Connected Chiropractic Manages Back Pain Fear with our Chiropractic Patients
Had back pain before? Yes? It’s natural to fear its recurrence, but do not let it hijack your life! This time of year, just think of Santa. Think he’s experienced back pain before lugging all those packages and parcels? Connected Chiropractic imagines so! Santa cannot quit, and neither can you. Elgin chiropractic care can help manage new back pain and chronic back pain and direct our Elgin back pain sufferers to live a bit more fear-lessly and confidently this holiday season.
FEAR OF BENDING
Your Elgin chiropractor realizes this: many low back pain patients fear bending forward. Researchers looked into this common clinical finding and found that this fear of bending forward also influences postural sway or balance by interfering with hip balance control, bringing about weight shifting from side to side to keep balance. (1) What is an unwanted consequence of being off-balance? A fall. Connected Chiropractic finds it very important to help our back pain patients – especially our older back pain patients – to keep their balance!
HELP TO KEEP BALANCE AND DECREASE FEAR
“There’s an app for that!” Just what our older Elgin chiropractic patients with balance issues want to hear?! As much as “tech” can annoy a few of its users, particularly some older users, it can help! The novel smartphone-based Gait&Balance App is available. Researchers have documented that it is able to track age-related differences in balance not typically noted during clinical exam measurements like postural stability, step time, step length and cycle. (2) These insights can help healthcare providers like your chiropractor design a more effective and individualized treatment plan to reduce fear of movement and enhanced balance. This is quite hopeful, so much so that chiropractic researchers are doing more research study to quantify the benefits of multimodal chiropractic care in its ability to affect gait, balance and/or fall risk and prevention. (3) One positive study with older lumbar spinal stenosis patients (average age 83.5 years) found that their postural sway and entropy as well as function and symptomatology were improved with a course of chiropractic care including Cox® Technic Flexion Distraction Decompression spinal manipulation. (4) Connected Chiropractic uses this treatment along with nutrition and exercise to help our patients keep moving fearlessly and balanced!
BIOMARKERS FOR BACK PAIN
One new nutrition finding this month may also aid this effort. It comes from researchers analyzing levels of biomarkers – C-reactive protein, vitamin D, neuropeptide Y and others - in low back pain patients tested via blood tests with pain and disability. Vitamin D which keeps appearing in many health news reports today also appears to be a potential biomarker for back pain relief and disability. A reliable randomized control study found a relationship between vitamin D levels and changes in both pain and disability for low back pain patients cared for with spinal manipulation. (5) One day, we may do blood tests to check for back pain risks!
CONTACT Connected Chiropractic
Listen to this PODCAST with Dr. Joel Dixon on The Back Doctors Podcast with Dr. Michael Johnson as he illustrates his helping a Vietnam veteran manage his back pain for 20 years, incorporating the Cox® Technic System of Spinal Pain Management.
Make your Elgin chiropractic appointment soon. Calling all our Elgin back pain patients! Bring us your back pain and your fear of back pain, bending and falling. We can help you manage them as well as Santa fearlessly and efficiently delivers all his presents in one night!
