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. 

• In addition to relieving non-spinal joint pain, chiropractic care has the following additional benefits: 
• Chiropractic care is an alternative to medication.
• It helps improve your digestion. 
• Chiropractic care can play a huge role in relieving stress.  
• It can help with lowering your blood pressure and helping you to maintain healthy blood pressure. 
• It provides a lot of benefits for expectant mothers both during pregnancy and during and after birth. 
• It can help you sleep better and feel more rested overall. 
• It can help with headaches and acid reflux issues. 
• Chiropractic care can help with back and neck pain relief and as we've discovered today, other joint pain! 

Consistent chiropractic care can help improve your overall physical performance, help you stay optimally healthy, and enhance your levels of wellness and relaxation. 
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! 

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!