Short Introduction to CBCT Analysis

This is a Cone Beam CT scan.

It is slowly, but surely taking the place of regular X-rays.

The first thing I look at is this 3 dimensional  view.

This gives me a good overview of what I am looking at and what to look for. I do my actual analysis on the 2-D views that you see on the right side of the screen. But this gives me some good overall information. I can look at the discs and the disc spaces, I can look at the holes between the bones where the nerves come out. I can look straight down from the brain through the cervical spine just to see what is going on there. So that's always what I start with first, just to get an overall view of what is going on.

Then I move to the 2-D views.

The first thing I do is I create these red lines that kind of square up the skull so I have some reference points. On this picture here, the head is pretty level, but on this picture here you can see there's quite a bit of tilt towards the right.

We want to look at the top joint in the spine where the skull sits on the top bone in the neck. Looking at the joints here on each side, and we'll take some measurements of it.

I'll just do a real quick version of it. We spend a bit more time. There's a bit more of a process to it when we are really analyzing something. It's about the same on both sides on this particular patient.

Then we're going to look at each side particularly.

So I want to look right down the outside edge of that joint there. We're going to see that over here. And we need to change the angle a little bit so we can see right down the joint. Alright, now it clears out. Looks pretty even there. The outside edge of the atlas and the outside edge of the occipital condyle, or the bottom of the skull. Let's take a look at the other side.

Overall this process takes about an hour.

Now if you look here, you can actually see a very small misalignment there. On this particular patient the atlas, or the bone underneath the skull, has moved a little bit to the left and forward of the actual skull itself and gotten stuck.

So we have to design an adjustment to slide the bone right back down there.

One of the tools that help us do that and again I would be a little more careful when I am actually analyzing it. We're going to look at what the angle is there so we know how to place our body in comparison to the patient to slide the bone back into place without twisting and popping. There is a lot of other things that we analyze...

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.

Arthritis & Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care | Dr. Gordon Elder

Dr. Gordon D. Elder of The Blair Chiropractic Clinic, Lubbock Texas explains how Upper Cervical Chiropractic can help reduce Arthritic pain.

Arthritis can come in many forms but the most common kind is caused by the body’s joints wearing away for one reason or another. Many times, this condition is caused by poor alignment, which makes a lot of sense; if your alignment is wrong, your joints are going to wear wrong.  This causes the inflammation, burning sensation, and pain that’s usually associated with arthritis.  This does not apply to ALL types of arthritis – for example, autoimmune arthritities like Rheumatoid arthritis is caused by a part of the body eating or disintegrating its own joints, which is a different issue.  At this time, we want to focus on arthritis that’s caused by cervical misalignment – which can be repaired over time with proper Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care.

Regardless of the type of arthritis you may have, chances are you’ve had the problem for much longer than your symptoms have been showing. Another one of the challenges associated with treating arthritis is that the problem doesn’t ‘start’ when the joints get hot and swollen.  These symptoms occur after years of the joint being worn down, which is what is causing the irritation and inflammation in the joint.  For example, many of our patients are amazed because we can look at an X-Ray of the neck and ask, “What happened to you 20 (or 50) years ago?”  We can even point out where the trauma occurred, since the X-Ray shows us where the arthritis is developed.

Contrary to what many people believe, having arthritis does NOT mean you’re old; it simply means you have an “old problem. We’ve seen relatively young patients with significant arthritis in their joints, and we’ve seen elderly patients who had virtually no arthritis until, for example, a spinal injury occurs. In these cases, when we fix the patient’s neck and take the pressure off the brainstem, their body starts to move back into the proper position. As this happens, we can relieve the pressure on those irritated joints.

Unfortunately, if the injury or damage has been there for a long time, some of the arthritic symptoms may be permanent. However, when a patient’s body is healthy enough to straighten things out, it has the ability to “work around” the damage. In many cases, people with arthritis can live fairly normal lives, not having to think about the pain of the arthritis because everything else is functioning properly and the body can compensate for the damage.  Upper cervical alignment can play a big role in this as well, because of how closely this area of the neck is associated with total body alignment.

If you or someone you know is experiencing severe pain from arthritis, we would love to see how we can help. Upper Cervical Chiropractic care has shown tremendous success in helping patients get back to normal, without being burdened by arthritic pain.  At Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX , we want to fix the underlyingnproblem 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.  

Sciatica & Upper Cervical Chiropractic

In this video Dr. Elder talks about what sciatic pain is and isn’t. He then discusses different treatment options and why it makes sense to try less invasive methods first.

A lot of people who get pain in the leg are told, or think that it is sciatica. The sciatic nerve is a large nerve that runs down the back of the leg. When it comes out from the spine, it comes from from several different parts and they merge and come apart and merge again. Then there are nerves about the size of the thumb that are running down through your buttocks down the side of the leg like a line. If you have a pain that is broad (about the size of your hand) running down the back of your leg, that is not sciatica; it can be a pinched nerve of some kind, but not sciatica. 

If it is like a line of fire going down your leg and it is really bad, and goes down the back of your leg and the bottom of your leg, down to the heel and then shoot out the toe, that is what sciatica feels like (or so I’ve been told). 

That nerve can be pinched in a couple of different places. It can be pinched because of a muscle that is too tight in the buttocks, it can be where the nerves come out from the spine because the spinal pieces are not lined up properly or somehow smashing and swelling and causing problems on the roots of the nerves themselves. 

What I’ve noticed is probably about fifty-percent of my practice is made up of people with low back pain and a high percentage of those have sciatica.

When I adjust their neck, the sciatica goes away.

Now, there have been a few where it has not gone away, but we send them to another chiropractor or therapist to help get the last percentage away. It will go down a little bit with me, their moving better, their other symptoms go away, but the problem is so progressed that they need more than just closing the barn door so to speak. So we send them to someone else, they get the rest of it, and it gets fixed. 

In some cases, people do need low back surgery, but please do not rush to that. There is a diagnosis code on the books for failed low-back surgery syndrome because it happens so often. So that should not be the first choice. First choice, look at your posture, look at your nervous system, and get those fixed.  If you get to the point where you have to go around in a wheelchair, then you might think about surgery.