You probably hear the term, spinal manipulation, and figure that there’s just too many things that can go wrong. The idea people often have in their minds about chiropractors tends to conjure the image of a patient writhing on a table to the melodic tune of vertebrae popping as a calm practitioner wrenches or twists something just so. It’s typically all for dramatic effect on television and in movies, and it leads some to think that chiropractic care is a painful process. It’s not at all what you think it is if any of these things speak to your state of mind or hit inordinately close to home. You have no reason to fear spinal manipulation practices because quality professionals in chiropractic care are highly trained for working with spinal techniques. This is partly because the techniques tend to be the techniques they use the most, so your practitioner can probably strum “Hail to the Chief” on your vertebrae in his or her sleep.
Rest Assured
Chiropractors usually deal with over a hundred adjustment techniques for disparate reasons, but an individual professional is likely to focus his or her talents on about a tenth of those for most of the adjustments they perform. The techniques they use aren’t restricted to just realigning the spine either obviously, though chiropractors are often associated with spinal manipulation specifically. Their techniques generally reduce pain and joint inflammation in order to enhance or restore joint function. The joints in question don’t have to be in your back, though. The most all-encompassing way to distinguish chiropractic techniques from one another is to categorize them according to which ones are forceful and which ones are less so.
The actual techniques that chiropractors refer to when using the term, spinal manipulation, are a forceful one called by the same name and a gentler one called spinal mobilization. Spinal manipulation is the one that makes people think that, in order to render chiropractic care on television or in movies in an interesting way, they have to depict it as a series of pops that send the patient yelping abruptly and sonorously. There’s nowhere near as much at stake given that your chiropractor would never inflict pain on you. Sometimes, it feels necessary to emphasize this so as to undo some of the damage that may have been done to the appeal of chiropractic care in media.
Spinal Manipulation
Spinal manipulation is technically called high-velocity low-amplitude thrust, and it is arguably the most common technique your chiropractor uses, which means that there’s no need to be concerned that anything will go sitcomically wrong. Spinal manipulation is also the most traditional technique chiropractors employ, too, so the technique itself has been more than thoroughly vetted. Just let the chiropractor work because a trained professional in chiropractic care knows the spine very well; all he or she really needs to learn from you is the nature of the discomfort or spinal issue that brought you here. Being as savvy as a chiropractor can be when it comes to the spine as well as the general nervous system, they know how best to position you so that you get the greatest possible benefit out of spinal manipulation. Your chiropractor will probably position you such that you feel somewhat contorted, and that may not be super comfortable, but your chiropractor will take advantage of your positioning to feel the joint where the trouble is. A chiropractor can sometimes detect your troubled spot before you even explain its location with any real specificity because, if you provide a ballpark and say that you’re in pain, he or she knows what it will likely feel like to his or her hands when feeling the area in which what you’re describing is occurring.
No doubt, you’ve heard the old saying, “I was just a bundle of nerves for the rest of the day,” or some variant thereof. Nerves can get all tangled up, and this phrase can become strikingly applicable. A chiropractor is the ideal practitioner to find these bundles and untangle them so that the discomfort you have can go away. They use manual force sometimes to accomplish this when necessary, but they absolutely know when to do so; moreover, a trained professional uses the utmost discretion in plotting a course to dealing with your problem.
