Assessing Low Back Pain | Chiropractor for Low Back Pain in Mount Pleasant, TX
Hey guys, Dr. Courtney here from Durrum Chiropractic and family wellness. Today, again, we’re talking about low back pain. But I wanted to go over with you some of the tools and the techniques that we use to create a differential diagnosis and find out what’s actually causing your problem in your lower back.
Determining the Root Cause of Your Low Back Pain
One of the things I want you to understand first, when we’re talking about low back pain, is that low back pain is actually a spine problem, it’s in most cases, it’s a nerve problem, we know that your brain controls all of the functions in the body, and that your brain sends signals down through this spinal cord, and out to the body. So for all of the cells, the organs and the tissues in your body to truly be healthy, this needs to be a clear, smooth connection flowing up and down through that body, the brain has got to have a clear pathway to send signals down. But the reverse is also true. Your body’s organs and systems need a clear pathway and route back up that spinal cord to be able to tell the brain what’s happening in the viral environment around it, as well. All right. Now, most folks are understand that when you have problems in the spine, or a pinched nerve, something that we would refer to and call a subluxation in the spine, they always assume they’re going to be able to feel that. And in some cases, you can. But I want you to understand that that’s not true in every case. All right.
Your Nervous System and How it Relates to Low Back Pain
So this chart represents the sensory nerves like your spine. And the sensory nerves are actually less than 10% of the nerves in your body. So only approximately 9% of the nerves in your body are sensory meaning that those tell you how you feel, and do you feel good, are you experiencing pain. So the other 90% of the organs in your in your body and in your nervous system are controlling the function of these organs and systems. So everything from your vision, your heart, your blood pressure, the lungs, so your respiratory system, your stomach, colon, the digestive system, your reproductive system, these are all controlled by what’s called autonomic nerves of the nervous system. And again, this represents about 90% of the nerves in the body. So you feel the 9% sensory, these autonomic nerves, you don’t feel. So we need to have a way in a tool to be able to test your nervous system to know primarily, how are these nerves functioning. So for that we do a spinal scans, we do two different sets of spinal scans, the first one that we do is called a Thermography Scan. And this scan rolls up your back. And it’s actually measuring and testing the temperature of the spinal cord and the nerves directly beside your spinal cord. Now the temperature of the body right there is going to correlate with the nerve system because we know that it’s the nerves that’s regulating and controlling that that body temperature. So anywhere that there’s inflammation along the nerve, our thermography system is going to pick that up and be able to pinpoint and show us where there’s problems where the nerve along your spine.
Using an EMG Scan to Measure Muscle Tone
The other scan that we do is call this surface EMG. The surface EMG scan is much like an EKG, it’s measuring the the muscle tone, or the muscle action, again, right alongside that spinal cord. And that correlates with your nerve activity. And because muscles don’t move on their own, they only move when the brain and the nerve tells them to move. Okay, so if you have areas of spasm, or and oftentimes we’ll see a reading really high on one side, but super low, or completely lack of tone on the opposite side. This creates instability in the spine, and your nervous system. All right. So a good analogy here would be the tires on your car, they need to be in alignment. If those two tires aren’t properly aligned, that creates imbalance in your car. And we know that that’s going to wear the tires down much faster, they’re going to deteriorate much faster. So when the muscles along your spine are out of balance, that actually actually speeds up the deterioration and the degeneration of your spine. Now we know our bodies smart, and we know that God designed our body to be healthy over a lifetime. It’s our job to take care of it and make sure that we keep it performing at a peak level so that that degeneration and deterioration doesn’t occur.
Using X-rays to Determine if Subluxations Exist
Now in addition to the computer scans, we also do an extremely thorough set of x rays. And we do this on almost every patient that comes in because the X rays show us a number of things. Number one, they’re going to show us whether or not you have subluxations so we can give you a definitive answer on whether or not you’re in the right place, whether or not we’re going to be able to help you. They also give us a baseline so that we can establish where you are now, because in the future, we’re going to circle back around, usually, approximately after that first four months of care, we’re going to come back and we’re going to repeat all of these tests, we’ll do a side by side comparison, so that we can see what type of progress that you’ve made. And we’ll be able to demonstrate and show how much you’ve benefited from the gear. But it also tells us what do we need to focus on next? And what type of care might you need moving forward. The other good and really, really valuable information we get from X rays is it demonstrates and shows us how long you’ve had your problem. Okay, so the longer that you’ve had subluxation or misalignment of the spine, that’s going to correlate with more deterioration, possibly disc degeneration, Osteophyte bones formation was the loss of a good healthy curvatures that the spine, and quite possibly in some, in some cases, scoliosis, or lateral curvatures than the spine. The good news as when we do these post X rays, man, that’s a fun visit, we get to do that side by side comparison. And so often we just see drastic and dramatic changes in those spines. And that’s really fun for us as doctors and the physicians taking care of you. But also for the patients. It’s rewarding for them to see that the efforts, the time, the money and the home exercises, everything that they’ve invested back into their care has truly paid off. All right, so we do an extremely thorough evaluation. In addition to those things, of course, we’re going to do orthopedic, neurological evaluation and posture assessments, and chiropractic exam palpation to find exactly where those correlating, subluxations and nerve interference are.
We’re Here to Help!
We have a wonderful team of doctors here, our hearts are really in the right place. And we just love to see our patients get well we’d love to see them get better and get back to doing the things that they wanted to things that they have to do and most of all the things that they love to do. We like to see you getting back to being who God designed you to be okay. So if this is something again that interests you, or you want to have your spine evaluated and checked out to find out exactly what’s going on, click on the link below. We’ll get you scheduled just as soon as we can get you added, and checked out. Hope See you soon!
