How a Chiropractor Can Help You

Posted on: 19 July 2023

Here are two ways that a chiropractor can help a person who has back pain.

They can do spinal adjustments on the person

Chiropractors routinely do spinal adjustments on their patients who have back pain. When doing these adjustments, the chiropractor will use their hands (as well as specialist medical instruments) to apply gentle, controlled and very precise pressure to joints within the person's spine that this professional believes to be misaligned or not functioning as optimally as they could. These alignments can restore the mobility and alignment of the patient's spine.

This, in turn, can improve or eliminate a person's back pain in multiple ways. For example, these adjustments can relieve the pressure that the misaligned joints may have been placing on the spinal nerves. This can result in relief from nerve-related conditions like sciatica. Similarly, when a chiropractor corrects misalignments within a person's spine, this can also eliminate or reduce the painful muscle tension and spasms that this misalignment may have been causing. Lastly, spinal adjustments can improve the functionality of a person's spinal joints, which can increase their mobility and reduce any joint stiffness or achiness the person was experiencing previously. 

They can evaluate and help them to correct their posture

Back pain can often be caused or exacerbated by a person's bad posture. As such, if a person goes to a chiropractor because of their back pain, this professional might also do a full evaluation of the patient's posture, and give them advice on how they can correct it. To do this evaluation, they might ask the patient to sit in the way they normally do when, for example, they're working at their desk or on the sofa watching television, and also ask them to stand in the position they usually do when they need to stand for an extended period. This will help the chiropractor to see which aspects of the patient's posture might need to be corrected.

They might, for example, notice that the patient slumps down when sitting on a chair or that they lean on one side of their body more than the other when standing. This former could put extra pressure on the person's spinal discs and on the spine's supporting muscles, which could cause nerve pain and muscle aches. The latter might lead to muscle imbalances in the back and more pressure being placed on certain spinal joints, both of which could cause back pain. If a chiropractor can point out these issues to the patient and offer them alternative, comfortable positions to sit and stand in, they could help them to improve their back pain quite a bit.

Contact a clinic like Goodwood Chiropractic for more info.