Optimal Chiropractic (701) 364-9998 3220 4th Street East Suite #101, West Fargo, ND 58078 https://optimalchirond.com/
📍 📍 Hey everyone
it’s Doctor Andrew with Optimal Chiropractic. I want to go over something with you guys we get in our office a lot, especially with our new patients that come in. It’s a common term that everyone likes to refer to, but they call them pinched nerves. They come in, a new patient will come in, and they’ll come in, but, Oh, my neck.
I think I got a pinched nerve in my neck. I got a pinched nerve in my low back. So I want to explain what is really going on there, if it really is a pinched nerve or and then how does chiropractic deal with that? So one thing I want to just explain first was what the nerves look like. Basically, when we look at a spine, all these yellow little nodules popping out here are the nerves of the spine.
So you can see here they go through the whole entire spinal cord through the whole skeletal system here in the spine. Now, as you see, they come out of these nice little openings all through here. That’s why I really wanted to show you because that’s where all the main spinal nerves, spinal nerve roots come out of.
So I’ll give you a little bit, even a smaller version of it here too. They all come out of this area right here and that’s what a good spine should look like right there with that nice, it’s called a foramina is the opening itself. That thing should be nice and wide and open. That’s the ideally what we want to be seeing.
But with what happens, I call them every day, unavoidable stresses. Whether you, you sit at a desk all day, whether you’re in like an assembly type work, you’re constantly lifting all day long, you’re twisting, whatever it might be, everything, I just call them everyday unavoidable stresses basically. But over time that spine gets worked and shifted repetitively.
And basically what happens here’s another spine model. This is with the nerve out of it, but here is that nice nerve root open right there. That’s a nice hole right there. We want to see that wide open, but as that is your body starts to shift and twist and do all these certain things, you can see it start to easily start to collapse and shift towards that area like that and really pinch that nerve area off.
So when that happens, that’s what we call we call it subluxation chiropractic because that nerve is not able to function at its full extent. And that’s what we do as chiropractors, is we remove subluxations, or in the sense, a pinched nerve. That’s really our specialty. That’s what we do as chiropractors.
Now, how we do that is, once we do our hands on exam, if we do our x ray, it helps determine where the damage is in the spine. What we do as chiropractors then, we start to get proper motion back into the spine. We actually adjust and shift the vertebrae forward. to help take pressure off of those nerves when they’re sitting there really crushed down like that we can help them shift and open it up and work it back open so as that nerve starts to relieve pressure on there it can then start to heal over time and that’s when people usually start to see Results happening that they want to see over time.
But you can imagine though, this doesn’t just happen overnight where we just pinch it off. That’s usually years of wear and tear that get to us. So that’s what we try to explain to our patients too, is that these things don’t just happen overnight and then they can’t just be fixed overnight as well too.
Pain is usually the last thing to show up at the end where you need to go get help. And then it’s usually the first thing to go away, but then you can imagine it takes a long time to correct something like this. So that’s the definition of nerve irritations. We usually, when people come in with a pinched nerve, it could be anything like burning pain, numbness, tingling, headaches, migraine, sciatic pain, that’s all pinched nerves running to issues.
But those pinched nerves can also run to just muscles of your upper back from poor posture. They can also run to organs, glands, and tissues that cause like digestive issues or things like that. So that’s why we always encourage to think about chiropractic as honestly like a general wellness type of care as well, too, because that will help us increase that nerve function, which then helps you function at your best.
If you have any questions about this, I’m happy to go into a little more detail, especially if a certain situation in your case, just reach out to us and we’d be happy to help.
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