What Have I Done to Deserve This?

The questions I am most frequently asked include:  I’ve only been hurting for a week, why do I have to keep getting treatments?, Why do the vertebrae keep going out of place?, Why am I still hurting?, etc. An illustration is in order.

When you wake up one morning with a toothache, you go to the dentist and he finds a hole in your tooth.  Does he say, “You ate CANDY last night, didn’t you?” NO! He asks instead, “What have you been doing for the last SIX months?” Our spines are no different than our teeth – when we begin feeling the pain, the problem has already been around for a long time.

Vertebrae can only go out of place when the soft-tissue support structures have been damaged. The muscles, tendons, ligaments, discs, and other connective tissues are stretched and torn during a traumatic incident which allows the vertebrae slip out of their normal alignment.

Soft tissues never heal back to 100% -- it is always some percentage less. As a ridiculous example, if a muscle cell is damaged badly enough that it cannot be repaired, it is not replaced with another muscle cell, but by scar tissue. Scar tissue is not as flexible as muscle tissue, and contributes nothing to the strength of the muscle, and so it is now one cell weaker than it was before the injury. In the event of future trauma, that area of muscle, being weaker and less flexible, is more likely to be re-injured than the remaining healthy muscles.

Additionally, if the vertebrae are out of their correct position as the soft tissues are healing, the final positioning will be causing irritation to the nerve roots, which leads to body pain and organ malfunction. Placing the vertebrae into their correct position initially only confuses the body and it will actually pull the vertebrae out of place again in less than 48 hours. The body can be retrained to hold them in place again for some length of time, but this can only be achieved if they are IN PLACE more than they are OUT OF PLACE during this process.

As you can see, the sooner after an injury that chiropractic treatments are begun, the faster and more effective the healing will be, but it is never too late to help the body to improve itself. Our bodies have miraculous recuperative abilities when given the proper encouragement and support, and many conditions that the medical doctors have told us we will have to live with can be improved or eliminated.

At Val Vista Chiropractic we have the knowledge and ability to give your body its best chance for a healthy and pain-free life, all done the natural way, without drugs or surgery. Come in today and discover what we can do for you.

Getting rid of your pain,

Dr. Steven Ray, Chiropractor

Val Vista Chiropractic