 Today's blog is going to be focusing on chiropractic care for the bones in your body other than your spine!
Hello, everyone! Dr. Bob Salamon here with another exciting and educational blog! I hope everyone out there is staying safe and doing well. Today we are going to be changing things up a bit! We are still going to be talking about chiropractic care, but we are going to be talking about adjusting other bones in your body besides your spinal bones. Don't forget, you have many bones throughout your body that need care too, not just your spine! I have a lot of people who come into my office who don't know that chiropractors can work on your elbows, wrists, shoulders, and other joints in your body that could be causing you pain. There are 206 bones in the human body, and they all have joints of some kind. Any movable and semi-movable joint can be adjusted. The question that is posed a lot is why would you want a chiropractor to work on a non-spinal joint? Very similar to the spine, bones throughout your body can get out of alignment and cause pain and other problems. Non- spinal joints, even though they might not have any spinal nerves coming out of them, when misaligned can create a lot of inflammation, which usually will cause pain. I'll give you an example. A patient recently came into my office who works in construction. He had fallen off a scaffold a few weeks before coming to see me, and he fell straight down and landed on his feet. However, he hit his elbow on the brick wall next to him when he was falling. When he came in to see me, he didn't have any issues with his elbow, but he was having some serious issues with his shoulder. I checked his shoulder joint, and he had very limited range of motion and when he tried to move it, it was incredibly painful. Just by looking at the mechanism of the injury, I could tell that by hitting his elbow with such force, it had pushed the humerus or upper arm bone upward into his shoulder socket. I typically don't take x-rays on joints if I don’t suspect a fracture. In this case, since I knew the mechanism of injury and did not suspect a fracture, I adjusted the shoulder without x-rays and told him to come back in a few days. Two days later, he came back in and informed me that the pain he had been experiencing had drastically decreased and his range of motion had returned to normal! I've adjusted him since then and he is basically back to optimal health. If he hadn't come to see me, his options would have been to deal with the pain, go to physical therapy, take medication or get an injection into the shoulder. I don’t believe the outcome would have been as successful as what we achieved in my office with chiropractic care. In some cases, it doesn't take a ton of work to change the alignment of a joint that is out of position, and to help ease your pain! We get a lot of patients in the office who play soccer and who injure their ankles and knees very often. In many cases, we can help them tremendously with chiropractic care. What I do normally with these joints is that I check to make sure that first of all, it's stable, which means that there isn't a tear of a ligament, tendon, or meniscus. If there is a tear of a soft tissue and the joint itself is moving as it should, that's not a situation for chiropractic . In those cases, I would refer out to an orthopedic specialist. While it might be difficult to decide who you should see first in cases of pain after an accident, or if you're just feeling out of sorts, my advice would always be to come to see me first. We may be able to help you quickly and avoid more costly or invasive treatments.
Chiropractic care can also help with improving your posture, your overall mood, and can be a huge boost to your immune system, which after this past year, we all know to be extremely important! As I mentioned above, there are 206 bones in the human body, so I'm sure you can imagine how much stress is put on all of your joints by a normal day's activity, and then imagine how much stress can be added on your body over a whole year and beyond! Chiropractic care can be an amazing solution when relieving this stress off your body and is a low-cost solution, a drug-free solution, and a non-surgical solution for your problems. We can treat everything from your jaw to your shoulder joints, to your ribs, elbows, wrist, knees, hips, and beyond. The whole point of today's blog is to let all of our readers know that if you're struggling with a joint problem, and you're not getting a lot of relief or success with the methods that you're currently using, just come and see me! Look us up! Visit our website, send us an email, or give us a call and I promise to look at what is bothering you, evaluate the joint, and if I can help you I will, and we will begin working right away! Until next time, I'm Dr. Bob and I've got your back and joints covered!
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 Curious about what goes into the process of taking your x-rays when you come to visit me? Today, we'll be talking about the whole process and how I use x-rays to analyze your spine. Let's take a look at an x-ray together and discuss some helpful information from your favorite Spanish-speaking chiropractor! Hey, everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic. I hope you're all doing well and staying safe out there! Today, we are going to be doing something a little different with the blog! We will be discussing a set of x-rays that I recently took of a new patient - with picture examples! I want to use this blog and each image to talk about how I analyze the x-rays that I take when you visit my office and how we will begin working together on your wellness journey after I do so. These x-rays are imperative! They help me to help my patients. I feel like x-rays are extremely important in helping me find the spinal issues that need to be corrected.  The patient I will be talking about today is a painter from Honduras. Before she came and saw me a few weeks ago seeking help, she was carrying a very heavy bucket of paint and hurt her back. The symptoms she was experiencing after she hurt her back were right lower back pain, sciatica (meaning she had pain down the back of her right leg) and numbness and tingling in her toes. What I do normally, with any new patient such as this young woman, is take a detailed health history and do a chiropractic exam first, and follow these two steps by taking a set of x-rays. What's unique in our office is that we take full spine x-rays. They're 14X36 inches in size and they show the whole spine in two different views. These x-rays are very helpful for me, but very importantly they also help every patient see what's going on with the spine. I can walk them through what is causing their pain and how I am going to work on trying to alleviate these issues by pointing out exactly what's happening on their x-rays. What I am always looking for on these x-rays and what I am aiming to correct are subluxations. Subluxations are vertebrae that have misaligned and are irritating nerves and causing pain. Today, this blog is going to be a behind-the-scenes look at what I do when analyzing my patient's x-rays and how they help me! Take a moment by examining the first picture below which shows the two 14X36 x-rays that I take of my patients, and the specific one I will be discussing today!  The first x-ray that I look at is a side view of my patient, called the lateral. This x-ray helps me look at and see the curves of the body and the whole spine, and I look at the disc space between every vertebrae to see if there is any arthritis in the spine. Arthritis shows up as little spurs or hooks on the bones.As you can see, she does not have any arthritis and the disc spaces between the vertebrae look good! Look closely at this picture. I would personally like to see a little more of a curve in her lower back so it looks a little more like a C. Her back is pretty straight, as is her neck. I would also like to see more of a curve at the top of her neck, too. Even with these wants, her back looks pretty good overall!  Now, let's talk about the second x-ray called the A to P, which is the front-to-back x-ray. When I take this picture the patient is looking away from me, meaning the x-ray is looking at their back straight on. I do this because when I adjust my patients they are lying face down, and I want to mirror what I am going to see on my table when I adjust them. As you can see from the third picture here, there is a scoliosis or a curvature in the middle of her back, which is not normal. The bones in the middle of her back should be straight and lined up perfectly with the rest of the spine. When you look closer at the 4th picture, you can see that her pelvis on the left side is much higher than the right side! From the A to P view, I see that one of the main problems is that the curvature in her spine is a compensation for what's going on in her lumbo-pelvic area. Also, in addition to the scoliosis in the middle of her back, her vertebrae are rotated to the left. Why has this happened? It's being caused by a problem in the sacrum, which has rotated to the right and is causing the vertebrae to rotate to the left. The scoliosis in her back is irritating the nerves that are coming out between the vertebrae. Finally, please look at picture number 5. You will see the ilium (the largest part of the pelvis) is 205 mm in length on the left-hand side and only 200 mm on the right side. This means the right ilium has rotated forward and the left has rotated backward!
Once I had taken these x-rays and analyzed them, the trouble areas are where I started with my patient's treatment, which I corrected with what I was feeling in her spine as I adjusted her. Low and behold, after this specific treatment based on my findings, she is doing so much better! After about three treatments she came in and shared with me that she is feeling great, her pain is gone, and she is back to working normally! I might not have straightened out her back and her scoliosis but I removed enough pressure on her nerves to make a difference. Now that she has come in to see me to correct her issues, her new goal needs to be maintaining her adjustment. The best way to do this is to continue coming back to me for consistent maintenance and wellness care. If she doesn't, there is a potential that the problem she experienced could come back. Think about it this way; it only takes the weight of a dime on your nerves to affect them. You, or in this case my new patient, don't need to be perfectly straightened out to get the excellent results you need and deserve! I hope today's blog has helped and has been informative! I hope you enjoyed an inside look at how I, as a chiropractor, use x-rays to help me treat my patients. X-rays are just another tool in a chiropractor's toolbox along with understanding their patient's health history and performing a consultation and exam to understand what our patients are going through. For me, it is imperative that I get a good set of x-rays so that I can give the best care to my patients. If your spine looks like the one we've been discussing today, or if you want to know what your spine looks like, please look us up! Send us an email or give us a call, and we'll get you in here and get started on your wellness journey! Until next time, I'm Dr. Bob Salamon and I've got your back covered! Take care!  Curious about how chiropractic care can benefit you or anyone you know that might be expecting? Dr. Bob is here in this week's blog to talk about how chiropractic care can safely help bring ease and relief to pregnancy!
Hey everybody! Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic and another exciting and informative blog! I hope you're doing great out there! Today, we are going to be talking about pregnancy and why it's a good idea for pregnant women to be under chiropractic care. Let's jump in and get started. In case you have any questions or hesitations, I am personally trained to work with women who are pregnant, and I do have extensive experience. Why is it so important to receive chiropractic care during pregnancy? As the baby grows, we see that this brings on a lot of physical, chemical, and hormonal changes in the mother's body. Let's talk about those physical changes! As the baby continues to grow bigger, this can cause your hips to become displaced, your pelvis can tighten up, and it can cause you to walk with a different posture than you normally do. All of these changes can put a lot of stress on the joints in your body. The baby can also sit on a plexus of nerves that are in the sacrum or lumbar area of the body. In this case, it is very common for a woman to experience low back pain. My job is to help prevent or alleviate any of these issues to help you feel better and to help the baby remain healthy and safe throughout your pregnancy. There are three main reasons why women seek me out during their pregnancy:
The space between the pelvic and the lumbar section is where mom’s belly fits, and the table can be adjusted to accommodate the height of the mother and the size of their baby. This allows plenty of room for mom and baby to be comfortable. Thanks to the type of table that I have in my office, I can give relief to my pregnant patients. If it weren't for this specific table, I wouldn't be able to adjust someone who is far along in their pregnancy face down. Being face down to receive your chiropractic care is one of my preferred ways to adjust my patents! Please don't hesitate to come in and get adjusted. You and your baby will be safe and comfortable throughout the entire process. If you have any questions, or if you're pregnant and you would like to chat and ask me some questions about what you should be doing during your pregnancy, please feel free to get in touch with us. As always, we would be very happy to help anyone in any way we can! I hope this blog has been helpful and informative, and for any of my readers who are pregnant, I hope everything is going well for you and that you come to see me soon! I promise that we will take good care of you! Until next time, remember that I am Dr. Bob and I have your back covered!  Do you struggle with headaches regularly? Chiropractic care is highly recommended to help with your headaches! You don't have to suffer anymore, let chiropractic care help you!
Hey everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic and another exciting blog! I hope you are staying safe and well out there! Today, we are going to be talking about something that affects many people worldwide daily, and that is headaches! Hopefully, through this blog and what we are going to be talking about today, I can help give you some information on how to combat your headaches naturally! There are many different types of headaches out there; classic migraines, common migraines, cluster headaches, tension headaches, and many more. Each of these different types of headaches is caused by different things. Migraine headaches will have onset symptoms that appear before getting the actual pain in the head like sensitivity to light, floaters in your eyes, and auras. Each of these early-onset symptoms acts as a warning to an individual that a massive headache is on its way. Migraine headaches are a little more complex in general because they're usually related to some hormonal or chemical imbalance in the brain. Today, we are going to put migraines to the side and talk about tension headaches. Generally speaking, tension headaches are headaches that will progress as the day goes on. You may wake up feeling great, but as the morning wears on into the afternoon, you start to get a headache. You might feel the pain in your temples, behind the eyes, or maybe even in the back of your head. These headaches may or may not require you to take some medications to help you get through the rest of your day. Let's talk about tension headaches and their causes. Primarily tension headaches are vascular, meaning they are caused by the changes in your blood vessels or capillaries in your brain. Your capillaries carry blood to and from your brain, and the pressure on the walls of those tiny capillaries is really important. If you have too much pressure on the walls of your capillaries, it can cause inflammation. That inflammation, as we all know, can cause some serious pain. Tension headaches can also be caused if the capillaries in your brain expand, causing your blood vessels in your brain to make up more space, resulting in serious pain as well. Do you know the "normal" amount of headaches that your body can suffer every week? Zero! No headache is normal, and there is no such thing as a "normal" headache or a "normal" amount of headaches to have every week. I have so many patients that tell me that they get "normal headaches" about 2-3 times a week. This isn't a normal thing to experience, we are shooting for zero headaches every week! If you're getting more than zero headaches every week, it might be time to find a new way of dealing with them and preventing them! Back to blood vessels! What controls the sizes of these blood vessels in your brain is the nerve supply. Remember that every organ, blood vessel, tissue, gland, skin cell, and everything in your body has a nerve supply that comes out of the spine and spinal cord. If that nerve is somehow inhibited, meaning there is pressure on that nerve or it's pinched in some way, the signal from the brain is not getting through to that nerve as it should. In these situations, isn't it conceivable that maybe that blood vessel could dilate because it's not getting the right supply? Or, conversely, could that blood vessel constrict for the same reason? The answer is yes to both of these questions because interference with nerves can either speed things up, slow things down, enlarge things, shrink things, and stop things from happening as they normally should. To ensure that these blood vessels are the proper size and you have the proper amount of blood flow going through those vessels in the brain, one of the things that helps with tension headaches is chiropractic care! How does it help? What chiropractors are trained to do is to take the pressure off the nerves that may be pinched because a vertebra or a bone in your back is out of place. My job is to analyze where in your spine the bones are out of place, called a subluxation, putting pressure on nerves and affecting a lot of things in your body. Subluxations can get in the way of every system in your body, along with creating the tension headaches we are talking about today. My job is to correct those subluxations with my hands so that those nerves are freed up and they start working properly. This allows the blood vessels to go back to their normal size and help the headaches go away! The other alternative to help with your tension headaches is to take medication. The medication that is out there can solve the problem short-term by removing some of that inflammation off the blood vessel. Just like any medication though, it doesn't correct the cause of the problem. If the cause of the problem is a subluxation of your spin and irritated nerves, the medication can't fix that problem. Chiropractic aims at fixing the problem that's causing these symptoms. Also, every medication has side effects. Looking at the list of medications that are out there for headaches, one of the side effects of long-term use of anti-inflammatories is that they can lead to liver damage! This liver damage is just one of many side effects connected to this medicine! If you are using medication regularly to help with your tension headaches, you might want to consider chiropractic care because the results are incredible and you can avoid those side effects. If you come into our office to help your headaches, we will do a complete exam, go through your medical history, give you a full consultation, and we will take some X-rays to see where those subluxations are. If I can feel where those subluxations are or what is causing your headaches, we will get to work right away working to fix these issues causing you pain. Chiropractic care is an all-natural treatment for headaches and there are no medications involved. If you're struggling with headaches and you want a new approach from the one you're already using, look us up! We would love to help you. I hope all of this information helps! Don't forget, I'm Dr. Bob and I've got your back covered! Have a great day, and we'll see you soon!  Chiropractic care is an excellent form of care for everyone at every age! Today we're going to be talking about chiropractic care for children!
Welcome back to the blog, readers! I'm Dr. Bob Salamon with Lowcountry Chiropractic! I hope you are all doing well out there, and that you're staying healthy and safe! Today we are going to be expanding on the idea that chiropractic care is beneficial for everyone at every stage in their lives. We've recently talked about the many benefits that chiropractic care offers to the elderly, and today we are going to turn the tables and talk about the benefits of chiropractic care for our children and younger generations. While their bodies are growing and developing, who better to have their brain function and their immune systems strengthened with chiropractic care than our children? When it comes to the goal of any chiropractor, it comes down to going beyond fixing the many ailments that can be connected to poor alignment and a subluxation. We care for your back, which is connected to the nervous system and your brain. The brain controls every operation in our bodies. While we are thrilled that chiropractic care can help so many different things, our goal is to ensure that the body's nervous system has every chance to work as efficiently and effectively as it can! CHILDREN AND CHIROPRACTIC CARE Many might think children don't need chiropractic care. Their bodies are brand new, healthy, and they haven't had to carry the weight and stress that adulthood and time can bring. While this is true, even before they're born, children can experience stress on their nervous system. These nerve irritations or subluxations are a part of everyday life. You've watched a child learning how to roll themselves over, hold up their heads for the first time, learn how to walk, and take their first stumbles and falls. Imagine the stress that puts on their developing nervous system. Subluxations can occur from bad posture, sleeping on their tummies, remaining in one position for a prolonged period, knocks and falls, and much more. Stress can be put on the nervous system before a child is even born. This can happen due to being in an award position in the uterus, restriction of movement, or birth complications like fast or very slow labor or cesarean delivery. We all know the importance of a healthy back and nervous system that chiropractic care can deliver, and we know that children deserve this care just as much as adults! Introducing chiropractic care to children at a young age can put them on a course of having a very healthy lifestyle. While many still might believe that chiropractic care is only for adults, it can be even more important for a chiropractor to care for and check on your children due to spurts of rapid growth, changes in their bodies, and development. Also know that chiropractic care for children, while it might be a new idea for some parents, it is not a new idea overall and has been around for some time. According to the American Chiropractic Association (ACA), many parents have feared how their children would respond to treatments and if they were safe. Over the years, many health professionals have sided with these parents. At the same time, doctors of chiropractic have been spending years trying to teach and assure parents that treatments are safe. Any injury or pain resulting from a chiropractic treatment was connected to underlying pathologies. Thanks to these studies and years of hard work, more parents and health professionals have gotten on board with chiropractic care. It is recommended that chiropractors do a very thorough examination and speak with parents about their medical history and their child's before treatment begins. Also, just like I mentioned in my previous blog about elderly chiropractic care, an infant would never receive the same kind of care that an adult would. Their treatment would be adjusted to their needs and age to promote the utmost safety and care! Also, don't forget that chiropractic care is non-invasive and its foundations are based on effective and gentle adjustment techniques that are safe and have been well tested. Remember my blog late last year where I discussed the many myths chiropractors have to constantly disprove? The biggest one is that chiropractors are not real doctors. We busted that myth! Your child's care and health are very important and will be in very confident hands any time they are in a chiropractor's office. THE BASICS What do you remember about your childhood? Before every smart device took over, we were outside running, jumping, climbing, swinging, and playing every game and sport we could think of. This also meant a lot of stumbles, falls, and accidents. They're still learning, still understanding their balance and coordination, and they haven't fallen enough yet to understand the full consequences of their actions. Their bodies respond to these incidents and can carry and hold tension and subluxations just like an adult's body. Chiropractic care can help realign their spine and joints, which is incredibly important as a child grows. These subluxations, remember, can get in the way of the brain functioning and communicating to the body as it should. In a body that is growing and changing every day, they need these connections and communications to make sure the best decisions are made for their health and development. Also, remember that chiropractic care is an excellent way to avoid the use of over-the-counter or prescription medications. According to the ACA, one of the most common reasons why parents take their children to a chiropractor is to help with the care and management of chronic ear infections, instead of them taking a plethora of antibiotics. GROWING BODIES Children and adults have the same joints, but they aren't fully formed in a child's body right away. Due to this, as I mentioned above, treatment will be specifically tailored to their little bodies. The adjustments will be done faster and with much less force, due to their increased flexibility in the developing joints and that they are much smaller. Instead of manipulating joints as chiropractic care can do for adult bodies, chiropractic care helps mobilize the joints in a child's body. When it comes to infants and in utero, it's even more tailored. For babies, many common issues include sleep problems, issues with nursing, colic, torticollis, and plagiocephaly. Chiropractic care has shown drastic improvement with each of these issues, along with helping or preventing any long-term effects. In utero, treatments can help prevent any sort of constraint. If the baby moves in a certain way, they can remain in that one position for several months. Wouldn't that be uncomfortable for you too? According to the ACA, "the goal of treatments is to restore motion to the joints and balance the tissues to keep everything as biomechanically even as possible. Taking the tension off from day one can help allow for optimal growth and development." TOP REASONS AND BENEFITS OF TAKING YOUR CHILD TO A CHIROPRACTOR
Your child's health is in your hands while they are growing and learning! I hope this blog helped explain why chiropractic care is so beneficial for children and to assure you that it is safe. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out. If you would like to talk about your child's chiropractic care, please reach out as well! Until next time I'm Dr. Bob and I've got your back covered! |
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