At What Point Should You See A Chiropractor?

Many people think a chiropractor is a doctor you go to after a car accident or serious back injury at work. And while it is true, these are good times to call for an appointment, there are also many other times you may benefit from chiropractic care. 

It may surprise you to know that chiropractors can help with a wide range of health conditions, diseases, and symptoms for people of all ages. The health of the spine is vitally connected to the function of all of the body's systems. 

Here are just some of the problems a chiropractor may be able to help with:

After Accidents and Injuries

Any accidents or injuries—even seemingly small ones—can cause misalignments of the spine. This is particularly true of the upper cervical area (the neck), the most vulnerable part of the spine. You may not realize you have a misalignment and can go for years before nagging little aches and pains become debilitating problems. 

For Allergies, Sinus Issues, and Earaches

The upper cervical spine begins at the base of the skull, close to clusters of nerves and tubes that go throughout the head and face. A misalignment that causes inflammation and swelling may compress these passages, leading to blockages and the build-up of fluids.

When You Suffer from Headaches or Headache Disorders

Ordinary headaches can be a result of stress and tension in the neck, back, and face. This is often due to misalignments of the spine. Even worse, headache disorders, such as migraines or cluster headaches, are often due to nerves being pinched or compressed. 

When You Are Sedentary

There are many reasons why people don't get enough exercise—having to work at a desk, mobility issues, or health problems, to name a few. Either way, sitting for long periods puts three times more pressure on your spine than standing or walking. When we sit and use electronic devices, we tend to look down, extend the neck, and hunch the shoulders, which can result in maladaptive postures, disc degeneration, digestive issues, breathing issues, or nerve problems. A chiropractor can help restore proper posture and alignment and alleviate some of the stress caused by sitting. 

As a Preventative Measure

When it comes to your health, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Chiropractors can be part of your regular healthcare routine, along with medical check-ups, dentists, and gynecologists. Since the spine plays such a major role in the body’s overall health and wellness, adding chiropractic care to your healthcare routine can save you a lot of pain and trouble in the long run. 

Call Us For An Appointment

Dr. Gordon Elder of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, Texas is an upper cervical specialist who is a trained practitioner of the Blair Chiropractic Technique. Blair practitioners embrace advanced technology such as 3D diagnostic imaging tools to get a better understanding of their patient's spines. They also specialized in hands-on manipulations that are gentler and longer-lasting than the jarring snaps and twists associated with traditional chiropractic care. 

Dr. Elder treats patients using three simple steps. The first step involves a thorough assessment with advanced diagnostic tools so he can pinpoint problems. The second involves low-pressure adjustments to restore proper alignment of the spine and facilitate healing. The third is by continuing preventative care to avoid future problems by nipping any issues in the bud. 

Contact Dr. Elder to see how upper cervical care can help you. You might be surprised at how much of your health is connected to this vital area. Dr. Elder's area of coverage includes Lubbock, Amarillo, Midland, Odessa, Abilene, and El Paso in Texas, as well as Hobbs in New Mexico.

Published by Vic Belonogoff: A Blair Chiropractic doctor helped heal vertigo, among other conditions that Vic Belonogoff suffered from, and it gave him his life back. He continues to see an upper cervical chiropractor as a preventative measure. Vic Belonogoff is passionate about upper cervical chiropractic and how much it helps patients.

Seeing A Chiropractor When You Feel Good Is A Great Idea

A lot of people call the chiropractor for an appointment after an accident or injury, or when that old nagging back and neck pain has started flaring up again. Of course, this is a good time to make that appointment, but it's not the best time. 

What is the best time to make an appointment with your chiropractor? Actually, the best time to see a chiropractor is when you feel great. Here's why.

Preventative Chiropractic Care

Few people realize the importance of the musculoskeletal system in one's overall health. Any misalignment of the spine sets off a cascade of problems through the rest of the musculoskeletal system. Your body shifts to adjust for the misalignment and it causes undue stress on other muscles, joints, and ligaments. 

In addition to aches and pains, the spine is also responsible for protecting the spinal cord. The spinal cord and the brain work together to send signals throughout the body and regulate all of our essential systems. When the spine is misaligned, it may pinch or compress nerves and disrupt the signals. In time, this can cause a wide variety of health problems.

Benefits of Proactive Chiropractic Care

Boost your immune system—one of those important systems that rely on nerve signals is the immune system. If misfiring nerves cause your immune system to malfunction, it can make it more difficult for your body to fight against disease and various health conditions. Keeping your spine healthy helps keep the immune system functioning at optimal levels so it is at its best when fighting off infections, colds, and flu. 

Avoid aches and pains— when you spend too many hours hunched over a desk, bending to clean, picking up heavy objects, or sleeping on a lumpy mattress, you'll eventually have some pain. Why wait for it, though? Going to a chiropractor for regular wellness check-ups can help keep your musculoskeletal system in proper alignment so that you avoid those aches and pains altogether. 

Better Night's Sleep—pain in the daytime when you're trying to go about your work and chores is bad enough; pain at night causes problems. Sleep deprivation can lead to some serious health problems. Chiropractic care helps prevent the problems that may get in the way of you getting sound rest throughout the night. A good night's sleep helps you feel better, improves your mood, and gives you more energy. 

Saves money—preventative care helps you stay in good health, which means fewer trips to the doctor, physical therapist, or other specialists. It means you won't need as many prescription or over-the-counter drugs, or medical assistive devices such as heating pads, ice packs, braces, bandages, etc. This also means fewer medical bills, co-payments, and expenses. You can also avoid taking off more time from work than necessary.

Let Us Help Keep You Healthy

Dr. Gordon Elder of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, Texas is a specialist in the Blair Chiropractic Technique. Blair practitioners use cutting-edge technology to examine your anatomy for better, longer-lasting adjustments.

Dr. Elder follows a three-step plan for patients. The first step involves a thorough health assessment involving a consultation and 3D diagnostic imaging tools. 

The second step involves gentle corrections to help restore the spine's proper alignment. Thanks to the advanced technology during the assessment, the doctor can apply precise corrections using a light touch. 

The third step involves adding chiropractic care to your regular health and wellness routine to ensure corrections remain intact and to nip further problems in the bud. 

If you want to give preventative chiropractic care a try so that you can avoid common health problems, contact Dr. Elder. His areas of coverage include Lubbock, Amarillo, Midland, Odessa, Abilene, and El Paso in Texas, as well as Hobbs in New Mexico. 

Published by Vic Belonogoff: A Blair Chiropractic doctor helped heal vertigo, among other conditions that Vic Belonogoff suffered from, and it gave him his life back. He continues to see an upper cervical chiropractor as a preventative measure. Vic Belonogoff is passionate about upper cervical chiropractic and how much it helps patients.

Schedule of care at Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX.

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is: “How often do I need to come?”

The goal is to not see you because you are well. Dr. Gordon elder explains the process to get you there.

Once the spine has been injured and it’s affecting the central nervous system, the brain, or the brain stem spinal cord, it takes a while for it to heal. Now, different tissues in the body heal at different rates. Ligaments heal at a different rate than muscles. Nerves, blood vessels, they all have different rates of healing. We have observed that people tend to heal in cycles. And sometimes one thing has to heal before another thing can heal.

So as a chiropractor, once somebody has injured themselves, and I correct the problem that’s keeping them from healing themselves, then I want to check more often in the beginning. Usually, we start out at twice a week. Now, that’s not necessarily a treatment twice a week. I hope it isn’t, but it’s a check to make sure that things are still progressing. And then, we go down to once a week, and then once every other week, and then once a month. My goal is to get you to the point where I’m checking you, if possible, once every six months again without finding anything, in the same way, that a dentist would be looking at your teeth, not wanting to find a cavity.

We don’t rely on symptoms to tell us when to treat you. When something needs to be fixed because as the body starts to go back to its normal position sometimes things will hurt, muscles will get stretched.

So, we do not rely primarily on how you feel to know what you need. We use objective tests for that and that’s what those tests are for.

We know that in the beginning, the bones are more likely to go back out of alignment, and so we check more often. You’re not necessarily going to know, at that time, whether it’s in or out. It may feel like it’s out and it’s not. Or it may feel great, and it’s actually just gone out of alignment and needs to be fixed before you do feel something. So that’s why we design each treatment plan for the patient. But also based on the scientific knowledge we have of how fast things heal and what cycles people go through in that healing process.

About 50% of my patients don’t need another upper neck adjustment during the first three months, but I don’t know which 50% you’re going to fall into. I want to catch it almost as soon as it happens.

In the beginning, if you go back out of alignment relatively quickly, you tend to lose progress or regress relatively quickly. As time goes on you could go out of alignment and the body is stronger. And so you don’t regress quite so quickly so, we don’t need to catch it quite as quickly.

It’s best to keep to the recommended schedule.

There are two common mistakes people make:

1. They start feeling better right away and they stop coming in.

2. The other one is that it takes a while for them to start feeling better, so they get discouraged and stop coming in.

We found that the first three months is the most critical time period. If we can make it through the first three months or three month period without having to readjust the spine, we know that it’s getting pretty stable. So in the beginning you may feel real good, but it’s not stable. So we need to keep checking it to make sure that it stays in alignment long enough to get stable.

On the other end I’ve had patients come in where it’s taken almost three months before they really started feeling better. Just the process that the body had to take to get to that point.

And so I encourage people: Go through the schedule that I recommend at least for the first three months. Once you commit to that and we get through that, then we will discuss what the next step is.

I try not to check you more than I really need to,

and so we will space those off but, based on particular times where we know, okay, things are going to be about this stable at this point. And as we go on, you’re going to become more stable and there are certain mileposts, that once we hit, we know that we can safely go on to the next level. 

How can we help more people, better?

Dr. Gordon Elder discusses what chiropractic is and what to expect from him as a Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor in Lubbock, TX

Helping more people in the best way possible is our goal.

I’m very open to using other professionals. Health is too big for any one person or any one profession.

Chiropractic; modern chiropractic started in 1895. People have been manipulating joints and bones since the beginning of time, evidently. We know the Egyptians did it, the Asians have done it the American Indians... In Europe, there was a profession called the “Bone Setters”. But modern chiropractic where we have taken western science and married it to the manipulation of joints has been around since 1895. In 1895 is was seen as a competitor to medicine, to chemistry, and surgery. And there was some bad blood between medical doctors and chiropractors. It still exists even today, however, many years this is. But they really are two separate and distinct sciences. They are both interested in getting and keeping you healthy. Chiropractic in general has many, many different techniques. There are over 200 different techniques. Some are better than others. All of them work for some people.

The question is:

“Can we help more people, better?”

So my goal as an Upper Cervical Chiropractor is to do the least possible and let your body do the most possible work because then you’re going to be stronger. You’re going to be healthier. You’re going to need me less. So we want to be as accurate as possible. We take some very precise X-Rays that look at the actual shape of your joints. We can see how they are supposed to line up. We can see how they are misaligned if they are. We correlate that with some neurological tests to see: is that misaligned bone actually putting pressure on nerves? Because if it is; it may be keeping itself from healing itself and pulling itself back. So then we decide which joints it is that actually need to be treated, to be fixed. And we slide that bone back into place, let it go back to normal. And make sure it stays that way; make sure it gets strong.

So the type of chiropractic that I practice; the Blair Chiropractic Technique is very precise and very accurate, as accurate as we can be. Now does that mean that we have reached the end and there is no more progress? Oh, I hope not! I want to help even more people. I hope there is more research done; more research that I can avail myself of, maybe that I can do myself to help my patients even more along the lines I have chosen.

However, I’m very open to using other professionals. Whether that be physical therapists, massage therapists, medical doctors, colon therapists. Because health is not… It’s too big for any one person or any one profession. My goal when a patient comes in to see me is; let’s fix the nervous system so your body can work as well as it can. And then if there’s something still left over, let’s find out who you can now go to and get the best effect from because the nervous system is working the way it is designed to.

Heart Palpitations

Dr. Gordon Elder , Director of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX discusses his experience with helping people with rapid heartbeat.

I know from experience the neck can affect the heart.

I had a patient come in several years ago in January. Over the Christmas vacation, she had been to the emergency room a couple times for rapid heart beat. In fact, it was so rapid, the doctors thought it was impossible and tested it a few times because they couldn’t believe how fast her heart was beating.

She told me that her heart had actually been beating faster before she went to the emergency room and they measured it. She said her whole shirt was vibrating.

The typical intervention for this in a severe case was to go in and burn out some of the nerves in the heart. Now in my opinion, we probably need most of the parts that we have in our body. Occasionally something needs to be removed and medicine is great at doing that. But sometimes parts are removed when something else maybe was the problem.

I asked her to not get the surgery right away (a little risky on my part, right, we are dealing with the heart) and I found a problem and said that I thought it could be relevant. I ran my hand down her back and right in the top part of her back there was one bone that when I touched it, she almost screamed. It’s one of the bones where nerves actually come out and go to the heart and then back up. Now the heart gets its innervation from a couple different places, not just the spine. When that bone was that tender, I thought, okay this is probably a mechanical problem, not an organic one that needs to be dealt with with surgery.

I said, “Don’t do the surgery yet, give me a little while, I am going to adjust your neck and see what happens.” I adjusted her neck, the hot spot in her upper back went away, and her heart calmed down. Every once in a while it would come back and we’d check and sure enough, she was out of alignment again. So I know from experience- and I’ve had other patients after that (not as dramatic)- that the neck can affect the heart.

Children's Conditions & How Upper Cervical Chiropractic Can Help

Upper Cervical Chiropractic has been proven to help children with colic, chronic ear infections, and more.

If I could just take care of children all the time, I would. No offense to you adults, but children are really fun to take care of.  The thing is, children usually don’t need chiropractic care. However, they should be checked because if they do need it, we want to make the corrections while they’re young so they don’t grow crooked. 

If children don't need upper cervical care, that’s great and that’s the best thing possible. When they’re born, children’s bones are still soft and not totally solidified so they can take a lot of tumbles without sustaining any major damage. There are obviously limits to this. For example, sometimes if a child has some type of in-utero constraint before they’re born, that can cause a neck injury. If a child is born by C-Section, it often becomes a neck injury. A difficult or prolonged vaginal birth also can cause a neck injury. Since the body is meant to take a lot of these stresses, most children are fine when they are born. 

One of the things that give us a clue that a child may have a problem early in life or infancy, is colic. Colic is one of the big things, also when the head twists and they can’t seem to straighten out, often seems to be related. Another sign can be when a baby isn’t nursing well on one side. What we've found is that usually, those children have a neck issue that, once corrected, the neck muscles relax, the muscles in the digestive system relax, and everything starts doing their jobs properly. 

Another symptom that’s usually seen in children as they get a little older is chronic ear infection. However, it’s important to make the distinction between ear infections every once in a while or getting sick every once in a while, versus a chronic condition. Getting sick on occasion is a baby’s natural immunity being built, and it’s important to their overall health as they get older. If a child doesn’t get sick occasionally or if they live in a hermetically sealed environment, they are probably going to grow up and have lots of other issues. But, occasional ear infection or getting sick is perfectly normal.  We just want to ride those out, and give them proper nutrition. Try not to have to give them any drugs that will inhibit them from developing an immune response. 

HERE’S THE DIFFERENCE: If your child develops a chronic ear infection, perhaps their pediatrician is saying they need to use tubes in the ears – In my experience, this is most often a neck problem. Every child that I’ve had come into my office with these issues have seen their symptoms clear up. When we find a neck problem, we corrected the neck problem. The immune system corrects itself, and the body starts functioning properly. In children, the eustachian tubes (the connection between the tongue and the back of the throat) that should remain clear, are fairly straight. Therefore they don’t drain properly and can get ear infections. But, if they get chronic ear infections, a lot of times the muscles around them tighten and so it blocks things. If the neck is out of alignment, the adjustment we make allows those eustachian tubes to open back up again and properly drain. 

Another issue I’ve seen commonly in children a little bit older than the toddler is the bed-wetting. Often that’s just because you know that those children should be able to sleep through the night without wetting their bed. There can be many issues that can cause bedwetting, but one of them does seem to be a neurological issue caused by a problem in the neck. I’ve had some patients come in as children, I’ve adjusted them, and its cleared up, I’ve had some where it hasn’t, it was some other issue but they did have some neck problem and it may have been part of the whole equation. 

If your child is experiencing colic, chronic ear infections, or any of the other symptoms and conditions listed above, we would love to see how we can help. Upper Cervical Chiropractic care has shown tremendous success in helping to eliminate these issues in children.  At Blair Chiropractic Clinic, we want to fix the problem you’re having.  Our motto is “Find it, fix it, then leave it alone”.  Visit www.blairclinic.com or call (806) 747-2735 today to speak with a member of our staff about scheduling a screening.  

https://www.blairchiropractic.com/

https://www.uppercervicalcare.com/healthconditions

What is a screening and why is it important?[Video]

The screening is important because we don’t often know if we have injured the spine or how bad it is.

So we want to check those see even if the symptoms aren’t very bad or if you have no symptoms whatsoever that you find out in 30 years that now you have a heart problem because a nerve that is coming from your spine that’s going to your heart isn’t working like it should.

In the screening, there are several components.

The first is just you and me talking about what the issues are and what brought you to my office.

The second is the testing phase, where we determine whether it is something I can help you with or not. And that is divided up into a neurological component and a measurement component. The neurological component has two tests.

The first one is measuring the temperature of your skin on either side of the spine just in the neck region. This gives me some information about the nervous system and how it is functioning.

The second is having you lay on your stomach or on your back and looking at the length of your legs which may sound kind of strange. Leg length changes the tension of the muscles all the way down the spine, causes the pelvis to twist a little bit. If the pelvis twists a little bit, then the hips are not going to be level, and if the hips are not level, then one leg is going to look and act like it is shorter than the other. That can cause other problems.

And then we run some tests from there to determine what is causing that short leg. Is it a neurological problem in the spine, and if so, where in the spine is it? After we do those two tests, then we do a posture measurement. There can be about three different factors that can determine how you are standing and what’s correct for you.

Then we’ll sit down and talk about the findings. And we’ll say “you’re doing fine,” especially if ti’s just a checkup and you don’t have any symptoms. But if I do find something, at that point, we’ll go over what the process is. What’s the next step? What do we need to do to fix it? How long is this going to take? How much will it cost as far as we can tell at this time?

I recommend that screenings start at birth and then proceeds throughout life

It doesn’t mean you have to see the chiropractor a lot. We want to make sure that especially as the child grows, they are growing straight. And even as adults as we get involved in sports and we get into car accidents that it doesn’t cause permanent damage that you may not really realize until 20 or 30 years after the fact.