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MCFARLAND CHIROPRACTIC
Dr. Mark H. McFarland
Chiropractic Physician
447 N Bluff Street
St. George, UT 84770
(435) 656-1300
McFarland Chiropractic
Some patients have questions about how chiropractic care differs from medicine, physical therapy, and massage. When they have a back pain, neck ace, or shoulder problem, or any type of musculoskeletal type injury that bothers them and causes pain, they often think that they can just do certain exercises to strengthen the muscles and take away the pain. Or take a certain pill to take away the pain.
Actually the pain doesn't get taken away; it gets covered up. Muscle relaxers, pain pill, anti-inflammatories mask the underlying cause which is the subluxation. Subluxation is a small mechanical misalignment that irritates the nerve causing the spine to become rigid and fixated causing neuropathology, mild pathology, kinesiopathology and histopathology. If the nerve is pinched and irritated in the neck that goes down in to the arm, you might have numbness, tingling, aching pains, and muscle weakness. If the nerve that goes into the arm is cut or severed, you lose the function of that arm. Think of a limb on a bush or tree, once it is bent or broken; what happens to the leaves on the end of that limb? They start to die.
Physical Therapy or Massage will work on the muscles around the spine, They'll work on the arm itself. They will give you exercises to strengthen and stretch tissues. Massage will help send sensory information through the skin and also can help increase circulation and loosen muscles. But if the nerve is still-pinched or irritated, you can rub that muscle, you can use physical therapy such as exercises, you can take medication, but when you stop the medication and when you stop the rubbing and stop the electrical current or the ultrasound,m guess what? The problem manifests itself again.
All other disciplines are treating the symptom, not the cause. The nerve controls the muscle, not the other way around. As a matter of fact, the nerve is telling the muscle to be tight in some cases to compensate and to adapt to postural faults that are already present - degenerative disk, misaligned vertebrae. The nerves send messages to tighten the muscles to prevent further injury. It is your body's self-defense mechanism.
So before you go on and do a bunch of exercises and do physical therapy modalities and massage it and trigger point work tying to alleviate the tight muscles, you might want to think "Why is my brain and body doing this in the first place?" If you think you know more than your body does in the healing process, you can go ahead and drug and sedate the muscles temporarily. You will experience some pain relief with massage, physical therapy, and certain drugs to be sure. But you could also be covering up and masking the problem which underneath the surface can lead to future degenerative changes, osteoarthritis, and permanent damage to your spine that only can be repaired then by surgery. Best course of action - is to first have the mis-alignment re-aligned and then strengthen the supporting muscles around it to help alleviate future problems.
I hope you realize that when we embark on care for you, there are two types of care. Pain relief usually happens within a couple of weeks and you have some good days and bad days. Corrective care takes several weeks more, but once you get through corrective care, then we start the therapy, the exercises and the massage to help aid in the recovery. But we are treating the nerve and the cause of the problem, not treating the symptom or that which is on the end of the nerve. We get to the nerve root so the messages from the brain can travel down the spinal cord to the muscles more efficiently. As a matter of fact, every function of your body is controlled by the nerves - your immune system, respiratory system, circulatory system, all of your organs and glands, and of course your musculoskeletal system. You have three types of nerves in your body: Motor nerves - those go to the muscles; Sensory nerves - that's what you feel with, texture, sensation, light touch, vibration, numbness, tingling, pain: then you have Trophic nerves - those go to the organs and glands.
Chiropractic adjustments are the only think that will help restore normal bio-mechanics to fixated joints, subluxated vertebra and actually re-educate the peripheral nerve pathway - the bad habits that have been established through poor posture, through injury, through spinal neglect, from lack of spinal maintenance, lack of following through with chiropractic care, taking drugs covering up symptoms. We actually reeducate the peripheral nerve so that your body can function better and no longer send messages out to the organs, muscles and glands that are not appropriate for optimal spinal health.
Contact my office and get back on a healthy schedule. We will look forward to seeing you and anticipate getting great results. Within a few weeks to a couple of months, 97.3% of all chiropractic patients of doctors who adjust specifically report being well or improved. Those are great odds when compared to the other disciplines that are out there to treat such problems. Healing is a process which takes time, but I'm confident that we can get great results with you and your conditions and when appropriate, we do, of course, refer out for therapy and medical intervention. But make no mistake, we are not treating the same things, As a chiropractic physician, I am more of a nerve doctor than I am a muscle doctor.
