Innova Pain Clinic
Low Back Pain Relief With Chiropactic
Chiropractic care provides help to reduce muscle spasms and reduce pain. How does this work? Great question. At Innova Pain Clinic, we love explaining how chiropractic manual medicine is able to help reduce chronic low back pain. It is difficult to explain in a blog entry, but I will give you the highlights. If you want a detailed explanation with spinal models and diagrams, just come by the office.
Understand that the nervous system controls and coordinates every function of the body, whether that is wiggling your finger or digesting your food. Your nervous system is monitoring, evaluating, and coordinating every function. One very important part of the nervous system is Proprioception; Your body’s ability to know where the body parts are and what they are doing. Try closing your eyes and touching your finger tip to your nose. Then, keeping your eyes closed, turn your head and touch your nose again. To no surprise, you should be able to find your nose the second time, even though it moved from the first position. The brain knows where your finger is and where your nose is. Your brain is able to calculate a path to connect the two. This is proprioception.
Proprioception relies heavily on signals being sent from the joints of the body. It’s like a constant game of Marco-Polo, with the joints reporting to the brain if they are in motion. If a joint is not moving correctly, because of muscle spasm, joint fixation, surface tension, or subluxation, those important signals will not match the neighboring joint signals. The brain can misinterpret the differing messages and believe there is an injury– hence pain.
Think of the problem is sea-sickness. You inner-ears are telling your brain that you are in motion– an you are, because of the rocking boat. But you eyes see the stable walls of the galley or cabin and they are not moving. This mixed signal confuses the brain and you feel sea-sickness. The brain does not like mixed signals. As an experiment, the next time someone asks you a ‘yes or no question,’ answer the question but use the opposite head motion. Nod your head as if indicating yes, but use the word “No.” Or shake your head ‘no’ but use the word “Yes.” Watch the response of the person to whom you are speaking. They will looked confused because of the mixed signal.
Chiropractic care restores normal joint motion and reduces the ‘confusing’ signals being sent to the brain. This helps to reduce pain. That is why chiropractic adjustments feel so good, at least the one I give do. If you feel sore after some other chiropractor has worked on you, then I suggest you try our office.
There is also a critical pain reducing component from the brain. I will have to explain that in a different blog. It is very detailed and usually only doctors are interested in that level of detail. It involves special brain and spinal cord structures. If you are interested Google “descending nucleus raphe magnus.”
Chiropractic can treat a lot of body pain related sickness nowadays, we just have to be open to try the treatment and see how it would work for us.