In October, we have something called Bone and Joint Health Awareness Week, something that there are a lot of clinical practitioners who like raising awareness on health issues relating to bone and joint diseases. In our clinic as a chiropractic clinic, one of the things we see a lot of or we hear a lot from our community is patients that have bulging discs, herniated discs, neck and back pain, and disk issues are really serious issues. And I wanted to give you just a little bit of an insight as to what causes disc issues.
So if you have someone in your life that you know, has a disc issue if you have a disc issue, or if you just want to help raise awareness for bone and joint health awareness, please share this video you don’t know who might be watching that could benefit from this information. So with that said, let’s get started. And I’m going to talk about the neck but just so you know, your lower back in a lot of ways is like your neck just a lot bigger. Okay.
Now, if we look at the neck, this illustration here is a person looking in this direction. So if you were looking at my neck, from the side, the bones themselves should be arched forward towards the throat, and the same thing in the lower back should come forward towards the belly, Okay, when a baby is learning how to crawl an infant, they pick their head up, that’s one of the theories as to what might help that curve and the neck begin. And when they get on all fours their belly sags.
Again, that might be why or how that lumbar curve starts to come in. These are normal and natural things. The reason I bring it up, let your babies spend time on their bellies, let your babies spend time on their hands and knees, and don’t put them in those little cute little chairs that make them sit up right away. They need to build those muscles, they need that belly to relax. So just a little tidbit of information that you know, the little walkers and the chairs, those are adorable.
However, these curves as we’ll see in a minute, are really important. So let your child develop naturally as if it didn’t have all that technology going on. The curve is like a big spring in your spine and it’s supported by your discs, right here. Those discs are like little cushions little jelly doughnuts in between the backbones and behind those backbones, runs your spinal cord which is pretty important you know, your spinal cord is like the power cord to your appliances that’s how I teach my kids.
You know if you think of the word cord kind of reminds you of a power cord that’s what gives your body life It gives it power, you know, the brain sends those messages down the spinal cord out the nerves to every organ, cell, and tissue in your body. And that’s kind of what keeps you going. So the job of your spine is to keep you up, right, give you a little spring, but also so to protect your spinal cord.
Now, here’s what happens maybe through trauma, accidents, or injuries, or through what we like to call ‘Tech-neck’. So when you’re sitting on your phone, hopefully, you’re not watching this video like this, right? when we are at laptops, or we have our cell phones out or iPads. Remember, this is me right now, and watch what happens when I do this
My neck comes forward and it’s okay to tuck my chin down but if I bring my ears in front of my shoulders, and my head is looking straight down. One of the things that it causes, causes the curve and your neck to reverse sometimes as I said, can be due to repetitive poor posture and technique. It could be due to traumas and what we find in our work. It can be due to misalignment instability and the weight of your head.
So even though you want to stand right over time, your head slowly does this. Kind of like the senior citizen that has the big hump in the back of their head is forward. It doesn’t happen overnight that’s a slow, progressive problem that we want to address and fix. But here’s why, here’s what happens, whether it’s due to trauma, whether it’s due to technique, the way to the head comes forward, changing the curve and the neck from being in this direction here to being in this direction here.
If you think of it like a banana, all bananas have curves, right? If you took a banana for breakfast, and you tried to straighten the banana how or change the direction of the curve, one of the things that happen is those discs those jelly doughnuts get wide in the back and they get compressed in the front. And so that disk comes backward and when that this ball does out in the back. You see what it hits, it hits the spinal cord and that can create some significant problems.
Neck pain is just the tip of the iceberg but the event happens in a lot of cases, we get numbness and tingling down into the arm into the hands, worst case we get weakness and muscle wasting. Same thing in the legs. numbness, tingling, pain, weakness in your muscle strength, and wasting of the muscle tissue. Also, those nerves go up into the head. So a lot of people with disc bulging disc issues can be the cause of some significant facial pain syndromes, migraine headaches, and things of that nature.
Now, pain is bad enough. Over time though, with to the head. When you lose that natural spring, the discs slowly begin to deteriorate and like that big jelly doughnut turns into stale peanut butter and jelly sandwich and turns into beef jerky after that it just slowly loses its height, slowly loses its bounce, and its water and eventually you get into this position where you’ve got some permanent Arthritis. And we can still help those people that have that Arthritis but the bone position is usually the bone arthritis will usually never change.
So the reason we go over this stuff is that you can influence it. You can correct your posture so that it doesn’t get any worse. You can correct your alignment. You can correct what we call spinal subluxations. Those are the stuck individual vertebra is that is irritating the neurology keeping that brain, and power cord remembers from communicating and giving life to your body. So it’s a very significant issue but it does have some specific solutions.
You want to sit up nice and tall, you don’t want to slouch, you want to hold your technology in front of you, not in your lap, when you’re driving in your car, you don’t want to have the car seat back because it’ll make you lean your head forward to see the road you want to have the car seat up so it brings your head up. So you’re looking straight ahead.
But most importantly, you want to have professional guidance, something that you can handle on your own, but specific wedges and twist in your neck. They’re not going to come out on their own just by improving your posture, improve your posture helps, but we needed someone to do a very close evaluation. And that’s kind of where the whole we fill in specific chiropractic care in our office and upper cervical chiropractic care. We start with the weight of your head because we know that the position of your head is going to dictate the position of your spine.
And so if you have any questions on that, please leave them in the comments section below. If you are outside of the greater Pittsburgh area, check out our referral map, https://www.reviveucc.com/referralmap/ and we’ll help you find a professional in your area.
If you are in or around the Cranberry Township area and are looking for a resource to help with bone/spinal care. In that case, you can visit us at the Revive Upper Cervical Chiropractic. Our practice is open Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 9 am to 6 pm; Wednesday from 1 pm to 6 pm. You can also drop by on Fridays between 9 am to 12 noon.
To schedule a consultation with Revive Upper Cervical Chiropractic, call 724-302-3628, or just click the button below.
If you are outside of the local area, you can find an Upper Cervical Doctor near you at www.uppercervicalawareness.com.
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