Low back pain….it happens to almost everyone at some point in their life, and many suffer from it routinely. It accounts for a significant portion of ALL doctor visits in our county. There have been many studies which have proven the effectiveness of chiropractic manipulation for lower back pain, that is not debated even remotely as much as it used to be say 20 years ago, but the conversation we have more these days with; insurance companies, our medical colleagues, and the public, is how often to get adjusted and when exactly to go in.
In our office, we don’t typically see patients very long if the case is simple. If you woke up with a tweak in your back and it isn’t something you typically deal with, then it is usually something that doesn’t take much to correct. However, if you’ve had this lower back pain for 8 months or a few years, well, it probably won’t get fixed in a single visit, or two. Hey, I’m not the Wizard of Oz and my wife isn’t the good witch whose name I can’t remember (but she’s prettier than her, and that witch wasn’t bad to look at…please tell her I said this if you read it, I need all the brownie points I can muster).
There was an interesting research article a few years back that looked at getting adjusted a few times for ‘acute’ episodes, where you are hurting the most, and then just stopping care, which is what most people do. They also looked at those who got adjusted for the acute episode and then treated continued to treat monthly for 6 months after. I found this study very interesting because I often wonder what happens to those people who come in 3 times a year and they need 1-2 weeks of care to get better. I often think, what if they got treatment once a month or once every other instead of coming in just when the pain was bad. The study revealed that those who received the monthly treatments for 6 months had improvement in pain and disability scores 10 months after receiving their first round of care while the others did not. This proved that receiving regular adjustments can help maintain function and reduce pain ratings and the kicker here is that from my perspective, people will spend LESS time and money doing this type of care versus increased care at the time of bad flare-ups, and the most important part of all, LESS PAIN throughout the year, which is kinda the point of this whole thing. :)
Dr. Tracy