Hey, what’s up everybody, Dr. Hunter Merriman here with Next Level Chiropractic, your chiropractic for low back pain in Bradenton, FL. And today’s video is on low back pain.
Statistically, up to 80% of people will experience low back pain at some point in their life. And my guess is that if you’re watching this video right now, that may have, unfortunately already happened to you. And I’m sorry about that, but I want to help you with that as well.
Low Back Pain Assessment with Chiropractic in Bradenton, FL
Now, in regards to a low back pain in this office, there’s three primary things we look for. Spinal motion, spinal alignment, and spinal stability. Those three things are necessary in order to prevent injuries like disc herniations, muscle strains, other conditions like osteoarthritis, facet syndrome, disc degeneration, that kind of stuff. The things that put people in this office, unfortunately.
Now, in regards to motion. In the spine, we have 24 vertebrae, 24 movable vertebrae, okay. And the lumbar spine, since we’re talking about low back pain, there’s 5, but there are a number of joints that make up articulations in this region.
Each one of those joints has a responsibility for a certain percentage of the overall movement that you’re trying to achieve; whether you’re bending over to pick something up, whether you’re twisting to turn around, look behind you, whatever it is now, thanks to sedentary activity, tight muscles, injuries, adhesions, and restrictions can build up inside these tiny joints back here, what we call facet joints.
When that happens, and those joints get stuck, when you go to bend over for some type of movement, that joint will fail and that responsibility gets put on a different joint and a different muscle fiber or muscle group.
They may or may not be ready for that amount of stress and that’s when, ping, next thing, you’re walking in here all crooked and bent over. So that’s where the chiropractic adjustments come in.
Chiropractic Low Back Pain Treatment in Bradenton, FL
Our purpose as chiropractors is to find regions in the spine that are stuck, that are not moving appropriately. Maybe they’re twisted and out of alignment a little bit, and then reestablish motion
in those areas, okay.
Now, the second thing, alignment. Three different types of alignment. First type is from the front. From the front, we want just a straight vertical column, no curves, because if you have a curve, we call that scoliosis, okay. So we want that straight up and down.
Now from the side, it’s completely different. From the side, we want three curves, okay. But for today’s discussion, we’re going to focus on the low back. What we want in the low back in regards to curvature is a nice, deep about a negative 40 degree curve in there, okay. The purpose of that curve is to distribute stress appropriately down the spine.
Now, these big thick joints back here, these Facet joints, these are built to handle a lot of load, a lot of stress. Now, when people start to lose that curvature what happens is stress is now distributed inappropriately, and it puts tremendous pressure on the discs in between the vertebrae and that can cause bulges out the back, herniations, etc. So we want to keep that curve in there.
Chiropractic Low Back Pain Exam in Bradenton, FL
Now, the way we assess for that curve is by x-rays. We take some films of the low back. We run them through some state-of-the-art spinal analysis software that we have, and we can actually measure the exact curve in degrees that you may have.
Maybe negative 10 degrees, instead of the negative 40, maybe it’s positive, hopefully not. But when we have that measurement, now we can set goals and we can track progress over time with those metrics, metrics, it’s fantastic, okay.
Now the third thing, stability, I can not stress stability enough in regards to the low back, the lumbar spine. As I mentioned before, our spine is just a vertical column. It’s like a mast on a sailboat. It requires guidewires for stability. That way we can walk upright, okay.
Now, you already have a built-in core set if you will. We have the transverse abdominis muscles on the side. We have the rectus abdominis on the front. We have quadratus lumborum.
All of these muscles are designed to squeeze and create some pressure around your lumbar spine to keep that thing stable. When you’re bending over to pick something up, and I don’t care if you’re bending over to pick up 500 pounds or bending over to tie your shoe laces, your spine better be stable.
Otherwise one of these discs can pop and next thing you know, you’re on the floor and you can’t get back up and some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. Stability is critical.
So motion, alignment, stability; this is how we get you out of pain and keep you at a pain so you can get back to living your life.
Thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, please hit like, share it with a friend, subscribe, write a comment below. And we’ll see you on the next one, take care.
