Tag Archives: Adjustment

How Do Chiropractors Know Where To Adjust?

(Transcription)

Hi. I want to talk about diagnostic thermography. Kind of a fancy word, but essentially, it talks about instrumentation that the chiropractor uses to help do a better job in locating where the spine needs to be adjusted. We’ve talked in the past about x-ray, the importance of x-ray, and I’ve done previous videos on that. So if you’re curious about that, check them out. The importance of x-ray or the value of x-ray is that we can really see a roadmap of what the spine is doing. When we talk about thermography, there’s another element of information that the chiropractor uses to get information about where to adjust. When there’s pressure on nerves, when there’s pressure, especially on one of these big nerves that comes out of the spine, there’s going to be a heat signature on the skin directly above it. There are accessory nerve fibers, basically means like little branch, like a little twig that comes off of these big nerves and goes up to this skin right above it. So when we’re talking about thermography, let me show you what’s up.

This unit right here is an instrument for thermography. And basically, what it does, it kinda looks like a stud finder. So when you’re checking the skin, it’s real sensitive and the needle should be pretty much in the middle. If it goes like this really quickly, that indicates that there’s pressure on a nerve right below that area. This helps along with exam information and information from the x-rays helps the chiropractor determine where to adjust on that day. This is especially valuable information because as the spine heals and rehabs… So let’s say, you have a curvature in the spine and there are one, or two, or three disks there that are kinda sprained and need to be rehabbed and need to heal. As one of them begins to heal, we’ll probably start getting a reading at a different level, maybe one above there, or one below, or two up, something like that. It is because these bones are on… It’s a curve, it forms a curve, and so in that curve, all these bones and disks are sort of points along that curve. So if you start moving one, you’re going to move the whole rest of the curve too. As you rehab one area, it’ll become… The priority will shift to start rehabbing another one on either above or below that. So this instrument really helps a lot with that to tell where the nerve pressure is that day and where it needs to be adjusted.

So I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic (in Petaluma, CA). We do a technique of chiropractic called Gonstead chiropractic. Gonstead utilizes information from x-ray, from exam, from an instrument like this to do real specific adjusting to help patients get better quicker.

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.