When it comes to pain, most people can relate to this: After about 2-3 weeks of progressively worsening pain, you begin to wonder if it’s something that you need to get checked out. Once you finally fold and head to your Primary Care or a physical medicine practitioner like a chiropractor or physical therapist the thing you want most is to find out WHY that pain is there… WHAT is causing it? To help get your answers imaging may be done: X-Ray, MRI Etc. or orthopedic testing to narrow down where the pain is coming from. Let’s say imaging is done and a report comes back stating you have “disk degeneration.” According to a study by Brinjikji et al., 2015, when assessing pain free populations with MRI’s 52% of 30 year olds and 88% of 60 year olds came back with this finding. Even more so, 30% of 20 year olds and about 40% of pain free 60 year olds showed disc herniations on MRI’s. In other words, while these do cause pain, they may not exactly be causing the pain you’re experiencing, and even if they are there are many other factors to pain that must be considered.

What’s the difference??

With a lot of patients, or clients interested in strength programming, I frequently get asked what the best exercise(s) is for losing fat at X, Y, or Z is. Take stubborn belly fat for example… the answer has to be crunches right?? No? No. Planks then?? Ehhh, nope.

TMJD (temporomandibular joint dysfunction), or jaw pain is increasingly common in America. It is estimated that 10 million Americans experience jaw pain in their lifetime. Dentists even report that 8/10 patients report jaw pain or bruxism (night grinding).

Having sufficient mobility in your thoracic spine (midback) is key, for a lot of reasons. If you lose mobility in this region of the spine, the joints around it (shoulders and neck) have to work extra hard to make up for this loss of motion

Maintenance care is a term that can be defined as healthcare directed towards maintaining optimal body function. In chiropractic, this would include following a regularly scheduled adjustment once every 2-4 weeks. Maintenance care is a type of preventative care that is recommended so that recurrences of painful episodes are lessened. Just a few benefits of maintenance care are as followed:

Dry needling is a soft tissue therapy developed by physical therapists, and recently has entered the chiropractic realm. If you’ve been in the office, you’ve probably heard me talk about it, or even have had it done. In the eyes of many healthcare professionals, this IS the gold standard of soft tissue therapy. Let’s break it down on what exactly dry needling is, how it works, and how it may help you!

For our first blog of the summer, we’re talking back pain and golf! This is a very common thing I see in my clinic. Today we’ll address why back pain occurs when golfing, and the body-swing connection—how the different parts of the body are related to each part of the swing.

Back in Action 💪