spine & disc degeneration

Your spinal bones begin to deform: your discs swell, then shrink; your ligaments, tendons and muscles begin to harden and weaken; and your entire spinal column loses its balance, flexibility, stability and strength. What's happening? Your spine is degenerating.

Spinal degeneration is often caused by long-standing physical stress. Along with the bones, tendons, ligaments and muscles, your nerves, body chemistry and internal organs can also be affected. Spinal degeneration leads to less overall ability to adapt to the pressures of life: you lose the spring to your step, and the youth in your being. You also lose your height!

Loss of Height
Most people believe they lose height when they get old. Does that mean that at age 65 you wake up and find yourself shorter? Of course not! The loss of height is silent, slow and gradual, and may begin in your 20s and 30s as one of the symptoms of spinal degeneration.

What Causes Spinal Degeneration?
Spinal degeneration (osteoarthritis) is usually caused by years of longstanding vertebral subluxations in your spine. So, what are vertebral subluxations?

Vertebral Subluxations
Day-to-day stress can cause your spine's many complex parts (discs, ligaments, tendons and the bone itself) to deteriorate. Stress often causes the spinal vertebrae to shift from their proper position and irritate the surrounding nerves, bones, discs, ligaments and other soft tissues including muscles. This serious spinal condition is called a vertebral subluxation complex. Subluxations, often painless, are common; they are a hidden epidemic.

Spinal Decay
Spinal degeneration is like tooth decay (often a painless process)—by the time a person notices its effects or feels any pain, the subluxation has been present for years! Although age is often the reason people are told they have degeneration, it's only partialy true. A more accurate explanation would be the amount of time a subluxation has been present: the longer it exists the more the joint, nerves and vertebrae will breakdown. Often times a patient's spinal x-ray will reveal one level in the spine that's degenerated to a certain extent, but the rest of the spine will be fine! If old age was the cause of osteoarthritis/spinal degeneration then the whole spine would be worn out. It just doesn't make any sense. Regardless of the amount of degeneration there is always something that chiropractic can do to help relieve symptoms and prevent further damage.

The Chiropractic Approach
You need not sit and passively watch your spine degenerate. Chiropractic can reduce, halt and may even reverse spinal degeneration by improving spinal balance and posture and keeping your joints, nerves and discs healthy and strong throughout your lifetime. As one researcher writes,"The restoration of motion to a previously fixated joint leads to a restoration of normal joint function and physiology." Further, there is increasing evidence that some spinal degeneration may be reversible. As another researcher has noted,"Correction of a vertebral subluxation can not only attenuate and arrest this degenerative process, but can actually allow the condition to reverse itself."

Prevention
The sooner chiropractic care is begun, the better. According to one researcher, "The earlier the degeneration process is identified, the better chance the patient has for its arrest and reversal."

Of course, the best approach to spinal degeneration is to prevent it from occurring in the first place! This means bringing your children for periodic spinal checkups to make sure their spines are free of the vertebral subluxation complex. Of course, anytime someone experiences a fall, accident or other trauma, they should have their spine checked by a doctor of chiropractic to make sure that they are subluxation-free.

Periodic spinal checkups to detect the "silent" vertebral complex are of vital importance for everyone. That's because stress, including emotional stress, job stress, school stress, family stress and environmental stress, takes its toll on all of us. Therefore, we all should have our spines checked to detect this hidden epidemic that slowly and steadily drains our life of energy, strength and wholeness.

See your chiropractor regularly to keep your spine free from subluxations and free from spinal degeneration.