Spinal Decompression

Ever wonder what that machine you see in the chiropractor's office is? How about what the table you lie on is called? The machines in the chiropractor's office are all designed to solve your many back ailments. As high tech and intimidating as the machines seem, they are really quite fascinating to understand. In this article there will be several machines listed that are common in chiropractic office. We will also tell you what they do and how they work. Hopefully next time you go into the chiropractic office you will have a better feel for what is being done to your back.

Computerized Traction Tables

Computerized Traction Tables are non-surgical devices that relieve back and neck pain that is caused by pressure put on the spine. The table stretches, pulls, and relaxes the different parts of the spine. Older traction machines would sometimes pull too quickly and cause uncomfortable or ineffective pain relief. The computerized table, however, is slow and can be controlled much easier than its ancestors. So what is it doing to you? The patient is strapped in to this machine and it will slowly reach enough tension or "pull" that the pressure on the disc will be released. The machine decreases the pull in smaller and smaller increments to release all of the pressure without harming the patient. The reasons for spinal decompression include regaining normal length and alignment of the spinal cord, to lessen or eliminate muscle spasms, and to relieve pressure on nerves (especially spinal).

BioDex Balance System

The BioDex Balance System is designed to improve balance, increase agility, and develop muscle tone. This system allows for patients to do training in both static and dynamic formats. Among the wide variety of training methods this system offers are, postural stability training, maze control training, weight shifting training, random control training, limits of stability training, and percentage weight bearing training. The machine features a moving plate that patients stand on. The plate shuffles in different ways depending on the training needed. Through repeated exposure, muscles and coordination are built. With focus on the knees, ankles, hips, and lower back this machine will improve coordination, balance and muscle within 6 to 8 weeks for most patients.

Free Motion Dual Cable Cross

The Free Motion Dual Cable Cross might be a mouthful to say but is a machine you are likely familiar with if you have been in a gym. This machine has two cables that can be positioned in a variety of directions depending on what you want to work out. You then assign weight to the cables and pull away. With twelve vertical and nine horizontal settings, this machine can essentially cover any movement pattern. While common in gyms for simple weight-lifting, a skilled chiropractor uses these for rehabilitation and movement training.

Power Plate

The Power Plate is a vibration machine used at some chiropractic practices. By using unique acceleration technology it stimulates the brain's natural response to vibration. If you remember the 80s there were vibration machines that used bands to "rub away the fat". Power Plates use the vibration in a different way. By standing on the plate, doing regular exercises, the vibration intensifies the muscle strain and creates a stronger workout in less time. Additionally, the unstable feel of standing on the plate generates coordination and balance benefits. This can also be accomplished by the much less safe method of working out in an earthquake.

Medical machinery includes many of the most intimidating machines we regular folk ever have to interact with. Having an understanding of what these devices do makes it easier to step into/on/around them and start reaping the benefits of human ingenuity. So, when you next walk into your chiropractor's office, take a look around and see if there are any machines you might recognize. Hopefully knowing how it works will make it a little less creepy.

Sciatica is a kind of symptom that irritates the root of the nerve, causing numbness or pain at your lower back. It is normally caused by the compression of lumbar nerves or sacral nerves or by compression of the sciatica nerve itself. Nerve roots can be compressed due to different reasons and conditions and eventually cause sciatica. Treatment for sciatica usually differs from patient to patient.

If you feel lower back pain when you're squatting, walking on toes, rotating the spine, bending forward and backward, sitting, lying on back, and raising one leg at a time, these are the signs of sciatica symptoms. Therapy and treatment should be taken as soon as possible before it deteriorates.

Normally, therapy for sciatica is done by reducing the pressure and compression of the lower back. Other therapies such as taking anti-inflammatory medications, physical massage therapy, non-surgical spinal decompression and stretching exercises for muscle rebalancing are also found effective in sciatica treatment.

However, though effective, these Sciatica medications and treatments do not cure Sciatica entirely. They are just effective to remove the pain caused by Sciatica.

The new medical breakthrough for back and sciatica treatment- Muscle Balance Therapy (MBT) is a new revolutionary treatment for sciatica or long term back pain patients. Muscle Balance Therapy addresses the root cause of your condition while at the same time brings relief to your symptoms through simple effective exercises.

In a nutshell, Muscle Balance Therapy program will identify the main cause of your sciatica, suggest the MBT muscle exercises for your symptom and bring your pain and body back to a more neutral state.Once your muscles are more balanced and you're feeling better, you will be able to return to your workplace or to your favorite activity with the confidence and security that you need to live a full and productive life.

When searching for a chiropractor, just picking one out of the yellow pages is not a good idea. Chiropractors in this modern era should have an office with the following attributes to be considered optimal. With the following office traits, patients will have the best chance of receiving an excellent outcome.

1) Multi-discipline - Chiropractic training is extremely diverse. Some chiropractors are trained in traditional medical models, whereas others receive training that is more holistic. When seeking treatment from a chiropractor in this modern era, it should not be acceptable to be under the care of one who simply performs nothing more than manipulations. Because we know that multi-faceted treatments work well in the majority of patients. This includes treating patients with physical rehabilitation along with active and passive modalities such as spinal decompression, interferential treatment, ice, and heat.

2) Spinal Decompression Certification - Since 1996, Spinal Decompression Treatment has been cleared by the FDA. Studies have shown that it works extremely well for back and neck pain patients with diagnoses including disc herniations, degenerative disc disease, spinal arthritis, whiplash, spinal stenosis, and more. The intermittent traction involved creates a negative pressure inside the disc space which allows increased blood flow and oxygen to help repair damage. Numerous studies have shown over a 75% good to excellent results with a series of spinal decompression treatments.

3) Manipulation Under Anesthesia - This treatment, called "MUA", has been under utilized in the chiropractic community for the past couple of decades. Due to its success record it has been gaining momentum and can help patients dramatically with frozen shoulder, pelvic pain, neck stiffness, and more.

4) Affiliated with pain management - Creating a true multi-discipline center including both traditional and alternative treatment methods maximizes patient outcome success. This includes chiropractic treatment, physical therapy, massage/acupuncture, medication management, and interventional pain management by traditionally trained doctors. Patients come in with unique circumstances, and their treatments don't always fit a mold. Having all the various options can help dramatically and be combined as necessary.

5) Trained in both Active and Passive Spinal Manipulations - In the world of chiropractic, spinal manipulations may dramatically assist patients in becoming more active while reducing pain dramatically. Typical patients receive an active manipulation from a chiropractor and there are many different techniques for doing them such as the Diversified technique. However, sometimes patients are not able to receive an active manipulation. Reasons for this may include pregnancy, fibromyalgia or a condition such as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy where being actively manipulated is simply not tolerated. In these cases, a passive manipulation technique such as an Activator may help patients while at the same time being tolerated fine.

Among the most recent, new advances in the physical therapy treatment of patients with neck and back pain is something called spinal decompression. It is an improvement of the old spinal traction machines. The concept remains the similar, although we now know, better, why this treatment works so well for most patients.

First, it's important to know why spines hurt. Most of the time, human spines hurt because time, gravity and genetics conspire to cause our discs to wear out. These changes give rise to intermittent pain, at first. If we are lucky, we will get through our lives without severe, constant or disabling pain. But many are not so lucky.

The important question to ask is, "Is there an effective way to change this natural course of spinal aging and, for some people, pain and disability?" That is, actually, too broad a question. That question could be deconstructed into many different questions. I will suggest a simple answer to a simpler question.

Given the natural history of human spinal degeneration, pain and disability, is there an intervention that can, meaningfully, improve this problem?" To that, I'll answer, "Yes".

Now, I am going to get very simple in my explanation. Then I'll elaborate a little, so that professionals understand too. First, for laypersons, the reason that spines hurt, is that time compresses our spines. The more time, the more compression. The rate of compression varies from person to person, but in all persons this process occurs. Everyone loses height as they age, as a result of this process. It squashes them and that hurts.

The most direct way to treat this problem, is to decompress the spine, i.e. physically pull the vertebrae apart. You can use a sophisticated spinal decompression table as I do, or you can try to use a conventional traction table if that is what you have. Very mildly compressed spines may respond to inversion tables, though this will not suffice if you have a significant problem in your spine.

Professionals should know: Spinal discs have some regenerative potential as documented by CT scans showing improved disc height after a series of such treatments. Histologic(microscopic) and radioisotope studies show an increase in the number of cells in the disc and an increase in the synthesis of reparative molecules in discs treated with decompression. The important fact is that most patients treated this way, note significant improvement.

There are some things that machines can do more effectively than humans. One of them is to apply a load, over time, to deform a tissue. The are biomechanical terms that denote, in this case, the improvement of the spinal disc when it is pulled with sufficient force, a sufficient number of times. It is a very unfortunate fact, that the majority of the patients I treat have not been treated, offered nor discussed spinal decompression as treatment. And they may have had pain and disability for months or years. This is a fundamentally rational component of spinal treatment that should be tried with almost all patients.

So when it comes to physical therapy treatment in Atlanta, for patients with neck pain and low back pain, I recommend patients and professionals, alike, consider learning more about, and trying, spinal decompression.

Shoulder pain can result from any one of the following typical problems.

1) Shoulder arthritis, also called Degenerative Joint Disease (DJD)

2) Rotator cuff problem, such as rotator cuff tear

3) Subacromial impingement, called Impingement Syndrome

4) Cervical Spinal Stenosis

5) Cervical Disc Herniation

6) There are quite a few others, these are the usual culprits

So how do you know what the generator of the pain is? How does one tell if the pain is coming from a shoulder problem, a neck problem (cervical spine), or a combination of the two? From a combination of patient history, physical examination, and imaging studies, the answer usually becomes apparent.

If there is still a quandary after the above is performed, an injection into the shoulder may serve both a diagnostic and therapeutic purpose. If the pain is coming from Impingement Syndrome, an injection of pain medication (numbing plus/minus steroid) into the space called the Subacromial Space may substantially or completely decrease the pain within a few minutes. If the pain is completely alleviated, one can be fairly certain the subacromial space pathology is causing the pain.

If the patient's x-rays show considerable degenerative joint disease of the shoulder itself, an injection into the glenohumeral joint should be considered. Technically it's a more difficult injection, but if accomplished correctly and the pain diminishes substantially then voila, mission accomplished.

If the patient has a disc herniation in the neck, called a cervical disc herniation, it can result in shoulder pain. Also, if a patient has spinal stenosis in the neck, one or multiple nerve roots may be compressed from arthritis. The cervical spinal stenosis resulting in pinched nerve(s) may cause considerable shoulder pain and may be seen as a result of a shoulder problem when in fact it is not.

Keep in mind that even if a person's shoulder pain is being generated from a cervical spine problem, the patient may not have any neck pain at all. So this means it is not a prerequisite for determining whether the neck is the culprit.

So if the shoulder injection(s) either do not help or only partially relieve the person's pain, and the patient has a neck problem, injection(s) can be performed in the neck. These are usually epidural injections around the nerve root being pinched from the herniated disc or the nerve roots being pinched with spinal stenosis.

Defining how much pain is relieved by either the shoulder injection or the cervical injections can define where the pain is being generated. In conjunction with the information from the history and physical examination and imaging studies, physicians should be able to fairly accurately classify the source of the pain.

When pain management patients visit the emergency room, there's always a question of whether or not the person is a legitimate chronic pain patient, or a "drug seeker". Narcotic abuse, in the US is at an all-time high and doctors need to be very careful about prescribing opiates to patients with subjective pain complaints in the ER.

When a patient presents illegitimately, he or she is often younger, well groomed, and often give evasive answers. It may even be difficult for the person to produce identification. They will typically say they are allergic to certain pain medications and often know a lot more medical terminology than the average consumer.

How should doctors effectively treat patients in the emergency room with complaints of pain with the hefty amount of drug seekers coming through? The answer is with common sense.

Most doctors in the emergency room have "seen it all". They have seen patients who have the medication "stolen", heard all the stories of medications being accidentally flushed down the toilet, and dealt with plenty of patients who have recently been terminated by their pain management doctor.

Most emergency room doctors will prescribe a small amount of narcotic medication for short term use. This means prescribing 2 to 3 pills per day for a duration of 2 to 3 days. Generic drugs are often utilized because they maintain pain management effectiveness that have a lower street value.

Often times long acting opioids are utilized. This version of opiates has a lower street value and a higher potential for reducing a fatal overdose. Granted, the patient can crush up the long-acting medication and abuse it, so this may not be as effective as you think. The combination medications of opiates along with acetaminophen are harder to sell and have a lower street value. Patients must be instructed about the risk of medication overdose.

Along with providing a short-term narcotic, the follow-up should be provided so that the patient can see their primary care doctor or normal pain management doctor soon after the ER visit. Detailed records should be kept because if the patient is a drug seeker inevitably he or she will be coming back to get more supplies.

It is important in this day and age to try and give patients some benefit of the doubt. One of the main reasons that a lot of patients are undertreated for their pain is the high suspicion of narcotic abuse and drug seeking. Even if the patient is slurring speech and appears high, they still may in fact be a legitimate patient. So being rational and maintaining common sense is the best approach.

Sciatica from a pinched nerve affects 1% of Americans at any one point in time. That's well over 3 million people! It involves a burning, searing type of pain that goes down a person's leg, resulting from a herniated disc pushing on an individual's nerve root in either the lumbar or sacral part of the spine. Can it lead to permanent nerve damage?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is yes. Here's the explanation. If you take your finger and push on a person's nerve root while he is awake, it does not hurt. That would be a ridiculous experiment, but the point is the pain from sciatica does not come from the simple act of compression. It comes from the resulting inflammation of the compression.

The inflammation sparks up pain and it typically travels down the area where that nerve root supplies sensation. For L3 that's on the front of the thigh, for L4 it's past the knee on the front of the shin. For L5 it's past the knee on the side of the calf and foot, and for S1 it's on the back of the calf and also on the side of the foot and a bit on the bottom. The nerve root supplied regions vary a bit from person to person, and not everyone walks out of a textbook.

So a herniated disc is pushing on the nerve root, sparking up inflammation, and causing sciatica pain. It may also cause pins and needles and/or numbness. These symptoms are obviously annoying to patients, but do not mean surgery is necessary. With these issues the surgery becomes a quality of life decision.

If conservative treatments fail, surgery has approximately a 95% chance of taking away the pain. Even a successful surgery for pain relief may still not fix the numbness pain. A significant amount of patients have numbness that never goes away, even if the surgery was technically done perfectly. The vast majority of patients don't care as long as the pain is gone. If the numbness involves the bottom of the foot though, it may be exceptionally annoying.

This is a hard phenomenon to predict, and is not the fault of the surgeon. It's the fault of the person's body. If a person develops muscle weakness from the nerve root pinching, and it does not improve over 4 to 8 weeks, surgery should be considered. Why? The reason is that the longer the muscle weakness, such as a foot drop is watched, the higher the chance it will never get better after surgery. Even if the surgery is technically done perfectly as well.

Epidural injections may allow patients to avoid surgery. They may do 2 things by decreasing the inflammation around nerve roots that are compressed. They may alleviate pain, and potentially allow the muscle weakness to improve. So pat your pain doctor on the back if that happens, as surgery is not fun. It's typically uneventful, but does entail some minor risks.

If you want to prevent sports injuries you better make time for warm-ups and cool-downs. Sports injury prevention concepts are becoming more accepted by personal athletic trainers, sports doctors, physical therapists and athletes. It is finally starting to sink in and it is about time. The concept is simple; warming up prior to rigorous activity and cooling down afterward prevents injury while skipping warm-ups and cool-downs leads to injury. These two basic principles may save you the heartache of being sidelined from your favorite sport.

Warming up refers to preliminary active use of muscles prior to physical performance. Muscles can be warmed-up passively with hot tub therapy and saunas; soft tissue manipulation like massage, ultrasound therapy or diathermy. This article will focus on the active methods of tissue warm-up. The warm-up increases the core temperatures of organ systems and the musculoskeletal system. It also provides the means of gently and slowly stretching and heating all elements of the soft tissues that will be active during the sport. These tissues include the tendons, ligaments, fascia, collagen fibers and cartilage. For any work load involving an increase in activity the metabolic rate is increased on a cellular, organ system and muscular level. As the body temperature raises, metabolic rate, blood flow and oxygen transport increase as well. The ability of the brain to send messages to the muscles and organ systems and vice versa is obviously important. This process of nerve impulse transmission is accelerated as core temperature rises. All of these physiologic changes adapt more efficiently if the body is properly primed with a decent warm-up. The warm-up effort should be gradual, steady and continue for fifteen to thirty minutes. This allows the body to ready itself for blood sugar, oxygen and adrenaline utilization and to stimulate maximum capillary response within the muscles, heart and lungs.

The type of warm-up performed should center first on a general activity that will stimulate organ systems and muscle globally followed by a more specific approach that targets the muscle of the sport. This activity should not be sport specific. It should just help increase body temperature and directly correlate with the actual sport to be performed. Jump rope, jumping jacks, leg raises, deep squats without weights, push-ups and sit-ups are excellent general exercises to prepare you for any sport. The second part of the warm-up should be sports specific and involve the most dominant aspects of movement with in that sport. Runners for instance should start out with ten to fifteen minutes of jumping jacks, and sit-ups followed by the more sport specific activity of ten to fifteen minutes of light jogging and basic sport specific stretches for the legs and core muscles such as calves, hamstrings, quads and psoas muscles. For those sports that require lifting, throwing or swinging, the muscles of the arm and shoulder should be the major focus in part two of the warm-up. Foot ball players should throw a few light passes. Baseball players should throw a few low to medium velocity pitches or hit a few imaginary balls with an actual bat.

Warm-up is achieved when the body shows an increase in cardiovascular output with heart rate increase and sweating. Try not to allow a cool down period to take place after your warm-up. For the best results, start your main workout no more than fifteen minutes after completing part two of your warm-up.

Many authorities believe that cooling down may be more important than warming up. It allows the body to gradually return to normal resting states of metabolism, cardiac and respiratory output, liver function, and nerve impulse transmission. Recovery should be active in nature and last fifteen to thirty minutes. Active recovery cool-down options such as jogging to walking and stretching during cool-down allows a faster decrease of lactic acid in the muscle tissues and blood level concentrations. Moreover, adequately cooling down after physical activity decreases muscle soreness, increases post-exercise flexibility and mobility and results in less fatigue and faster overall rates of recovery without pain.

The downfall of all of this extra work is that it can add up to an hour of precious time to your workout regimen. However, the extra effort can indirectly save you from the heartache of being sidelined indefinitely from an injury that could have been prevented. It just takes a little more discipline, conviction and dedication to add these sports injury prevention strategies to your routine. Keep up the good work and remember to warm it up and cool it down.

If you or someone you know has been diagnosed with a bulging lumbar disc or other type of lumbar disc damage then you are probably researching different treatment options. No doubt you have discovered the vast benefits of non-surgical spinal decompression. Being a conservative therapy it does not involve the high risks associated with drugs and surgery and generally has a much higher success rate both short and long term. The key is to ensure that the equipment you are being treated with is FDA cleared to provide true non-surgical spinal decompression, such as the DRX9000.

Non-surgical spinal decompression is much different than old-fashioned traction in its ability to create negative pressure (think suction) inside the disc to draw in water and nutrients from the surrounding blood supply. This is what repairs and heals the disc from within and returns it to as much normal function as is possible considering the condition of the disc prior to injury. The ability to repair bulging, herniated, protruded, and degenerative lumbar discs with good long-term prognosis is virtually unique in the health care industry.

There are several things that must take place before true decompression is accomplished inside the disc (intra-discal). The lumbar musculature must be completely relaxed or it will involuntarily resist the stretching forces of the machine and negate any benefit. You may feel a lot of stretching around your spine with traction but true intra-discal decompression is not occurring. Once both the patient and the lumbar musculature are comfortable and relaxed, the next thing is to target the proper disc level to decompress it and not those adjacent. This level of specificity is imperative to create the proper forces in the right direction. These forces must also be applied in a logarithmic progression to cause a "pumping action" by gradually and comfortably pulling and releasing. The amount of pull is calculated by considering the patient weight and spinal condition.

The above paragraphs are a good description of the attributes of the DRX9000 and that is why the Spinal Decompression Institute in Ocala uses it exclusively. It has a high success rate and is very patient friendly, offering a comfortable and relaxing treatment experience.

If you have herniated discs, degenerative disc disease, and facet joint syndrome, the treatment that would probably be recommended to you is spinal decompression, a non surgical and non invasive treatment. VAX-D Therapy is one of the most popular and successful forms of spinal decompression. During this type of therapy, the spine is stretched gently, taking the pressure off of the compressed disc as well as the vertebrae, granting an enormous amount of relief from back pain.

Spinal decompression results in long term pain relief for many patients; although the treatment is used most often for patients with herniated discs. Compressed discs cause patients' pain because of the pressure that surrounds the nerves of the spine. With decompression therapy, the discs are brought closer together thereby removing the pressure on the nerves of the spine and alleviating the pain.

Another cause of nerve compression is degenerative disc disease which is a common cause of back pain. The use of spinal decompression therapy in degenerative disc disease also relieves pain.

Arthritic changes of the bones of the vertebrae will cause facet joint syndrome. Spinal decompression is used to treat facet joint syndrome but to date there are only a few results that this therapy option relieves pain permanently. Spinal decompression therapy does result in less pain because it does open more space between the vertebrae.

Doctors no longer recommend the old weight and pulley method of spinal decompression because they feel that this method does not work for back pain. They now recommend the new state-of-the-art machines which are far more beneficial for relieving back or neck pain than the old method.

Spinal decompression therapy as a form of treatment to relieve back and/or neck pain is favored by most doctors because it is non invasive and because surgery (which is invasive) may not always result in relief. Surgery has risks and can also have complications.

There is a time when this therapy method is used as a placebo, and that is when people suffering from degenerative disc disease and facet syndrome say that they feel certain types of pain. Although their condition is valid, the pain they say they feel may be psychosomatic, which makes them claim they feel pain. In such cases, this type of therapy is used as a form of placebo treatment.

Anyone suffering from degenerative disc disease, facet syndrome, herniated discs, or any other form of back pain, should become fully informed about the latest methods that are being used to relieve the pain. You can get information from your health care provider or from the Spinal Decompression Association online. Being fully informed about the latest methods of spinal decompression may help relieve your pain, and depending on the type of back or neck pain you are suffering from, may give you permanent relief.

Bala Cynwyd near Philadelphia Pennsylvania has several clinics available to ask questions about the latest in this safe and beneficial method of therapy. Whether your back pain is new due to an accident or injury, or whether it has been with you for years, you can get the information and the help you need, regarding alleviating back pain.