Benefits of Chiropractic Adjustments

What is the meaning of chiropractic? There are a number of chiropractic definitions depending on who you ask. According to the World Federation of Chiropractic, the meaning of chiropractic medicine is: A health profession concerned with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mechanical disorders of the musculoskeletal system, and the effects of these disorders on the function of the nervous system and general health. There is an emphasis on manual treatments including spinal adjustment and other joint and soft-tissue manipulation.

Benefits
If you frequently deal with symptoms like joint pain, backaches or headaches, but are yet to ever visit a chiropractor for help, then you may be missing out on an effective and natural treatment option.

How Treatments Work
Most of the benefits associated with chiropractic care are due to patients receiving specific chiropractic adjustments. Chiropractic adjustments work by helping to place your body in the proper position that then allows the body to heal itself.

Why Chiropractic Adjustments?
Many things can lead to a vertebral subluxation. Some of the more common causes include: A vertebra going out of place (“misalignment”) because of a slip or fall (i.e., “macrotrauma”).

Having Good Posture
The problem we see in Western cultures is that our unnatural habit of sitting down all day does a lot of damage to our spine and posture. Today it’s common to spend hours sitting while being glued to a cell phone, iPad or laptop.

Sciatica
Compared to most medical treatments, few interventions can initiate back pain relief and healing like chiropractic adjustments can. The European Spine Journal published findings from a clinical trial uncovering how chiropractic adjustments resulted in a 72 percent success rate in treating sciatica-related symptoms.

Low Back Pain & Neck Pain
One study involving chiropractic patients with neck pain found that 96 percent of respondents indicated that they were either “Very satisfied” or “Satisfied” with the chiropractic care they received, and that 98 percent said that they “Definitely would” or were “Very likely” to choose chiropractic care again if they experienced a similar problem. In a 2003 study published in the British Medical Journal, 183 patients with neck pain were randomly allocated to receive either manual therapy (spinal mobilization), physiotherapy (mainly exercise) or general practitioner care (counseling, education and drugs) over the course of a 52-week period.

Headaches Tension Migraine
Second only to back pain, headaches — both tension headaches and migraine headaches — are one of the most common conditions regularly managed by chiropractors.

Ear Infections in Children
A 2011 systematic review published in the journal Explore — which included a review of 26 articles in total, including three clinical trials and four cohort studies — found that chiropractic adjustments helped greatly reduce colic symptoms.

Neurological Conditions
Exciting research is currently being conducted via upright MRI scans showing how upper cervical adjustments affect various brain-based conditions. What we have seen so far is quite remarkable.

Blood Pressure
In 2007, George Bakris, the world expert on hypertension, published a study with a team of researchers in the Human Journal of Hypertension showing that one upper cervical chiropractic adjustment had the same effect as two blood pressure-lowering drugs.

Frozen Shoulder
Last year a clinical trial was published describing how patients suffering from the debilitating condition frozen shoulder responded to chiropractic care.

Additional Benefits
While the benefits mentioned above might draw the most patients to visit chiropractors, there are also many more reasons why chiropractic care is such a valuable treatment approach.

Final Thoughts
Chiropractic adjustments work by helping to place your body in the proper position that then allows the body to heal itself.