Tag Archives: X-Ray

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.

What Is Text Neck?

Transcription –

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.

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.