Articles by Dr. Erdman are for informational purposes, and are not to be taken as specific medical advice.
It’s been awhile since I’ve written on a chiropractic
specific topic. There is a lot of misinformation about intervertebral discs
from many sources. Most doctors believe that once a spinal disc or nerve is
damaged, you need surgery or are forced to live with pain, weakness and organ
malfunction for the rest of your life.
The truth is that while the spine can and does easily
degenerate, it can also regenerate. Conditions once thought to be permanent can
many times be stopped, and sometimes reversed. Chiropractic, like medicine, is
becoming more specialized all the time. The special training necessary to
physically change your condition by fixing your postural problems is not to be
found at every office, nor is every patient a candidate to be fixed. The
process of rehabilitating a degenerated spine is time consuming and requires
significant active participation from the patient. Not everyone is willing to
put in the time and effort necessary to achieve a better spine.
Your spinal disc number twenty three from head to sacrum.
Discs are about 88% water. A loss of 12% of the water in the disc will reduce
its height by 50%. Research shows that a 1 mm loss of disc in the neck and a
1.4 mm loss in the lumbar region will cause the same amount of neurological
compression and IVF encroachment as an 8 degree rotation. (It takes 3 degrees
of rotation to pinch the nerve and cause pain down an arm or leg or disrupt
internal organ function). You can see it doesn’t take much change to alter its
function.
Up until puberty, the disc receives nutrition and eliminates
waste product like most other soft tissues, through a supply of blood. After
puberty, vessels to the disc atrophy and disappear completely by the start of
your third decade of life. This is huge! Simply put, your body does not use
blood supply to nourish or heal the discs after about the age of 20. So how do
they keep living?
The discs must receive their necessary water, nutrients and
eliminate waste from osmosis and imbibition. The only way this occurs is
through loading/unloading cycles by each and every spinal unit attached to each
disc. This is called hysteresis. Hysteresis is essential for correcting the
spinal structures; by reducing the tensile strength and rebound elastic energy
in the disc prior to adjusting or corrective exercises, you allow for improved
outcomes and motion. Consider the disc a sponge. It can hold a significant
amount of water. But the only way to exchange the water in the sponge with
other water is to squeeze or twist it. This is exactly what must occur for your
discs to stay alive. Motion is life; lack of motion is a slow death for discs.
From the time you crawl out of bed in the morning to when
you jump back into bed, you lose an average of 20mm of height. The sleep cycle
allows the unloaded discs to regain much of the lost water height, but not all
of it. This is another reason sleep is very
important. Since some height is not
regained, the spine becomes shorter starting at about age 30. It is common for
most adults to lose two inches by age 60.
The multitude of injuries and accidents we put ourselves
through along life’s winding path also plays a role in disc damage. If discs
need complete motion by surrounding joints to be nourished and eliminate waste
properly, what occurs when an area of the spine is damaged or reduced in
segmental motion by injury? That’s right, less food to the joint, and the less
healthy it becomes.
Therein is the reason posture and function go hand in hand.
Your poor posture is acquired over a lifetime of insults. By not correcting the
dysfunctions with chiropractic treatment, there remain areas of less function
which feed the discs less nutrients as the years go on. Finally, one day,
you’ve got enough pain to compel you to seek treatment. If you go to the
medical side, they say, “Aha, you have arthritis, there’s nothing we can do.
Take these pills for pain and inflammation; see you when it gets bad enough for
surgery.”
If you come to this chiropractor, there are many things to
be done to try to stop the degenerative changes. These include manipulation,
posture specific exercises, posture corrective rehabilitation, and a life style
change. Not everyone qualifies for corrective care at the moment, but it is a
goal to work toward. If you are a male with a hundred pound beer belly, there’s
nothing I can do to correct your posture until that goiter is gone. But in the
meantime, there are exercises specific to discs and loading/unloading cycles to
feed the discs regularly, and manipulation can help free up areas of
dysfunction while you lose that weight.
And pain relief is possible even when correction may not be an achievable
goal.
A healthy spine is a choice you must commit to in order to keep. Unfortunately,
most doctors have little understanding of the complex biomechanical structures,
and have no suggestions for their upkeep or rehabilitation. Most patients only
want to be out of pain and only think of their backs when they hurt. You can’t
ignore your spine until it hurts, then expect a simple adjustment to “fix” you
up. It doesn’t work that way. Although I can usually help people “feel” better
rather quickly, “correcting” the spine is a much different process, yet worthy
of the outcome; a healthy, pain free spine.