Herniated discs in your neck or your back can be very painful, particularly if it is creating pressure on your nerves. While you might think surgery is the only solution to your pain, chiropractic care may be able to help, without you having to go under the knife. Vancouver chiropractor Dr. Troy Dreiling addresses the situation in this video.
If you have questions, you can schedule a free consultation with Dr. Troy by calling 360-260-6903.
Video Transcription
Hey, it’s Dr. Troy here, the Vancouver chiropractor.
Ginger from Vancouver had a great question for me. She asked, “if I have a herniated disc in my neck or my lower back is there a way to get rid of that without surgery?” The answer is yes.
On many successful cases of patients seeking chiropractic care prior to surgery, I always recommend chiropractic before surgery. Let me just explain something.
People always just focus on the disc, that’s very myope. If you look at a joint, you look at the spine; there’s a bone, a disc, two bones. So if we look you’ve got two bones here, a disc, you have nerve roots to come off and nobody ever talks about the surrounding soft tissue. What about the muscles, ligaments, and tendons.
Usually, we are going to see disc issues associated with spinal misalignment which is usually caused by big traumas, car accidents where you get whipped around. Or, you have a micro-trauma where you do these repetitive small things over and over throughout the day. I always use the example of a cashier or somebody lifting luggage at the airport. I have a bunch of patients who throw luggage at the airport, they have chronic repetitive injuries.
What will happen is the spine will shift, if you look at the bones they are out of alignment, they shifted in a different direction. I always ask patients, which way did the disc go? It went that way and how we correct that is to get it to go this way. There’s a lot of various natural techniques and chiropractic one of them is adjusting the spine.
You can do instrument work. We have a traction unit that contraction the joint apart to help bring nutrients into the disc because they don’t have a direct blood supply so motion is the only thing that is going to heal that joint.
The same thing for the lower back. If people have neurological issues; I’ve seen people with foot drop, numbness, tingling and even digestive discomfort get clear, completely clear from any of the symptoms to get their function back by specific chiropractic techniques that help them resolve these things.
I always recommend patients have chiropractic care prior to surgery. It could take 8 weeks, it could take 12 weeks, it can even take months to resolve discal, neurological, spinal issues depending on how severe it is and how much trauma has been there, if it’s degenerating, if people change their lifestyle.
A guy recently came to me the numbness in his hands was gone. He had originally come to me and said he had disc issues, his numbness cleared out in about 5 weeks and I said, “hold on a minute, what have you changed in your lifestyle besides getting adjusted to resolve these issues?” His answer was nothing.
I always caution people, you know maintenance care is also important too. Once things get stable we encourage people, hey you should maintain it. It could be once a month, once a week just depends on the lifestyle. Depends on how much care your spine is going to need to keep it functioning to the max throughout your lifetime.
So, this is Dr. Troy. If you are interested in checking us out we do a free consultation, health evaluation to determine if chiropractic is right for you. Call our office 360-260-6903.
