Welcome

Apr 21, 2009 by Marc Croker

This blog will be a continuing discussion of events, experiences, and thoughts about pain, chiropractic, health and fitness. It is my hope that readers will find some stimulus to improve their own life in some small way.

As a chiropractor it is my daily experience to see people present to the clinic in acute pain and walk out feeling significantly better. A new patient described recently that she had never had immediate relief from other treatments she had received for her lower back condition and was amazed that she could feel so much better on her first visit to the chiropractor. I am constantly dumbfounded that in this the 21st century that back pain is still so commonly misdiagnosed and mistreated. If you have never had any chiropractic before I can highly recommend trying it. The wonderful thing about chiropractic is that when done properly a reduction in symptoms is often achieved immediately.

One of the biggest misconceptions about back pain is that it is the result of a muscular injury. In fact back pain is rarely the result of a muscle injury. Most back pain syndromes are actually the result of inflammation of the facet joints of the spinal column. Joint injuries respond best to manipulation and ice therapy as opposed to massage and heat therapy. As a result, taking the former approach to treating back injuries is far more successful than treating the back with soft tissue therapy and prescribing exercises to ‘strengthen’ the back muscles. Now to be fair it is impossible to treat back pain without some form of muscle therapy as the body needs to be treated wholistically for full recovery but to ignore the joints of the spine as a cause of pain is to throw away any real hope of finding any long lasting pain relief.