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. 

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...

Neurocalometer, and other $40 words

By Gordon Elder, D.C. and Philip Kennedy, D.C.

Skin temperature has played an important role in analyzing disease from ancient times. Hippocrates would put mud on a patient’s back and would note where it dried first, indicating higher temperatures and therefore disruption of normal physiological function.

In the early part of the 1900’s chiropractors, in much the same way, would move the back of the hand up a patient’s spine to locate “hot boxes,” areas of increased temperature. The increased temperature indicated to them, as to Hippocrates, an area of dysfunction and therefore possibly an area in need of a chiropractic adjustment.

As the century and technology progressed, chiropractic analysis became more refined. In 1922 the Neurocalometer (meaning nerve-heat-meter) was invented.

Dossa Evins, an engineer, contracted tuberculosis which then caused kidney failure. The effect that this had on Evins was that, since waste could not leave the body via urine, he excreted it through his sweat glands (called uremic frost) – which didn’t exactly provide a pleasant body odor. In his search for health he got under the care of a chiropractor in San Antonio, Texas. Evins noted that when his spine was in alignment his kidney function improved and he didn’t have the uremic frost. He also noted that the chiropractor analyzed his spine by using the above described method of sensing hot boxes with the back of his hand. Being an engineer, and figuring that if he could help the chiropractor do his job better he would benefit as well, Evins began working on a thermocouple device that would measure and compare skin temperature on either side of the spine. At the same time (1920) he enrolled in the Palmer School of Chiropractic. By 1922 the Neurocalometer was finished and in 1924 it had been tested and retested and was submitted to the chiropractic profession.

Our modern heat-sensing instruments are similar to the one developed by Dossa Evins and our understanding of the meaning of temperature imbalances has advanced since the 1920’s. Chiropractors of that era thought they were detecting the heat of an inflamed nerve, but we now know that the real story is more complex. Abnormal signals generated by spinal misalignments travel into the spinal cord along nerve fibers which connect directly to the part of the nervous system that controls blood flow in the skin. These abnormal signals disrupt the ability of the nervous system to keep the skin temperature even and balanced. The resulting temperature imbalance can be detected using the Neurocalometer or a similar device.

Incidentally, the same part of the nervous system that controls skin temperature also controls many of the major organs and systems of the body. This is why many patients who seek chiropractic care because of back or neck pain also end up noticing improvement of other health problems as well – digestive disorders, asthma, or abnormal heart rhythms, for example.

While many in our profession have abandoned the use of heat-sensing instruments, we at Muncy Chiropractic feel that they have an important place in any program of precise, specific spinal care.

Posted in Chiropractic Clinic and tagged alignment, inflamed nerve, spinal care, temperature