What Is Text Neck?

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Hi, Dr. Steve Battaglino here. I want to talk today about what’s been called by various names, one of them is text neck. Basically, it’s a phenomenon where, because as a culture, we’re looking so much at our smartphones, our tablets, and so forth, we’re looking down like this all the time, and it’s basically putting our neck in this posture so much. And for so many people across the board, that it’s actually having an epidemic effect on our posture; not just in the neck, but all throughout the spine. I’ve never seen anything quite like this in the past. There’s heavy backpack use that has been tied to postural changes, but not like this, not on the scale that this is.

I want to look at some x-rays with you and show you the effects that it has on the neck and the body, and we can kind of extrapolate the effect that it has on the body through the nervous system, which gets affected as well, which we’ll touch on in a minute.

These are before and after x-ray. The jaw is here and the patient’s looking this way. So you see the curve and the first x-ray on the left is actually reversed and then after some care, probably after a couple months of care, we’re starting to see a positive curve and it’s starting to go in the right direction. This kinda shows the same thing where there’s a real straight curve on the left and then a more pronounced healthy curve on the right side. This is the same thing. The before x-ray, it actually looks like the person is doing this, that’s the posture that they’re in. That’s actually what their normal is in the beginning, in the pre x-ray. The post x-ray or the after x-ray, we see that it’s starting to straighten up more, it’s still kind of a straight curve. We’d want to see more of a curvature like this in the neck, but that’s a good start.

And then this is actually an MRI, so this is the same orientation, so the patient’s looking this direction. This is the spinal cord inside. You can see where the curvature is reversed, that it’s putting pressure on the spinal cord right here. So, this is actually something that we want to relieve so that the body can function its best and be the healthiest it can be, and also so that the patient is not having a ton of arthritis in their neck as they age, and there’s so many different symptoms that can arise when you put pressure on the nerves that are controlling things.

This, again, is a reversed curvature here and this is basically same type of thing as we just saw, where this curve is reversed in that middle part. This infographic shows the effects on the rest of the spine with regard to how much the head weighs. So when the head’s in different positions, when it’s really up far forward it weighs a lot more, and it puts a lot of stress on the spine on down to compensate for that. This kinda shows with a picture kind of the affected area and why it’s happening. He’s looking at his phone all the time. Again, before and after here.

When we look at where those nerves are coming from in the neck, so it puts some pressure on this area in the mid neck, that’s where nerves are going down to the arms, but also to the heart and lungs. And we got nerve flow up at the very top that goes all over the place to help regulate stuff. So, with chiropractic care we can help reverse the effects of this new phenomenon, text neck, or I’ve heard it called technology hunchback or all these different names. But essentially it’s that what it is. We can help through chiropractic care to reverse this problem and greatly help the overall health of our patients because we’re removing stress from the nervous system and also heading off a lot of arthritic changes before they happen.

This is Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic, and this has been your health minute.

Why Chiropractic Maintenance Care?

Hi. Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic. I want to talk a little about maintenance care today.

A patient will come into our office and have some sort of problem. Usually, pain but it can be other things like dizziness, heart palpitations, numbness, tingling, headaches, all kinds things like that.

Once they go through what’s called an Initial Corrective Care Plan designed to address those acute symptoms, and get the body starting to heal from the injuries that are causing those symptoms, we then phase into maintenance care. Maintenance is a way to, like you maintain your car, you maintain your nails or your teeth. You don’t just go to the dentist when your teeth hurt, right? Maintenance is a way to keep things functioning and working properly, and to avoid bigger problems like root canals or things like that. Well, it’s the same thing with your spine. When the spine is out of place for long enough, you start to develop wear and tear in the joints and disks of the spine.

That’s something that can be nipped in the bud and corrected much more easily earlier on, when you have some sort of injury. Now injuries might be a car accident or some fall that’s a really obvious injury. But it might not be so obvious, and it might be something, and frequently is something, that happens when you’re much younger, in your early years between zero and five years old. That’s when most of these injuries happen, between zero and five years old. And they’re not corrected and over time you develop degenerative changes or wear and tear in the joints and disks.

Maintenance care is a way to offer insurance for the time and money investment that you made. You want to make sure that you’re continuing to heal and continuing to feel your best. Maintenance is a way to do that. And it’s also a proactive approach, so you’re not waiting until things get really sore and hurt before you take any action to help it out and help it heal.

I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino and this has been your Health Minute.

Is Chiropractic Care Safe For Children?

Hi, I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic.

“Is it okay to get my child checked by a chiropractor?” is a question I get asked quite a lot. “Why should I get my kids checked? They haven’t had a bunch of traumas, they haven’t worked at an office for 30 years.” These are good questions and I want to show you some x-rays of the neck to show you why we would want to get kids checked.

This is a side view of the neck, so this would be where the jaw comes out, the patient’s looking this way, this is the base of the skull. The spine, in the neck, it’s supposed to have a curvature like this. You can see this curvature isn’t quite there, it kind of just leans forward. The other thing that we look for is spaces in between the bones. This is where the disk lives, we can see these spaces at these levels, except for here. At this level, we can see that the disk is worn out and that the bones have actually fused together.

This patient is 51 years old and she had no idea how this could have happened until we started to talk and she realized that at eight years old, she fell off a swing set, onto her head, in this position, was knocked unconscious for five minutes, and then she woke up and she seemed to be okay other than a headache. Her parents never took her to the doctor. We see that, down the road, decades later, this has worn out and this is the site of that injury. The injury did not look like this when she was eight years old. If we would have been able to adjust the patient when she was… After that accident, it would have changed the structure of that area and it wouldn’t have grown that way. This is the result of decades of wear and tear from that area not moving. It was misaligned in the accident and never kind of got moving again properly.

Look at this x-ray and this is an x-ray of a 28-year-old female. You can see that the curve starts here but instead of continuing like this, it buckles right here and then it reverses. This, again, the patient was a gymnast and when she was involved in gymnastics at nine years old, she took a fall on her head, didn’t seem like a big deal, but then we looked and instead of having a positive curvature, again, it’s supposed to be like a spring or a coil that the weight of the head sits on top of, she’s got a negative curvature. It puts a lot of stress on the bones and joints of the neck, particularly here, and then down lower, and we’re starting to see some bone spurring. You can see the distance here compared with the distance here, it looks like the bones are almost touching here, here, and getting close here. This wear and tear is because of the structural alignment of the neck. Again, if we would have checked the patient when she was nine years old after this happened, it would have restored proper alignment and she would have grown properly. It’s like if you’re backing out of the driveway and you hit a sapling tree with your car and it puts a bend in it, well, as that tree grows it’s gonna grow with that bend in there and it’s going to be crooked, so that’s what’s happening here.

Predisposes the joints and discs for premature arthritis because they wear out a lot more quickly if they’re not aligned properly, but the other thing that we don’t see on x-ray are the nerves that come out of the neck and elsewhere in the spine that go to run our body. So it’s restricted nerve flow when we have compression in these areas. It’d be much better if we could treat her when she was a child and it would be just maybe a handful of visits to get this area properly fixed and avoid all this lifetime of problems.

This is a normal curvature, just to give you an idea. You can see the alignment here, it looks real nice. This is not a normal curve, again, this is a reversed curve, the jaw is here. This patient was 42 years old. She came in, she didn’t actually have any neck pain at all, which is another important point. We have a lot of nerves that come out of the spine at each level, some of those nerves are pain nerves, but only about 10%, the other 90% are going to run the body. What she did have was numbness and tingling and weakness in her hands, so much so that she had had a carpal tunnel surgery on both sides and it didn’t really help. She works typing at a legal office, really busy office, and she was… Her hands were going numb and falling asleep and so she was having a hard time working. We were able to establish a positive curvature in the neck after a course of care, but only a positive like one or two degrees. The reason it wasn’t able to go to an ideal curve, which is maybe 40 degrees, is because it was limited by this area. This area is very nearly fused together, but it was enough of an improvement so that her symptoms went away, and she was able to work and be perfectly happy and pain-free, but if we could have caught this earlier, it would have been much more of a fixable scenario instead of just a patchable partial fix.

This is Dr. Steve Battaglino with your health minute, and I’m encouraging to get your child checked by a qualified chiropractor. It’ll make a huge difference in their health today and in the future.

Got A Rib Out?

Hi. I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic, and I want to talk about ribs for a minute. A lot of people complain that they have a rib out. It’s kind of a new term that more and more people are aware of and probably because they’re kind of painful when they go out of place. I’ll explain why they go out of place and what to do about it.

You can see this spine. This is a scoliosis patient, so this is not the average spine. Normally we would want to see the spine more straight up and down. But scoliosis is a good visual aid to kind of show what ribs do, because when the spine is out of place, whether it’s one or two areas that are out of place or more of a global curve, it takes the ribs along with it because the ribs are connected at the vertebrae in between. So, when they’re out of place, it kind of pushes the rib out of place as well. The ribs go right underneath your shoulder blades in the back. They’re supposed to go right underneath like that. When one or two of them are kind of popped up, it puts pressure on the shoulder blade, or it can be on the rib itself or on tissue in between the ribs. But ribs have a lot of nerves going to them. They actually have a dual layer of innervation or nerves because it’s such an important part of your body. If you think about it, it’s kind of like your armor. All your vital organs other than your brain are kind of protected in there, inside your rib cage. So if there’s an injury there, your body needs to know about it right away. And so there’s a lot of nerves going there. The bottom line is, there’s going to be a lot of pain though, even if they get out of place a little bit.

They key is checking out the source. They very, very rarely go out of place on their own. They sort of get taken for a ride because the spine is out of place. So we need to figure out why it’s doing what it’s doing. So in this scenario, let’s say this rib right here is bothersome. We need to fix it, but in order to do so, we really need to see what’s going on and why it’s doing what it’s doing. So by addressing and correcting the spine structurally at this level, we’ll be able to have an effect on that rib out here.

This is Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic, urging you to come and get your spine and your overall body structure checked out by a qualified chiropractor that can take care of your ribs, too.

Got Whiplash From A Car Accident?

Hi, I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic. Today, I want to talk about a term that gets used real frequently with accidents called whiplash. Whiplash is an injury to the neck and areas below the neck due to some traumatic impacts, like a car accident. It doesn’t have to be a car, it can be a boating accident, jet ski, anywhere where the head is whipping back and forth. It comes from the analogy of a bull whip. When you crack the whip, at the very end, the whip is going so fast that it actually makes that cracking sound because it’s going through the air so fast, it breaks the sound barrier.

When you’re in a motor vehicle, for example. Let’s say you’re driving a car, you’re stabilized by the seatbelt from here down. Everything from here down becomes part of the seat more or less, but your head is moving freely still and that’s why the injury occurs. There’s two basic ways. One is, let’s say, you rear end a car that’s stopped, the first stage is where your head goes forward and then it goes back, both really quickly and violently, and then back to neutral. The more common way and more severe type is where you get rear ended by somebody from behind you. You’re in a neutral position and the head accelerates really fast back like this and then comes forward like this and then back to neutral. This creates a lot of damage to the disks and joints of the spine, but also to the ligaments and muscles, and especially… Well, I’m assuming that you’re wearing a seatbelt. If you’re not wearing a seatbelt, there’s going to be even more damage because you can hit the steering wheel, windshield, and dashboard.

Even when you’re wearing a seatbelt, when you go forward, it’s really common that people will hit the steering wheel, either with their head or with their arms, or if their airbag opens up… That airbag, we think about it being a cushiony bag, but it opens at a rate of 200 miles an hour. So, it’s just like opened instantly and impacting with that can sometimes cause a lot of damage.

Chiropractic is an essential and an excellent way to heal properly from these injuries because the body really wants to splint and kind of stabilize these injuries and heal them as quickly as possible. So, it will put down scar tissue to kind of firm things up, even if they’re out of place from the injury. What chiropractic does is it realigns these areas, the bones, joints, disks, muscles, and ligaments properly, so that it can heal in the best way. This is the best for having a comfortable outcome and having the best range of motion, but also for preventing further injury down the road and premature arthritis and things like this.

I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic and this has been your health minute.

Why Adjust Your Back and Spine?

Hi. I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic in Petaluma, CA. A real commonly asked question is “Why do I need to get adjusted? My back doesn’t hurt” or “It might hurt a little bit, and then it goes away. It’s fine, it’s not a big deal.”

The answer to that question is this: Here we have a spine, Okay? This is the back of the spine and the front. These little nerves that come out at each level from the spine are basically sandwiched right behind the disk. There’s a disk at each level of the spine like a little shock absorber, and right in front of little joints in the spine that move to allow us to move around. The joints and the disk are on either side of these nerves. Now these nerves are really… These are the big nerves that basically run our whole body. In other words, each of these little nerves has over 10,000 nerve fibers to it. It’s like a fiber optic cable, but basically, some of those nerves are pain nerves, but only about 10%. So, things can be out of place in the spine putting pressure on these nerves and on the disk itself, which has nerves, and on the joints as well.

If the nerves, let’s say, are going to run the digestive system like the stomach or liver or pancreas, or if they’re going up to the heart and lungs, those are the nerves that are really important for our body, and it’s not anything that we’ll actually feel. In other words, there’s different types of nerves. Sensory nerves are ones where you can feel sensation like pain, and then there are autonomic nerves that go to run organs, which we don’t feel anything. It runs without us being aware of it. Though we really want to make sure that the body is structurally sound because we’re in gravity all the time. We’re taking all kinds of little traumas on a daily basis. Some big, some small, some repetitive like sitting at your desk for years. A lot of these misalignments called subluxations have been there before age 10. It’s the most common thing that we see because you think about how often toddlers and infants are falling and they’re trying just crazy things that they shouldn’t be, and we all did that as well. So, what happens is if these misalignments aren’t corrected, as you grow, they stay in part of the format there.

We can see the remnants of that. It’s like if you hit a little sapling tree with your car when you’re backing out of the driveway. As that tree grows, it’ll kinda grow with that crooked part in there unless it’s corrected, and these things can be corrected. It takes pressure off of the nerves. So, whether or not there’s actually pain there, it takes pressure off the nerve to allow it to do its job that it’s supposed to do properly, and also it takes pressure off of the disks and joints, so that you’re not running into premature arthritis and pain from that as you age. In short, getting adjusted is maintenance for your body’s structure. It’s like brushing your teeth. You don’t just brush your teeth when they hurt, do you? Well, same thing with chiropractic. Having a regular schedule of checkups of maintenance for the spine and body structure is one of the healthiest things that you can do for yourself. I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic, and this has been your health minute.

Importance of X-Rays in Chiropractic Care

Hi, I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino, and this is your Health Minute. A lot of people ask about x-ray, and why x-ray is important. Is it safe, and there’s a variety of questions that involve x-rays. So, I wanted to talk about it a little bit. X-ray is incredibly safe, especially now that we have digital x-ray systems and high frequency systems that keep the dosage low, so they equate it to the effects on the body, much like a sunburn. In other words, it does have a damaging effect, but it’s slight, and it’s usually dissipated within two or three weeks.

I wanted to show you a little bit about the x-ray. This is a digital x-ray system. It’s state of the art, so there’s no film involved. Also, no processing with chemicals in a dark room, like you would see with traditional x-ray. So, you have a digital x-ray emitter, and then just a digital panel, then it comes to this console here where we capture the images and start to enhance them and crop them. And then we have another station over here, where we continue enhancing the images, we can get a lot of information that we wouldn’t normally have by getting these x-rays.

For example, we can see alignments, we can also see angles and so forth and get an idea of degenerative changes, like arthritic changes. Also, curvatures that aren’t supposed to be there. We can see deformities that exist in the spine. We can do before and after series, which is kind of cool, ’cause we can see actual changes, not only in the way the patient’s feeling, but we can actually mark them side by side and see those changes.

This is a scoliosis patient here, probably tough to see on this view, before and after. You can see the patient’s totally straight. There’s a reversed curvature in the neck, that curve is actually supposed to go this way. So, this is real important to see. There’s another one here where this is getting to be really arthritic and almost fused here, so important to see that. And scoliosis and so forth.

X-ray is a safe way to get really important information that we can’t otherwise glean. It helps us do a better job, and the care becomes much more affordable and much more timely, meaning we can get better results in a quicker amount of time by having this information. So, it’s definitely worth it, and having this state of the art equipment really helps make the exposure time lower, and it helps with a lot of the processing, because a lot of it, we just don’t have to do. So, there’s no chemicals in the office and things like that.

This is Dr. Steve Battaglino, and this has been your Health Minute.

Save Money Using a FSA or HSA Account For Chiropractic Care

Hi, I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic. You may have heard of FSAs or HSAs, they stand for Health Savings Account or Flexible Spending Account. These are tax-deferred accounts that are designed specifically for healthcare costs. They work really well, and they are accepted for chiropractic benefits, which is something that a lot of people don’t realize.

Benefits to this is that, in the case of a Health Savings Account, for example, your employer will make a contribution to it. As I said, it’s tax-deferred, or actually, it’s pre-tax dollars that go into these accounts, so you get a little more value with that as well. They often roll over from year to year, so depending on the account, you might not have to use everything up that year, but it is a great way, and an additional option to receiving care in our office and a host of other benefits.

I encourage you, if you are interested in opening an account, you can either speak with your employer, or with a bank about opening up a Flexible Spending Account, or Health Savings Account, and I would really look at your benefits if you already have them, to see what’s covered, ’cause you might be surprised by what types of coverages you can get with that. So, as I said, we do accept that in our office for chiropractic benefits, and… This is Dr. Steve Battaglino, and this has been your Health Minute.

Client Testimonial – Lori

My name is Lori and I came to see Dr. Steve approximately seven months ago. I was referred to Dr. Steve by a co-worker, who is a patient of his and I had suffered a traumatic motor cycle accident in which the left side of my body was broken up fairly well and I was casted; my leg was casted, my arm was casted. I came to see Dr. Steve after getting out of all the casting and subsequently I had a… My pelvis was tilted, I had a rib that was popping out all the time, the top of my left foot was fusing together, and I was in incredible pain; my back, headaches, and I cannot tell you how wonderful I feel after seven months.

I’m a thorough advocate of Dr. Steve’s because he has continued to help me. My rib stays in, my pelvis isn’t tilted, my back doesn’t hurt any longer, my headaches are gone. And he continues to adjust my feet to break up the scar tissue. I walk without a limp, and I’ve been to many chiropractors over the course of my lifetime, and while they were all professional, he is definitely more thorough as far as his examinations and his treatments. He really takes his time and goes the extra mile, I think, and I would recommend him to anyone. I believe that he is professional, he is fun, and best of all he will make you feel better.

The Importance of X-Rays

Hi, Dr. Steve Battaglino. Today I want to show you some X-rays, to show you the importance of x-ray. What kind of information we get from them that we can’t otherwise just glean from our hands.

This first x-ray series, this is “before and after,” so this is the side view of the neck like this and this is where the jaw is, the base of the skull. On the before x-ray, you can see its very straight, and then on the after x-ray, you can actually see a real nice gradual curvature. What it does is that curvature opens up these vertebrae and disks in the back where we can see they’re just about touching here on the before. A big change for the disks and nerve flow come in through there, but also in terms of arthritis as we age its crucial to get a proper curvature in there as much as possible. This is a “before and after” series of scoliosis patient, young man, 11 years old. You see curvature like this, real pronounced scoliosis. In fact, this patient was just waiting for surgery to have metal rods inserted up and down the spine on either side.

We were able to have him avoid that surgery, thank God. And we can see after four months of care, a very straight spine, much taller and much healthier in terms of energy level, digestion, and things like that. This is a neck curve, it’s actually a reversed neck curve. The neck curve… This is the jaw and base of the skull once again. The neck curve is supposed to go like this and this way. This neck curve is reversed and it causes a lot of stress and strain on the bones and the disks and joints and nerves of the neck. You can see actually some bone spurring forming here as the body tries to cope with that stress. This is a similar patient just fast forward probably 20 years where we can see the strain over time has caused this bird beak formation, this bone spurring. The body is trying to fuse these bones together to help with that strain of the neck being forward like that. We can see the disk, which is supposed to be nice and dark like this, is getting to be sort of obliterated there as well.

It’s important to catch these kind of problems in the alignment of the spine early on. This is another scoliosis patient where we can see real pronounced curvatures. It’s real important to catch this early on as well. You would think that this patient for example would be real distorted walking around, but they are not. Its amazing, but the body finds a way to compensate that makes them look almost straight. X-ray is crucial to be able to see really what’s was going on in the main points. This is the lower back from the side view. So this is the buttock here, this is the tummy here, the patient is looking this way. The main thing on this is a feature called spondylolisthesis. This your twenty dollar word of the day. It basically means this slippage here, these bones are supposed to pretty much line up with this. This is the sacrum or the base of the spine. This slippage here has a huge effect on low back, stability of the low back, its really important and know that its there to best treat it. Again, this is an x-ray diagnosis. We don’t really know about this by just feeling it.

We have curvatures in the neck, this is the left shoulder and the right. We see curvatures there that really can be best treated if we can figure out specifically where it’s locked up and why its doing what its doing. This is a type of scoliosis that we can’t really fix per se. It’s more of a support to kind of patch it and keep it functioning the best that I can, but basically this vertebrae is wedge-shaped instead of nice and cube-shaped like it’s normally its supposed to be. So it predisposes the spine to have that curvature to it. The body needs that curvature to compensate. We can see if things like this side slippage here, its kind of slipped this way. This is due to an injury probably before the age of 10. This man is probably in his late sixties now. To be able to see what’s causing a problem and to fix it and the best way and the most affordable way, the quickest way, x-ray is the way to go. That’s your little x-ray lesson your window in to the world of a chiropractic geek who marks x-rays until nine or 10 at night, till my wife calls me tells me to come home.

This is Dr. Steve and and this is been your x-ray minute.