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.