The young man slumped in a chair across the desk from the doctor. “All I did was turning my head,” the man said, “and BAM, suddenly I got this agonizing pain in my neck. And it won’t go away.” He looked worried.
In another chiropractor’s office across town a middle-aged woman told a similar story. “I was in the grocery checkout line and I dropped a penny. When I bent over to pick it up, something popped in my lower back. They had to phone my son to come and get me. He brought me here. The pain is horrible,” she said as she rubbed her lower back.
Every day, in chiropractic offices across this vast country, thousands of suffering men, women, and children tell doctors the same story:
“All I did was turning my neck… ”
“All I did was bending over… ”
“All I did was lifting the groceries out of the trunk…”
And the common question each of these victims asks is: “Why me? I wasn’t doing anything unusual or stressful, but now I can hardly move because of the pain. What did I do wrong?”
THEY DID NOTHING WRONG
Chances are none of those patients did anything “wrong.” Chances are each is the unfortunate prey of “microtraumas,” a series of very small, discrete injuries involving muscles, ligaments, tendons, or cartilages. Repeated time and again, such tiny stresses or injuries build up-and eventually blow up-into acute problems which quite literally can bring unsuspecting victims to their knees for no apparent reason.
That’s why microtraumas pose an enormous threat to anyone doing repeated activities. People simply do not know they may be setting themselves up for major problems merely by performing the same actions over and over again.
REPETITIVE MOTIONS
Assembly line workers are especially susceptible to microtraumatic injuries because of their repetitive work motions, but anyone doing repetitive motion either at work or play is fair game: carpenters, tennis players, bowlers, computer processors and so on. Even sitting the same way, repeatedly, over a long time can produce microtraumas, those tiny injuries which can develop into serious injuries.
MICROTRAUMAS LEAD TO BACK OR NECK PAIN
Microtraumas accumulating in the soft tissues around the spine often bring on spinal imbalance and misalignment of spinal bones which can suddenly – without warning – pinch, impinge, stretch, irritate, or compress spinal nerves. And that’s an event which suddenly brings otherwise healthy men and women to the chiropractic doctor. A person gets up in the morning feeling fine, but before the day is over, he or she is in excruciating back or neck pain.
While that kind of painful situation is a chief concern of chiropractic doctors, fortunately they are well-trained and experienced in handling painful cases.
DETECT AND CORRECT EARLY
However, to help avoid sudden pain and misery, not to mention loss of work and play time, chiropractors encourage their patients to get a chiropractic checkup at least every six months. They know it is always far better to detect and correct small injuries, imbalances, and misalignments of the spine before they accumulate into a sudden, painful, major episode.
Copyright © 2010 Health Star, Inc