How Do You Know if You Need a Chiropractor?

Chiropractors focus on restoring alignment, improving nerve function, and promoting overall body health, which can reduce pain, improve posture, and prevent long-term damage. It is ideal to see a chiropractor preventatively before back, neck or joint pain becomes severe.

If someone experiences chronic back pain or neck pain, when should they consider chiropractic care over other treatments?

Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: When people ask me, “How do you know if you need a chiropractor?” Usually, my first General Weisenheimer answer is usually going to be, “If you have a spine, you need a chiropractor”.

Everyone knows if they have teeth, they need a dentist. And if you take care of your teeth a little bit at a time throughout the course of your lifetime, they’re going to last you a lifetime. I always talk about this when I do my healthcare talks. I’m 58 years old, and if you go back two generations to like my great-grandparents’ generation and even my grandparents, they didn’t really go to a dentist unless they couldn’t bite into an apple. And subsequently they all lost their teeth by the time they were 65 and had full dentures. And what was interesting to me is that they all thought that that was normal. And what I tell people is it was common because they didn’t really know how to care for their teeth.

Now we’ve all seen maybe a 70 or an eighty-year-old guy all hunched over walking slow, and his posture is tipped down, his head’s looking down at his feet when he walks. And I promise you, he didn’t just wake up one day, look in the mirror and say, “What happened to me?” This stuff happened slowly over time.

And again, if you do the maintenance and you care for your spine over the course of a lifetime, it’s going to stay healthier. But what I find is most people come to chiropractic usually after they’ve had little or no success with the medical route or physical therapy. And it’s sad because chiropractic doesn’t include medications which often can be ineffective and increase eventually a need for people to get put on opiates. And those are prescribed at an insane rate now. And the medical profession created the opioid crisis and it was created by medicine. I always think it should be chiropractic first because it’s safe. It’s not terribly expensive, and it helps so many people lead active, healthy, drug-free lives.

The short answer is obviously if you’re starting to get back pain, neck pain, you’re on the late side because we like to be more on the preventative realm. Everyone should be considering chiropractic care over the other treatments because again, we’re not putting anything into the body, we’re not taking anything out of it. We’re just working with your body’s own natural nerve system and immune system to help the body keep healing, running and regulating at its best. Although it’s very effective with druglessly helping people with back pain and neck pain, and don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to help those people, chiropractic is so much bigger. If you’re only using chiropractic for your back aches and neck aches, you’re really only getting about 10 to 20% of what we have to offer.

Can a chiropractor help with joint pain such as in the knees, shoulders, or hips?

Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: The obvious answer is yes, but it typically doesn’t work the way people think it does. Balancing your hip and pelvis is a real important part of it because if the front end of my car is lined up perfectly, I can drive that car fast, I can drive it as long as I want, and I’m probably not going to wear the tires too much. But if that front end is out of alignment, it’s going to stress the wheels, the tires are going to wear funny. If I ignore it long enough, it’ll stress the U-joints, for my mechanical friends out there. And if you ignore that long enough, it’ll trash your steering column. Just getting $150 alignment on the front end after you hit a pothole will save you all kinds of problems down the road. But when things are in proper alignment, the mechanics are smoother, you’re going to get less friction, less degeneration, less arthritic change. It’s really about alignment when it comes to the extremities and the spinal joints.

Chiropractic works by removing the pressure off the nerves to restore normal function. Typically, stress, tension, poor posture, accidents, falls, will create these misalignments or what we call subluxations, and that irritates the nerves. When we think about neural irritation and creating static in the lines, that’s going to slow down the body’s ability to heal because your body heals by replacing damaged cells with healthy new ones. Sick cells make sick cells, healthy strong cells make healthy strong cells that are the next generation. And since our body is constantly regenerating, the healthier the cells that are created in the body, the healthier the body is going to be. And that’s the important thing to understand because everyone thinks it’s mechanical and about back pain or neck pain, but it’s truly about nerve system function and allowing the body to heal, run and regulate itself all through that system.

I know this is a big question for you. Why would a pregnant woman need a chiropractor?

Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Oh my gosh, there are so many reasons that we see pregnant women. Number one reason is, look, these moms are in pain. But they’re carrying another life inside them. They can’t take aspirin, they can’t take medications because they share that bloodstream with that baby. Any toxins or chemicals they put in their body is going to affect that baby. And then when the baby is developing, that’s rapidly dividing cells and those are the ones that are most frequently affected. It’s really important that we not “pollute” the baby’s environment with all these chemicals and things.

A lot of moms will come when they’re pregnant to improve the outcomes of delivery. A lot of times you’ll get some tightness through some of the abdominal musculature and you’ll get the round ligament contracting. The uterine sacral ligaments can get very tight and that can distort the shape of the uterus and create uterine constraint. When the doctors see that, a lot of times the babies won’t turn into the head-down position, and that can increase the rate of C-section when they’re watching those things.

A lot of moms, when they’re prepped and they go through the Webster protocol, they report a lot less labor pain. It restores great function and nerve system communication. We correct vertebral subluxations that may have occurred prior to delivery because they gained so much weight. The center of gravity moves forward, and it puts stress on the sacroiliac joints. And again, chiropractic can help ease some of the nausea and the back pain that the moms experience.

Typically, in the second trimester, it improves pelvic and hip alignment and prevents and actually relieves some of the headaches. Remember we were talking about those in a previous blog that because the estrogen levels start to dip, expecting moms are more prone to headaches. Then in the third trimester it improves the alignment and to make delivery easier because the better lined up and the better the nerve system functions, the better communication and that coordinated effort to bring that baby out is really orchestrated by the mom’s nervous system.

It’s really a wonderful thing in that it helps in so many different areas of pregnancy and easing the pain and discomfort reduces the need for interventions, particularly Pitocin, epidurals, and C-sections. We see a lot of moms seeking out natural care for the difficulties that they have during pregnancy, but these aren’t medical conditions. It’s just common stuff that happened with pregnancy. Most moms just get such better outcomes when they’re under chiropractic care.

For people that struggle to maintain good posture. How can a chiropractor help?

Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: The first thing is really when we’re talking about posture, there’s two types of posture, Liz. If you’re having a really bad day and you’re super upset, we look deflated, our shoulders round forward, our head drops down, and we’re all stressed out and all these types of things.

But really understanding the person, is how we find that out. We ask a lot of questions in the original interview. We’ll chart possible treatment plans and interventions. We’ll ask questions about lifestyle, their medical history. We’ll find out what type of work do they do? Are they in a stressful situation? Are they sitting? Is it super physically active? Are they up and down? A lot of different things. We check posture by, obviously, we put them on bilateral scales to see if there’s any weight balances. We look for elevation of the shoulders, any dipping of the head. A lot of times we’ll use x-rays. We’ll recommend physical exercises and tasks to allow us to understand their situation better. We’ll take notes on their condition. These will serve as markers to plan treatment and to see when they’re getting better.

Chiropractors will work with the strained tissues. We don’t just work with the bones and joints as we align things, and we correct the tone of the muscles. Any muscles that are strained will be relaxed and that’s crucial in healing. Treatment plans will help deal with the soft tissues as well as other forms of therapy, exercise, postural exercises and things that’ll help improve that. And then the adjustments are paramount because when we correct the alignment, the bones and the joints tend to be healthier, and we can figure out exactly what’s going on by assessing how healthy the bones and joints of the spine are.

Very often we’ll take x-rays, we’ll look for the proper curves or scoliosis or any of those things. And then oftentimes along with the chiropractic adjustments, we’ll recognize that maybe stretching, rehabilitation, those types of things. And sometimes I’ll even refer people out to physical therapy because they have a lot of experience in working with these postural exercises, and that’s not really in the wheelhouse of my practice. We work, we check, we adjust, and then if someone needs additional help, I’m not afraid to refer them out to another specialist who might have expertise in that area.

There’s a lot of different things looking at posture and how it relates to lifestyle. But the main thing is this, we just grill them, we interrogate them and find out what are their postural habits and figure out what can we change.

In what ways does a chiropractor help improve overall body function, including flexibility in sports performance?

Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Those are really great questions. There are tons of studies out there relating and showing how chiropractic care can improve your range of motion, both in your neck and your lower back. And the way chiropractic improves your flexibility is optimizing the spine’s biomechanics. When we have proper spinal alignment, your range of motion can increase, improving flexibility. Stiffness tends to reduce flexibility, increasing risk of injury, and affecting sports performance. In some athletes, stiffness can be related to overuse of the muscles, but by getting everything lined up, getting the pressure off the nerves and making sure that they’re as flexible as possible, this will improve balance, agility and coordination because chiropractic also helps with nerve system function and normality there. The nerve system’s responsible for movement. Chiropractic treatments can make it easier to coordinate the movements of your body and whenever you need to accomplish sports related tasks.

They did these cool studies in the early nineties. These guys, Lauro and Mauch examined the effects of chiropractic care on athletes, and they found that after six weeks, the athletes who received chiropractic care performed six and a half percent better than the control group, the athletes who didn’t receive chiropractic care.

They’re always looking at how structure dictates function, and the better your structure is, the better your nerve system function is, and the better your nerve system functions, the healthier you are. We always talk about how when we used to have dial-up internet, how slow everything was and it took forever to load pages and stuff like that. When we have a body that’s tuned up and a nerve system on chiropractic care, that nerve system’s running like it’s on a DSL or a T1 line, it’s not slow. The faster and the more accurate our nerve system works, the better we experience life because we experience life through our nerve system.

Chiropractors truly are nerve system doctors. It’s not just about back pain or neck pain, but when your nerve system works better, you’re more agile, the more flexibility, you just perform better. That’s why famous athletes, Joe Montana and all these great quarterbacks and athletes, the last thing they do before they take the field is usually get a chiropractic adjustment, get their uniforms and game gear on and get out there and play their best.

Learn More

To speak with Dr. Gregg Rubinstein, visit www.ChiropractorMidtown.comor call (212) 977-7094 to schedule an appointment.

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