Osteoporosis

chiropractic osteoporosisIf you suspect that you have osteoporosis (or even osteopenia), you may be concerned about visiting a chiropractor for your headaches, neck or back pain.

While chiropractic adjustments are in no way a treatment for osteoporosis, having this condition does not stop you from visiting a chiropractor.

I believe it would be in your best interest to notify your chiropractor prior to undergoing any of the adjustments where you would typically hear “pops and cracks” and instead opt for some of the adjustment techniques that utilize far less force or impact.

In our office, we do a chiropractic, orthopedic, and neurological examination on every patient. We are always looking to determine what is wrong and if chiropractic care can help. We are also looking for anything in the patient’s history or condition that will cause us to refer them out or to modify the type of adjustments we do for them.

In treating patients with osteoporosis, we are always concerned with the potential fragility of their spine and will treat them accordingly. We may not adjust any areas of concern, or will utilize the Activator adjusting instrument to deliver a low force, yet specific adjustment.

In working with osteoporosis patients, we will also get them working on posture exercises to build up their paraspinal musculature and better support their spine. The dowager hump is a serious spinal problem that often occurs in osteoporotic patients that have poor posture.

By building up their posture muscles and maintain good spinal movement, they should be able to avoid any serious complications from the dowager’s hump. We will often recommend our Posture Confidence DVD or our DVD that has more “sitting” type posture exercise workouts, the Stop Computer Posture DVD.

We can modify any of these movements until we find those exercises that the patient can successfully complete. It’s important that the patient start building up the back muscles. Unfortunately, we find that many of these patients are doing little to no exercise and are continuing to lose bone density because of it.