Tag Archives: spine

Why Do I Have Back Pain When I Sleep?

(Transcription)

This is a good question. It seems like when you’re sleeping, you’re laying down, you’re resting, that pain and those kind of symptoms would be less. But in some patients, they have worse back pain when they’re sleeping. So let’s take a moment to look at the final structure. This is the spine. You can see here you have disks in between the bones. These disks are really important because they act like shock absorbers, they allow for movement, and they can get injured. When they get injured, it’s like a sprained ankle. So what happens when you sprain your ankle? It swells up, right? Same thing happens to the disks. That swelling can be kept in check by moving around and by going through your day.

And then when you lay down at night to go to sleep, that pressure of you being in gravity and your weight kinda goes away. And that pressure’s been keeping the swelling in check. So you lay down and it just swells up. That swelling causes a lot of pain, and it causes a lot of pressure on the nerves that live right next to the disks. It’s really common to see that patients who have more pain while they’re sleeping, part of it has to do with the sleeping position, too. This is definitely a factor.

The best position I could recommend if patients can adhere to it, because everybody has a sleeping position that they have ingrained in their routine and it’s really hard to break that sometimes. But sleeping on your side with a pillow between your knees, and a pillow on your head, that keeps your head in the middle instead of doing this. The pillow between the knees kinda acts like a kickstand. It keeps you from rolling and twisting at night. That twisting, the disk does not like the twisting, especially with the swelling, so that helps a lot. Typically, we’ll see a big improvement in these symptoms with chiropractic care, and also with a change in the sleeping position. Pain usually will abate in the morning gradually as you move around, and it kinda pumps that inflammation, that fluid away from that area. But we wanna see a more sustained, a more long-term healing and fix for this problem. And chiropractic care can definitely help with rehabbing these disks that have been injured.

I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic (in Petaluma, CA), 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.

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.

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.

Chiropractic Care for Newborns and Children

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Hi. I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic [now in Petaluma, California]. I want to encourage you to have your children checked by a qualified chiropractor. This includes infants and newborns as well. The reason is that infants and newborns often have birth trauma that distorts their spine, either their neck or lower down in the spine, and causes problems. Problems that can become more severe later on. In the case of “easy births”, easy for the mom, it’s not easy for the child, it’s always a difficult traumatic event for an infant because they’re just relaxed for so long inside the womb. They come out, they don’t have the musculature to be able to support and stabilize themselves during that process. On top of that, they’re getting pulled out literally by, oftentimes, the head or sometimes the arm and shoulder combined with the head. In the case of forced delivery, suction delivery, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a C-section or normal birth, it is traumatic for the child.

Now, adjustments for children and infants is like this to the neck. It’s very light and gentle. So children should not cry during an adjustment, they should stop crying. That’s often what they do. Especially if children come in with colic or with some problems developmentally, why they’re not breastfeeding, they’re not sleeping, they’re not thriving. Now, colic is just basically a collection of different symptoms that gets labeled colic because children can’t speak to tell us what’s wrong with them and what their experiencing. But if you think about it, the nerve system is the first thing to form in an embryo. We start to see a nerve, like a spinal cord or a precursor to the spinal cord forming at about three weeks in the embryo stage, and it’s called the neural streak. That’s the first thing that forms because it’s the most important system because it runs everything and it kind of regulates development and differentiation of all the tissues.

It’s really important, it’s crucial, in fact, to have proper nerve flow coming through that nervous system, especially in the case of a child or a newborn. Having nerve flow working properly in an adult is crucial, but if you look at a child, they’re kind of like a rocket that’s in that initial primary stage where it’s leaving the platform, and it is going to the rim of space and it accelerates from zero to 20,000 miles an hour. That initial stage burns the brightest and the hottest because it’s the most important. It’s the same with children. They are differentiating and developing on a huge scale from zero… Well from birth to about four months, the brain’s size actually doubles. So we want to support this growth and this development by removing any interference to the spine with general adjustments to allow the child to grow and thrive the way they can… They’re supposed to, and to be their best. I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic encouraging you to have your children checked by a qualified chiropractor.

Scoliosis – A Success Story

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When I first consulted with this 11-year old boy’s mother, he was scheduled to have long stainless steel rods, called ‘Harrington Rods’ surgically inserted along the entire length of his spine on both sides.  In the first x-ray view (on left), a pronounced scoliosis is present.

The second view (on right) was taken after four months of care in my office.  The spine is clearly much straighter, and the boy is visibly taller.  However, what the x-ray doesn’t show is the dramatic increase in energy and immune function, which ensued as pressure on spinal nerves was relieved.

spine-before-after-xray