I see neck and back pain frequently in practice, with over 90% successful results. The primary focus in my practice is on restoring proper communication between your brain and your body. The doorway between your brain and body is the Atlas or C1 and Axis or C2. These are your first two bones in your neck. If these are out of place, it can cause dysfunction all throughout the spine, not just the neck.
A real simple way to see this is to have you lay down. I will examine the length of each leg and determine if one leg is sitting shorter than the other. If so, when you turn your head to one direction, you will see a change in your leg length. What that tells me is that there is some dysfunction in the neck causing this compensation that twists the back up and causes one leg to seem shorter. If you are out of balance in this way, it can cause back pain anywhere in your spine, all from a misalignment in the neck.
request an appointmentI’d like to address a common misunderstanding. If you ask someone why their back hurts, they will have different answers. What I hear most often from people is that “it’s just muscles”. When people say this, they are not exactly wrong. It’s not that simple though. To explain this, I’m going to talk a little anatomy. Let’s first establish this… your brain controls and coordinates everything. Every cell in your body is connected to your brain through nerve fibers. Your brain sends messages to the rest of your body from above down and inside out. That means that it starts from the brain and goes down to your body. These nerve fibers that come from the brain connect to muscles as well. A muscle doesn’t do anything unless some nerve tells it to. In other words, it’s usually not a muscle problem… it’s usually a nerve problem. So what makes a nerve tell a muscle to get tight? From what I see, there are a couple reasons.
First, there is some dysfunction that your body is compensating for. In other words, there’s a misalignment somewhere in the bones that is telling the brain to tighten down and stabilize the joint, and the muscle gets tight.
Second, some muscles might not be working correctly. If one muscle is overworking, undoubtedly there is another muscle not “holding its own” that is causing that tight muscle to overwork. Often this is due to poor posture or lack of exercise.
Third, there has been some injury to muscles that cause them to stay chronically tight until the injury heals right. I say “heals right” because sometimes a muscle will heal with scar tissue but, because it wasn’t rehabilitated correctly, it ends up with much more scar tissue than it should have. This can cause adhesions and other problems. So what’s the most common of the scenarios? Probably a mixture of all three. Usually there is a misalignment that happens with trauma, which can also end in muscle injury. This can cause poor posture too. Usually, one problem begets another. So what do you fix first? The misalignment of course. The other deficiencies will resolve better with a balanced nervous system. Oftentimes I see people that have already been to a general chiropractor. I often hear that it helped for a while but it came back when they stopped going. Maybe they didn’t correct the underlying cause of the problem. Blair upper cervical care is different because it gets to the root of the problem and corrects that so the body can heal itself. This way there’s a lot less adjusting, and the primary goal is to stay in alignment so your body doesn’t need adjustments. This is a different way of thinking. I invite you to see what Blair Upper Cervical Care could offer you with a free consultation.