Alleviate Low Back Pain

The number one cause of work compensation injuries in the U. S. is low back pain. If this leads to surgery the total cost can exceed $175,000 very easily to the employer not to mention the anguish, loss of income and pain and suffering to the employee. A "successful" spinal surgery is no pain for 1 year and this only happens in 25% of surgeries. The remaining 75% either stay the same or get worse, if they have a second failed back surgery, 80% of the patients commit suicide. Obviously surgery is not an option that should be taken lightly and without exploring all other possible avenues of treatment.

There are numerous ways that spinal surgery can be done but they almost all include cutting through 9 layers of muscles to get to the spine which is going to entail 9 layers of scar tissue for starters. One method is to cut out or scrape out the disc which is the spacer between the bones of the spine and can break down in various degrees, from getting a weak spot and a resulting bulge of the inner material (slipped disc) which is kind of like a pimple that then puts pressure on the nerve and causes the pain or other resulting abnormal effects to the body. The next thing that can happen is the "pimple" can break open and spills its contents onto the spinal nerves which causes the patients symptoms. This type of surgery is attempting to take the irritating material off of the nerve.

Another type of surgery is where they have to cut off the back half of the vertebra and throw it away which is called a laminectomy. They then try to create more stability by chiseling bone fragments off of the patients hips to fill in the gap created by the removal of the back of the vertebra and the bone above, it is then used as an anchor to try to get to the two bones to grow together which is called spinal fusion. Yet another method is to inject an enzyme into the disc that causes it to be digested so there is no remaining disc, theoretically, to cause symptoms. There are also other approaches from a surgical viewpoint but they all have the same 25% success rate as there has not been any improvement in surgical results in the 40 plus years I have been a chiropractor, the only thing new is the ways that have been tried.

The chiropractic approach is to find the cause of the pain, usually this is because of an involvement of the nervous system (a "pinched nerve") and remove by one of several ways thus enabling the patients body to once again heal itself as it is designed to do. This is done without the use of drugs, which by definition all have side effects, and without surgery. This leads to a very safe type of care with the highest success rate of any methodology and this has been proven by numerous medical studies. The ways the cause can be removed are many. It has been researched that there are at least 250 different named techniques that chiropractors use to attempt to bring the body back to the point that it is able to heal itself and therefore allow the patient to return to healthy state. Alas, if returning to health was that easy everyone could get in a much better state easily, but there are other areas that influence the bodies health and ability to heal itself.

One of which is nutrition which has went downhill significantly over just my lifetime. This is because of numerous chemicals that have been added into the food chain. Food that has had the nutritional value destroyed in many ways. Trying to eat what was normal in the past doesn't give you the same nutrition now because it is being grown in nutrition depleted soils and the nutrients are simply not there. This necessitates needing to take vitamins and minerals to get what the body needs to function. This at least can be handled in an affordable way now with the much better nutrition information and products that are available, ie. many if not most of my patients basic needs can be handled with only 4 products.

One also has to exercise as what we do not use, we lose. A regular exercise program done 3-4 times per week can cause an enormous change in health when the other health factors are kept in also.

There are also a multitude of poisons that we can be exposed to, from automobile exhaust to brushing our teeth (read the warning on your tube of toothpaste sometime). The problem with many types of chemicals are that they are stored in the bodies fat cells for an undetermined time, possibly for many years or until that fat cell breaks down and the poison is then released into the body again. A famous example of this is the "free trip" one can get years after they had taken LSD. This could happen to them at any time and anywhere with sometimes life threatening results when it is released into the blood stream again.

So to get and keep your health:
1) Eat good, healthy foods and take the needed supplements.
2) Stay away from poisons.
3) Exercise regularly.
4) Get your spine checked for nerve blocks regularly and remove them if found by your Junction City KS chiropractor so that the body can do what it was designed to do which is heal itself.