How Does Getting Adjusted Help Your Problem?

By Dr. Philip Cordova

February 4, 2016


You now know that your nervous system controls everything in your whole body, and that keeping it running at its best will significantly make your body run better and healthier.

So now you’ve visited our office and we’ve determined that chiropractic care can help your condition, so how do we do that? What exactly are we doing with the adjustment to help improve your health, increase your range of motion and eliminate your pain?

How does getting adjusted actually help your problem?

Since our office only accepts patients for care that have a vertebral subluxation (a misalignment in the spine causing pressure on a nerve), we wouldn’t even begin your care unless you have that problem. The symptoms that people have when they walk in the door can vary, and the cause of those symptoms can vary as well.

That’s why do a consultation, listening for clues that your problem is spine related. Then we do an examination consisting of palpation (feeling the spine with our hands), range of motion, chiropractic, orthopedic, and neurological tests.

All of these tests and evaluations are our way of 1) making sure your have a vertebra out of alignment causing your symptom and 2) making sure that there’s nothing else inside of you that would prevent us from beginning chiropractic care.

In most cases, x-ray examination is next. We will only x-ray the areas that we believe are absolutely necessary in checking out your spine. We’ll spend time evaluating and reading your x-rays. While our main focus is looking for bio-mechanical issues, we also do review your tests for any signs of pathology (like cancer or disease).

If we’re all good to go at that point, your chiropractic care will begin.

During chiropractic adjustments, we will relax the spine and feel for the areas of your spine that fixated (stuck), out of alignment, or both. Then we’ll determine which way that vertebra has gone out of place. Each bone can move backwards, forwards, tilt right, tilt left, rotate right, rotate left, and every combination thereof.

Each vertebra can move one of 16 ways out of alignment. Knowing which bone needs to be adjusted and which way it needs to go is important in the success of your chiropractic treatment program.

Your chiropractor will then perform a spinal adjustment, restoring the vertebra back to its proper place. It’s at that moment that your body can start to work the way it’s designed. However, it won’t last. The muscles, used to having the vertebra in the other position, will slowly start to move the bone back out of place.

Ideally, we get the chance to adjust you again (the next day or the day after) before the vertebra returns fully to the out of alignment position. We’ll repeat this process over the course of several weeks until the misaligned vertebra begins to stay in the new position.

The longer the vertebra stays in the new position, the longer you will feel symptom-free, have better range of motion, and will just work better. Each person is different in the areas that need to be addressed, but as soon as we determine which areas need to be adjusted on you, they will be adjusted until you’re better.

It may feel like we’re doing the same thing each time, because we usually are. It’s not the same adjustments for every patient, but it will be the same adjustment on you most of the time so that we can get the vertebra to stay in the correct position.

This simple, small, but important adjustment to your spine allows your body to work as it should. It allows the nerve pressure to be removed, the pain to go away, and the function to be restored. It’s almost crazy that this works, except that it does.

We see people get better every single day.

If for some reason you’re not experiencing better results after a couple of weeks, we will change what we’re doing or make the referral to the necessary healthcare provider to help you get to the next level. We regularly tell patients that our office is not the right place for them during the initial evaluation process, but do not often have to tell patients that we aren’t helping after they’ve started care.

This is a great office to be a part of and we hope you’ll think so too.

Dr. Philip Cordova

About the author

Dr. Philip Cordova is a chiropractor in Houston, Texas. He grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and decided to become a chiropractor after hurting his back as a teenager and getting help from chiropractic care. He is speaker on health & posture. Click Here To Read His Full Bio

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