Arctic Chiropractic, Sitka Manages Back Pain Fear with our Chiropractic Patients
Had back pain before? Yes? It’s natural to fear its recurrence, but don’t let it hijack your life! This holiday season, consider Santa. Think he’s had back pain before lugging all those packages and parcels? Arctic Chiropractic, Sitka expects he has! Santa can’t stop, and neither can you. Sitka chiropractic care can help manage new back pain and chronic back pain and guide our Sitka back pain sufferers to be a bit less fearful and a bit more confident getting around this holiday season.
FEAR OF BENDING
Your Sitka chiropractor realizes this: many low back pain patients fear bending forward. Researchers studied this common clinical finding and found that this fear of bending forward also influences postural sway or balance by interfering with hip balance control, bringing about weight shifting from side to side to keep balance. (1) What is an unwanted effect of being unbalanced? A fall. Arctic Chiropractic, Sitka finds it very important to help our back pain patients – especially our older back pain patients – stay balanced and upright!
HELP TO KEEP BALANCE AND REDUCE FEAR
“There’s an app for that!” Just what our older Sitka chiropractic patients with balance issues want to hear?! As much as “tech” can annoy a few of its users, particularly some older users, it can help! The new smartphone-based Gait&Balance App is accessible. Researchers have verified that it is able to measure age-related differences in balance not necessarily picked up during clinical exam measurements like postural stability, step time, step length and cycle. (2) These insights can assist healthcare providers like your chiropractor design a more beneficial and individualized treatment plan to decrease fear of movement and enhanced balance. This is quite hopeful, so much so that chiropractic researchers are exerting more research effort to quantify the benefits of multimodal chiropractic care in its ability to affect gait, balance and/or fall risk and prevention. (3) One encouraging study with older lumbar spinal stenosis patients (average age 83.5 years) found that their postural sway and entropy as well as function and symptomatology were better with a course of chiropractic care including Cox® Technic Flexion Distraction Decompression spinal manipulation. (4) Arctic Chiropractic, Sitka uses this treatment along with nutrition and exercise to help our patients keep moving fearlessly and balanced!
BIOMARKERS FOR BACK PAIN
A new nutrition discovery this month may also aid this effort. It comes from researchers analyzing levels of biomarkers – C-reactive protein, vitamin D, neuropeptide Y and others - in low back pain patients tested via blood tests with pain and disability. Vitamin D which keeps appearing in many health news reports today also seems to be a potential biomarker for back pain relief and disability. A respected randomized control study found a link between vitamin D levels and changes in both pain and disability for low back pain patients treated with spinal manipulation. (5) Some day, we may do blood tests to check for back pain risks!
CONTACT Arctic Chiropractic, Sitka
Listen to this PODCAST with Dr. Joel Dixon on The Back Doctors Podcast with Dr. Michael Johnson as he describes his helping a Vietnam veteran deal with his back pain for 20 years, incorporating the Cox® Technic System of Spinal Pain Management.
Schedule your Sitka chiropractic appointment soon. Calling all our Sitka back pain patients! Bring us your back pain and your fear of back pain, bending and falling. We can help you manage them as well as Santa fearlessly and efficiently delivers all his packages in a single night!
