Neck pain in Endicott
For two million years we looked straight ahead. We looked into the distance to see what berries there were to forage, what was there to hunt, what would hunt us. Even when we stopped to eat, we would pick up the food and put it to out mouths, but we wouldn’t be looking down at plates, at cutting boards, at pots and pans for most of those two millions years. In our society we don’t look straight ahead very often. More often we look down. Most of us sleep on pillows that push the head forward. When we get up we eat looking down at our breakfasts. Then we drive cars with our heads very far forward from the headrest and from our bodies. We get to work and look down at clipboards, at papers on desks, at books, at assembly lines, tools, under the hoods of cars, etcetera. Then we get home and to prepare dinner look down at counter tops with cutting boards, and at stove tops. Next we look down at our dinners to cut them up and get the food into our mouths. After dinner, when it is finally time to relax, we look down some more, while reading, knitting and even watching T.V. We lean back in our recliners which puts our head in line to look at the ceiling but our televisions are at eye level, so again we look down. The natural curve in the neck allows for proper function of the neck without stretching the spinal cord, loading the disks, or putting stress on the muscle and ligaments in the back of the head, neck and upper back.
If your car is out of alignment the tires will wear unevenly. If you wore out some of the tred but still had some left, correcting the alignment would not make your tires perfect again, but it would prolong the life of them considerably. It is the same way with your spine.
Research by a chiropractor who is also a mechanical engineer and mathematician, (Dr. Donald Harrison), shows that the ideal alignment of the neck as seen from the side view is C-shaped with the top and bottom towards the back and the curved middle in the front. When the neck has this shape, the ears are over the shoulder, there is very little stress on the muscles that help support the head because most of the weight is being born on the cervical column, 2/3 of the weight of the head is on back parts of the neck (pillars) and only 1/3 is on the disks and on the front parts of the bones of the neck. The spinal cord is in a nice loose configuration, there is no uneven wear and tear and the neck can last for many decades without any interference to the nervous system and without any arthritic changes in the neck. The technique that has developed from Dr. Harrison’s work is called Clinical Biomechanics of Posture(CBP).
Almost all patients that come into this office have very significant changes in the neck, whether they are symptomatic in that area or not. It no longer surprises me to see 100% of the curve in the neck gone and for the curve to be going in the opposite direction to what it should be, reversed curves are very common. What does surprise me is when I see a neck with a perfect curve, where the ears would be over the shoulder and the neck has an ideal arched shape. If I see a neck like that of a patient that hasn’t been through a corrective care program, modeled after Dr. Harrison’s work, it’s almost shocking. I don’t see a neck like that more than once every eight to ten years. So, one might ask what’s wrong with having a neck out of alignment if that’s the norm? If most people have misalignments and it is unusual to find someone with good alignment, what’s wrong with it?
Seventy-five years ago we might have asked a similar question: what’s wrong with having false teeth? Most of the people beyond a certain age had false teeth and it was pretty much expected that your teeth would have fallen out by your 60's or earlier, so what was wrong with having false teeth? There was probably a time when those dentists that wanted to raise the bar and wanted the goal of having people keep their own teeth into their 70's, 80's and 90's, were thought of as being kooks or thought of as being greedy. "Oh you even want to see people that have no tooth pain, you just want everyone’s money." And, yet today because some people pushed to have us become aware of tooth decay as a major public health problem, most people today have their own teeth into their 70's, 80's and even 90's and it is expected that it will be even more so in the next generation. But, in the generations where no one had preventive dental care, where you only went to a dentist when you bit down on something hard, broke a tooth in half and had to have the other half pulled, the expectation was that you were not going to have your teeth by the time your were 60.
After decades of uneven wear and tear from loss or reversal of neck curves, the discs thin, bulge or herniate. As the discs thin, the body lays down more bone to support the excess stress ( for every inch your head is forward it weighs ten pounds more) and this additional bone forms spurs. These spurs can close in on nerve roots that come off your spinal cord and innervate all parts of your body, and can also close in on the spinal cord (canal stenosis). Bulges, herniations and bone spurs pressing on nerves can affect whatever part of the body that nerve goes to. Many people have symptoms they do not associate with their spines: high blood pressure, asthma, urinary incontinence, constipation etc.. Many have neck pain or back pain. Others have numbness, pain, weakness or tingling in an arm, leg, shoulder, buttock, hand or foot. The muscles in back of the head, neck and upper back all connect and work overtime to try to protect discs from being crushed, frequently causing headaches.Today Arthritis is the number one cause of disability in senior citizens in America and puts more people into nursing homes than heart disease, cancer and stroke combined. It is very common for someone with neck pain to go to a medical doctor, have an x-ray taken and be told that "You’ve got arthritis in your neck, that’s perfectly normal for your age," (just as it was normal to have false teeth seventy-five years ago at that same age) and to be given a prescription for pills to help cover up the pain caused by the arthritis that was caused by the uneven wear and tear of the bones that had been out of alignment for decades.
Clinical Biomechanics of Posture has raised this bar, just as dentists raised the bar on the standards of health for teeth. It says that ideal alignment of the spine allows for better function of the nervous system- no uneven wear and tear, no premature degeneration- and that most degenerative arthritis of the spine, is completely preventable with proper correction and maintenance of alignment.
Only one or two percent of the chiropractors in this country have been properly trained and have the equipment necessary to follow through with the Harrison model. Some chiropractors are advocating pain management, free up the motion in the joint, enable it to move freely, get the person out of pain and allow it to continue to wear unevenly and to degenerate and decay. Some chiropractors are saying, yes let’s adjust the spine until we have ideal alignment, but there is one problem with that: it will never happen without the appropriate protocol of exercises and very specific traction along with a different type of adjusting than most are doing to restore proper alignment to the spine.
If a carpenter wanted to bend a straight piece of wood into the shape of a circle, hitting the piece of wood in the middle with a hammer three times per week would never accomplish the task. To do so would require bending and clamping the wood repeatedly into shapes progressively closer to a circle. The ligaments along the spine are like that piece of wood. To change the shape of the spine requires three things: adjustments or manipulation, to mobilize the frozen joints, exercise to balance the muscular forces pulling the bones in different directions, and traction to stretch ligaments to correct improper alignment. The type of adjustments, traction and exercise will not only vary from patient to patient, but will change in the course of an individual patient’s corrective care program.
To find a chiropractor who practices chiropractic biophysics (CBP), go onto the internet to www.idealspine.com, go to the top of the screen and click on resources, find a chiropractor, look to see who is available in your area and choose the one who has attended the most training seminars, as they have the greatest expertise.
In the Broome County area, North Endicott Chiropractic practices CBP.