Right now I want to talk about a very specific condition called scoliosis. Most people are familiar with scoliosis, but they don’t really know how devastating it can be to your health.
Recent research shows that scoliosis can take up to 14 years off your life. It can affect almost every major system in your body and lead to chronic and debilitating pain.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Scoliosis can be correctable, especially when you find it early. And I want to go through today how we’re actually able to get a significant correction with scoliosis with some advanced techniques that we do here in the office.
Watch this video to learn how to get proper corrective care for scoliosis
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Prefer to read? Here’s the gist of what Dr. Tim spoke about in this video clip.
Hope for Scoliosis Correction
So if you or someone you know is suffering from scoliosis, you know that there’s hope. Hope that doesn’t have to include more pain and suffering that you don’t have to experience painful and ineffective bracing or very painful and costly surgery that limits your health and function for the rest of your life.
You can avoid the years of life lost as a result of this because follow-up studies show that those who are getting a correction of scoliosis do not experience the same life loss or the same health issues once the problem is effectively corrected and maintained over the course of their life. So no matter where you are right now in your health struggles, if you or someone you know with scoliosis is looking to get help, there is a solution for you.
The most important test that we do is an X-Ray. This is a case study of somebody with scoliosis.
There’s different forms of scoliosis:
- Mild
- Moderate
- Severe
This would be considered mild to moderate. It’s important to know that whatever level you’re at, it’s significant. Whether that’s mild and it’s five degrees or it’s severe and it’s 40 plus degrees, it’s affecting your health all the same.
Case Study: Scoliosis Causes Chronic Health Problems
This is a person here that also had many struggles with this health, chronic back problems, chronic injuries, chronic digestive issues, a number of health problems despite how much he tried to exercise and be fit and eat well. There was no doctor who could be able to help him because no one was addressing the true cause.
Whenever we see something like this, one of the most important tests that we do is a motion x-ray. So this is a bending film. This is if you were to bend left or right. This shows us how limiting your function is right now and what is the correction for potential.
So as he moves over to the right side, we actually see a significant change from what we are seeing here. So we know that we can get a good correction here.
But this is far from normal. When you bend to one side, we should get at least 25 degrees in normal motion. He’s currently at three. So we were able to take him through a specific course of scoliosis correction care that we do here in our office, which I’m going to show you exactly how we do that in just a few minutes, and in six months we were able to take him to over here where we restored normal motion.
This is now 24 and a half degrees of function. Now here not only is he no longer experiencing back pain, but the disks of his spine are also being restored. He’s no longer having digestive issues and is able to function and do the things he wants to, but he’s also able to prevent future issues as long as he continues to maintain that with at least twice a month adjustments for the rest of his life.
This is his x-ray before we started. This is his x-ray six months later. He achieved significant correction, which is why function was being restored.
The Importance of Getting Checked for Scoliosis Even if You Don’t Have Symptoms
Now before I show you how we did this type of correction, I want to first show you another example of somebody that came in even earlier prior to symptoms. This is the goal of what we try to achieve and why we do videos like this and educate people on the importance of getting checked for scoliosis and correcting that as soon as possible.
This is a young girl that came in at 13 years old. She already has 15-degree scoliosis. Her doctor checked her for scoliosis in a routine exam and said, “Oh, you have some scoliosis but it’s not severe so we’re going to do nothing about it”.
Your Doctor Probably Won’t Do Anything About Your Scoliosis Even if They Detect it!
This is typically exactly what happens. The doctor finds it, they say we’re going to do nothing or watch it and it only worsens over time and nobody addresses it until it gets severely bad and starts causing symptoms. Now at this point, Lindsay had no symptoms, no pain, no health issues, but already 15-degree scoliosis. Left uncorrected, this would create all kinds of problems in her health future.
Thankfully because her mom was referred into the office by another patient, they were talking, they said my daughter was recently diagnosed with scoliosis and she said, you need to get in to see my chiropractor right away because scoliosis is a significant issue. She came in to get x-rays. We were able to find her issue and go through the process of correction before it got so severe it was no longer correctable.
This was her x-ray six months later with the full correction. Now she can prevent lifelong health issues because she found and corrected that early. That’s why it’s so important to get to these issues as soon as possible. And if you or anyone you know has scoliosis, you want to get to a corrective care chiropractor, immediately and start working on getting this solution.
Why Do I Need To See a Corrective Care Chiropractor if I Have Scoliosis?
When I say corrective care chiropractor, this is someone specifically trained to do this level of care. This is not just the person on your insurance plan, the person that’s offering the best deal down the street. This is the person who knows what they’re doing and how to fix these types of issues.
Advanced Scoliosis Correction Techniques.
Step 1: Preparing the Spine for an Adjustment
We go through an adjustment progression with all of our patients, especially patients with scoliosis. Before we even do the adjustment, we first prepare the spine for that adjustment. We’re going to do two things. We’re going to do traction of the cervical spine, which loosens up all the muscles of the neck and the upper back, hydrates the discs of the neck and the upper back, as well as decreases tension on the brain stem and spinal cord.
So the way that we do this, is we put this right around the neck and we just pull straight down. That also helps restore that curve in the neck and decompresses the spine.
The second exercise that we do is mobility. So this mobility is for the muscles and discs of the lower back. And in this one we’re going to go side to side. We’re going to go forward and back and we’re going to go in rotation. This also brings the oxygen and blood flow to the muscles. It starts to warm those muscles up so they are more malleable just like you would warm-up before exercise.
This allows us to get the most corrective adjustment possible and reduce a lot of the stiffness and other things that go on for people prior to coming in so that way we get the most correction out of every single visit.
Step 2: Corrective Care Adjustment for Scoliosis.
Now I want to demonstrate how we are able to get some of the advanced results I was talking about here through scoliosis correction in the office. We don’t have an actual patient here today, but we do have our demonstration patient so you understand what this looks like.
So typically when you look at scoliosis, you’re going to have a curve here in the lower part. A lot of times there would be curves in the upper part there as well. In this case, the curve goes into here on the right side and the outer part is over here on the left side. Now, these muscles on the outer part are typically the tight tense muscles that are working really hard to prevent further progression of scoliosis.
These muscles over here, they get really weak and tense. So the first thing that we want to do is open this side up and decrease some of the spinal cord tension on this side of the patient. We’re able to move the table and stretch that out so we’re actually opening up that scoliosis every single time that we’re doing this.
- This is stimulating the discs.
- This is stimulating the joint proprioceptors to start communicating with the brain differently.
- This is changing the tension to the spinal cord and the nerves here. Opening that up.
We can also stretch this side out as well as we’re opening that up to start to activate these muscles a little bit more.
The second thing we do is we do some vibration on the side that’s lower here. This side is already working for us. We want to start stimulating this side so it works as well.
This is called the PTLMS. Basically what it does is it starts to neurologically activate these muscles on the side that’s weaker. Once we do this, we actually want to do a couple of drops. So we’re going to do some drops on this side to start opening this up. This will start to open up this curve here and stimulate the brain on this side so these muscles start working differently.
From this point, we actually have them lay on their side like this, and again, this is the side where scoliosis sticks out. We’ll actually do adjustments on this side or again, dropping multiple times and that really opens that up.
So this opens up the opposite side. This brings this side down and this corrects the underlying areas of subluxation, which are the areas of the spine that have specifically shifted out of their normal line and then gotten stuck like that. That allowed scoliosis to happen in the first place. This allows for the body to start to adapt and change differently.
From this point, we have the patient lie on their back and then what they do is we actually bend the spine two different directions. So we’ll bend against scoliosis and do specific drops and bend away and the curves and the upper back, and we just bend to the opposite direction each time. Again, this is stimulating the joint proprioceptors. This is hydrating and restoring the discs. And this is reducing the spinal cord tension that created this.
We Don’t Just Adjust the Spine. Scoliosis Patients Often Have Feet Problems.
Now for most of these people, they also have issues with their feet. So we do adjustments of the feet and many times there’s tension in the calves which causes the feet to point down. So we actually do the vibration on that area too, to eliminate that and restore that balance in the feet. So we’re getting the proper communication from the feet all the way up to the rest of the body.
And the last issue that we typically see with these people is almost always they have a loss of reversal of the curve in their neck. So we have to be able to restore this as well or reduce the spinal cord tension to allow the rest of the spine to straighten out as it’s designed to.
Number one we do very specific adjustments designed to help restore that part of the neck. We use instruments like this arthro stem, which we can actually go through and stimulate the correction of that neck. Once we’ve done the corrections here, we actually have the patient do spinal stabilizing exercises called neuromuscular reeducation, where we use different types of body weighting that help retrain the posture and the connection between the brain and the body, which is what I want to show you next.
Step 3: Spinal Stabilizing Exercises for Scoliosis Correction
Throughout the adjustment, we do a process called neuromuscular reeducation where we’re doing body weighting as you can see me wearing here, and we do balance exercises to change the way the brain communicates to the rest of the body to help set in that adjustment and start working towards that correction that we’re looking for.
So you can see I have a weight on my head to bring my head back and restore the curve in your neck. I have a weight that goes across this way to the left. So if my spine curves this way, the weight is going to push it back this way, I have a weight on the right side, so if my spine is curved to the right here, it’s going to allow it to go back to this way. So basically it’s taking the spine and bringing it back to the center like this.
And then I stand on the balance disk here. When you’re in balance, all your muscles have to work harder, so there’s more of a corrective change that’s going to happen. In addition, we’ll actually put people on vibration platforms, which allows for even more great correction when it comes to all these balance exercises in neuromuscular reeducation.
The vibration platform also strengthens the skeletal system, strengthens the postural muscles, helps with spinal correction and has many other health benefits. So this is what you do after the adjustment.
Scoliosis Correction Doesn’t End at the Office – Home Care is Essential
In addition, we have patients do specific exercises at home to reinforce the correction that we’re doing here. And it’s a combination of all the three steps we went through in the adjustment today plus the exercises at home that allow us to get the kind of correction that we’re seeing here to be able to restore function, restore health and help people have lifelong wellness.
So now you’ve seen what causes scoliosis and that this can be corrected like the results we talked about here. We went through the progression of the types of adjustments and things that we’re doing that help us correct these things.
If you or someone you know has been diagnosed with scoliosis or think you may have it, you want to find a corrective care chiropractor trained in this type of correction as soon as possible. You can find our information online at NewLifeChiropracticRocklin.com. You can also find natural solutions to many healthcare conditions by subscribing to our YouTube channel here. And if you live outside the area and are unable to come to see us in our office, we can actually help you find a corrective care chiropractor in your area to get the level of results we talked about here today.