What Does Chiropractic Neck Treatment Involve?

During a chiropractic adjustment, trained specialists called chiropractors use their hands or a medical instrument to position the spinal joint. Chiropractic treatment is done when you have neck pain, headaches, or low back pains. These are the most common reasons why people seek chiropractic treatment.

The practice is a popular therapy for many people as it doesn’t involve any medication. Today, there are 60,000 plus certified chiropractors in the United States, and about 8% of adults and 3% of American children have had chiropractic care treatment. This is higher compared to those who opt for yoga, massage, and other therapies like acupuncture.

Procedure for Neck Pain Treatment

The word chiropractic originated from the Greek words ‘cheir’ for hand and ‘praxis’ meaning action. The chiropractor near you uses the hands to treat muscle, nerve pain, and joint pains throughout the spine and joint adjustment.

The adjustment procedure involves your practitioner applying moderate but abrupt force to a particular joint, pushing it beyond the point the joint moves typically. The process attempts to loosen up joints that poorly and painfully move due to tissue and tendon damage or scars caused by trauma or recurrent stress.

A traumatic example causing neck pain is whiplash, while an example of repetitive stress is a consistent poor posture.

After a neck pain treatment in Cave Creek, AZ, you might develop minor side effects that go away after a few days. They include fatigue or pain in the treated parts and consistent headaches.

Note that the response to a chiropractic adjustment is not similar for everyone. It much depends on an individual’s particular situation. If you fail to notice any improvements in symptoms after a few weeks of treatment, you might need an alternative therapy to chiropractic adjustment.

Risks Involved

Tatum Chiropractic and Wellness neck adjustment is safe when done by a trained and certified individual. Below are the common complications associated with neck pain treatment in Cave Creek, AZ.

• Herniated disks or worsening of an existing herniated disk
• Nerve compression in the bottom spinal column
• A unique stroke resulting from neck manipulation

Do not seek chiropractic treatment if you have:

• Severe Osteoporosis
• Cancer in the spine
• Increased risk of stroke
• Numbness or strength loss in the arm or leg
• An upper neck known bone abnormality
• Suspected spinal instability
• Acute Myelopathy
• Acute unstable fractures
• Special infections like osteomyelitis

Chiropractors near you are trained to assess the best treatment options for neck treatment and other pain types. A chiropractor might recommend you to another specialist if your neck pain comes with headache, fever, vomiting, or if you notice that you’re wincing at light. This can be a symptom of meningitis, an infection that infects the brain and spinal cord membranes.

You will need to visit an emergency room immediately if there is a possibility of meningitis.

Your neck pain might also be a result of underlying medical conditions such as arthritis or fibromyalgia. Sin this case, some medications and muscle relaxants recommended by your doctor will alleviate the pain better and faster than chiropractic treatment.

Gentle Chiropractic Treatment

These are chiropractic techniques that do not use rapid force or side bending of the neck for treatment but rather use slow velocity and smooth stretches. Several factors determine whether your chiropractor will recommend gentle chiropractic treatment, including:

• Patient Preference: Some patients are not comfortable with rapid high-velocity manipulation of the neck. They prefer an approach where the neck is not twisted or joints popped.
• Provider experience: Other chiropractors prefer using techniques in which they have more experience and skills. Most chiropractors practice different techniques then adapt to specific methods that they will use according to the patients’ preferences.
• Contraindications: It sometimes is hard for some patients to tolerate various treatments based on past experiences. This is as in the case of past treatments that led to trauma or possible spine instability. When the patient has severe osteoporosis, it’s not appropriate to perform a cervical manipulation procedure.

Once in a while, chiropractors use a combination of methods to treat neck pain. Adjunctive therapies like exercise, heat, cold therapies and other treatments can manage cervical spine pain.