A chiropractor can be a big help when you have back pain, but you may not realize chiropractic treatments can help with pain in other areas of your body too. Your spine and the nerves that run through it have far-reaching effects on your body when your spine is misaligned or when it pinches a nerve. That's why a spinal adjustment can affect much more than just the pain in your back. Here are some chronic pain conditions that spinal adjustments might be able to help.
Headaches
If you suffer from frequent headaches, you might want to try chiropractic treatments to see if they can reduce the severity and frequency of the attacks. Nerves run up your spine through your neck and into your head. If one of these nerves is compressed by your spine, it can trigger pain in a distant area such as your head.
Sometimes headaches are caused by tension held in your neck and shoulders. This sometimes results from poor posture or a change in posture because of back pain. Headache relief could be a secondary effect of spinal adjustments that relieve back pain and correct the position of the spine.
Tingling In Your Hands
Nerves run from your spine through your shoulder and to the tips of your fingers. If a disc in your spine pinches a nerve, you might have problems with chronic shoulder pain. However, nerve compression doesn't always cause pain. It can also cause tingling, and sometimes the tingling is felt in your hands and fingers.
Rather than treat your hands directly, a chiropractor might be able to stop the pain and tingling in your shoulder, arm, and hands through adjustments of the spine that relieve pressure on the nerve that leads into your arm.
Leg And Foot Pain
Pain that spreads from your hip down your leg is often caused by sciatica or pressure on your sciatic nerve. Chiropractic adjustments can help with sciatica by decompressing the nerve. Sciatica can be mild or extremely painful. Sometimes it resolves itself quickly, but other times it can last for weeks or months and interfere with your activities.
Chiropractic treatments might not be an instant cure, but they might provide temporary relief from pain and help speed recovery by taking pressure off of the nerve so it can heal.
Back Pain From Fractures
Compression fractures occur when a disc in your spine collapses or compresses. This type of fracture can happen when you have osteoporosis. You can have a compression fracture and not have much pain, but other times, a fracture can be very painful. A chiropractic treatment for a compression fracture opens the compressed area of the spine to relieve pressure on the nerve so blood flow can be restored to allow for healing.
This might be accomplished by positioning your body in such a way that the collapsed area of your spine opens. The chiropractor might do this manually or use a computerized table.
Chiropractic adjustments can treat a number of ailments and injuries. Before treatment begins, the chiropractor takes a medical history and does a physical examination to diagnose your condition and come up with an appropriate treatment plan. This ensures the treatments are safe and that they'll provide the most benefit for your condition.
