Tag Archives: neck

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.

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.

Headaches and Chiropractic Care

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Hi, I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic and I want to talk today about headaches and chiropractic. Specifically, how chiropractic can help get rid of headaches.

Many headaches are caused in the neck, specifically right at the very top of the neck. So we have vertebrae and the spine here in the neck and this is the base of the skull. We have little nerves that come out of each level in between the vertebrae. When things get out of alignment or crooked and that can happen in a lot of different ways, it can happen from sports injuries or bad posture or bad pillow. When that happens, these nerves get compressed and the nerves at the very top of the spine when they are compressed, it will shoot pain up into the head causing headache.

Now the other thing that happens is that the muscles on the side of the neck will get really tight and try to splint that area and that causes pain as well. With gentle, specific correction of this area, which restores proper alignment, we take pressure off the nerve and the headache goes away and the muscles relax as well.

If you are experiencing headaches on a daily basis or even on a weekly basis, I suggest that you get your neck checked by a qualified chiropractor. It is a much better fix if we can eliminate what is actually causing the problem than to cover it up with drug therapy or injection therapy or something like that.

Healthy Curves – Your Neck

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From the side view, the neck is supposed to be curved, so that it can comfortably absorb the shock of living a lifetime in gravity.  When this curve straightens out, the resulting increase in stress on the bones and joints eventually causes bone spurs to develop.  Bone spurs are the body’s attempt to stabilize the spine.  In this x-ray, this process has begun (outlined in red).  The chiropractor’s goal in this case is to halt the progression of this irreversible process, and he does so by re-establishing a healthier curve.  The increased curve fans out the vertebrae, thereby taking pressure off the nerves where they exit the spine and alleviating the aberrant stress on the bones that causes the bone spurs to develop.

neck-before-after-xray