. It’s that simple.

This is not an unusual situation. In fact, because of the focus on structural correction and the gentle adjustment techniques, I have been referred dozens of patients after surgery in the past, and almost all of them respond great to our care.

When you, or someone you know has had surgery, there are very real limitations to how much the structure of the spine can be corrected. As much as I love and enjoy helping patients post-surgery, the best thing anyone can do is to have their structure corrected BEFORE surgery becomes part of the picture. That way you can achieve a maximum correction, and have less dependency on chiropractic to stay well.

“It Must Be Because I’m Getting Old”

Are you suffering because of age, or might it be something deeper?

 “Don’t get old, you end up like this”

“That’s just because of old age”

“See, this is why you shouldn’t get older”

These are some of the most common phrases that I hear when people talk about the pain they’re having. Most of the time, they’re being said by someone in their early 40’s; which is just more than half of an American’s lifespan (78 years of age: 2012). It’s spoken as if Father Time had a magic shot that make a person start experiencing pain and arthritis completely out of the blue when they hit nature’s halfway point.

Let’s take a look at it for a second. When most people talk about the pain of getting old, they’re usually referring to a cascade of problems that’s lumped into the name Arthritis. We’re talking about the joint shrinking version known as osteoarthritis, and not the hot and burning inflammatory arthritis. Osteoarthritis is usually used to describe any one of these problems: degenerative joint disease, degenerative disc disease, spondylosis, bone spurs, and spinal canal stenosis.

Let’s take a look at one example:

 

This is the x-ray of a spine from a side view. This is a person in their late 50’s or early 60’s with neck pain and arm pain for the past year. The yellow arrows are pointing to areas that have severe degenerative disc disease, estimated 40-50 years of breakdown. When these badly degenerated discs were pointed out to them, guess what was said?

“Oh, those are just due to old age”

Now, of course there will be wear and tear on the spine of a 60 year old person. There’s no question about that. But the extent of damage to the area of the spine is substantial. Now the interesting thing is this, how old is the healthy disc of the spine?

That’s a trick question of course, because all of the discs are the same age. If this problem was strictly a matter of aging, wouldn’t you expect every single disc to have similar levels of degeneration?

“Here’s the truth, this person did not have a problem of age; they had an aging problem.”

There are definitive problems with the structure of this person’s spine. When a structural problem happens into the spine, 2 things can happen:

1. The biomechanics of the spine become distorted and accelerate the wear and tear of the joints. Think about what happens to your car when the tires are improperly aligned. Would you expect the steering wheel to pull to one side? Would you expect one tire to wear out on one side faster than the other? Would you expect the ability for the tire to hold air to be different from side to side? The same thing happens to the joints of the spine too!

2. The structural shift will distort the signals going in and out of the brain. As the spine shifts, the spinal cord and spinal nerves will misfire into the brain. This misfiring causes the muscles of the spine to tighten and spasm, and create dysfunction to anywhere where those nerves travel.

Those are the facts. Here’s where things get tricky. This person had a problem in their spine for upwards of 50+ years. However, they did not show any signs of pain until the past year. What gives?

Problems in the spine can be left undiagnosed and unidentified for several years. Research shows that many of us have herniated discs in the spine, and out of those people 60% of you will feel no symptoms.  Thus, a problem that should be of primary concern can be wreaking havoc on the body without us knowing it.

With that said, these problems are almost always preventable. With proper exercise and proper postural awareness, you can save years of wear and tear on the spine, and maintain full function of the delicate nervous system. As with anything else, it’s always important that you protect the parts of your body that you hold most dear through routine checkups.

We always find time to check our blood pressure, cholesterol, eyes, and of course your teeth. 

When was the last time the structure of your spine was checked?

Why Do My Joints Hurt More When It Rains?

One of the most common problems I hear about with patients with chronic pain is that rainy weather seems to make things worse. Is there a real biological reason for this or is this just an old wives tale that has been passed on through time?

Don’t Stop Believing: The Uncontrollable Factor

People have been talking about how they can sense weather patterns in their joints for thousands of years. You’ve probably heard of this phenomenon from your grandmother or another relative whose arthritis pain flared up when it rains. They might say that they feel the rain in their bones.

Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, was the first to note changes in a person’s illness status due to weather way back in 400 BC. Yet, as long as this idea has been around, studies about this phenomenon have been inconclusive. Some studies show that pain patients can feel a difference, while others say that the weather makes no difference.

It’s hard to study this effect because of the impact that belief systems have on pain. When human beings have a strong enough belief in something, it can drastically affect their perception of the world. This is seen in pain science all the time, and it makes studying pain very challenging and difficult.

Short of locking people in a box and hiding them from weather reports, it’s hard to know how this affects humans with any degree of certainty.

Animal Studies Leaving Clues

While belief systems can impact humans, some of our furry friends have helped leave some clues.

Scientists believe that the pressure in the air (barometric pressure) is what allows people to feel pain when the weather changes. When storms come, the pressure in the atmosphere begins to drop. The theory is that as air pressure drops, it decreases the amount of pressure on your joints leading to the joints and soft tissues to expand and irritate nerve endings causing pain.

In Michigan, we get experience weather changes quickly so pain patients have the unfortunate opportunity to experience this regularly.

Scientists tested this idea on guinea pigs and rats. They placed animals bred with with a pain predisposition into two environments. One group had normal air pressure while the other group had the air pressure lowered artificially.

They found that the low pressure animals showed increased pain behavior compared to the controls.

This is important because you can’t sway or convince an animal that lower pressure is going to make them hurt more. It’s a much closer relationship to cause and effect than can be currently studied in human beings.

 So What? Is This Treatable?

So we know that feeling weather changes when you have pain syndromes is at least plausible based on animal models, but why does it happen and is it treatable? The truth is, we still don’t really know what mechanisms cause this type of pain so we have no idea if it’s treatable or preventable.

Based on my experience, I believe that when pain tends to be triggered or aggravated by weather, there’s likely a pain processing problem in the body.

Tissue Damage vs Pain Perception

The most common conditions associated with weather-related pain are osteoarthritis (wear and tear arthritis, not joints on fire arthritis), headaches, and fibromyalgia. The important thing to note about these 3 conditions is that the pain related to these conditions is NOT dependent on tissue damage. What does that mean?

It means that the level of pain associated with these conditions is not tied to the amount of damage that’s in the body. When you have a sprained ankle, broken bone, torn muscle, or a cut, there is damage done to the tissues that sets off a series of chemical signals meant to trigger a pain response. It’s a very linear relationship.

With joint degeneration, you might feel pain, you might not. With headaches and fibromyalgia, there’s not necessarily any physical damage that’s related to the the pain being felt.

It’s not to say that the pain isn’t real, it just means that there’s no obvious source of damage that’s causing the pain. The problem is related to the way your brain processes pain. Your brain has a built in volume control for pain perception. It can turn these signals up in certain situations, and it can turn it down in others. Chronic pain patients have their volume dial on high all the time.

It’s not just a matter of belief. Although that’s an important piece of the puzzle, there are other factors like:

• Brain oxygenation
• Hormones in the blood
• Global inflammation
• Joint movement, especially in the spine

That’s why pain isn’t just a physical phenomenon. I’m sure you’ve been in a situation where you you suffered an injury, but you didn’t feel it until much later. This happens frequently after the shock of car accident, the thril of playing in a championship game, or the necessity of escaping a dangerous situation.

You get stunned, your heart races, adrenaline is surging through the veins, and you don’t notice any pain until hours later when those hormones leave the blood stream.

Pain Perception is Malleable

This brings some good news and bad news.

Bad News: It means that for lots of cases, there might not be a treatable lesion that is generating some of the chronic pain problems you’re feeling.

Good News: This also means that your pain levels are malleable and there are different things you can do to turn down the volume of the pain you experience. Things like meditation, exercise, and cognitive therapy can all allow us to change our experience with pain, and get a little bit more control over how we feel. It gives us control over the volume dial.

This is actually one of the primary mechanisms that Structural Corrections can help people with headaches, fibromyalgia, and arthritis related pain syndromes. We are not fixing or repairing damaged tissue, we are creating an environment for healthy neurological function.

When the structure of the spine are disrupted, it decreases 2 things:

1. Blood supply in and out of the brain
2. Mechanical input into the brain

Both of these factors cause the brain to be more sensitive to pain signals. When the spine moves better and normal blood supply is restored, you can see not only an improvement to someone’s weather related pain, but also an improved resiliency and control over chronic pain syndromes.