Kinney Chiropractic Manages Arthritis | Chiropractor for Arthritis in Belmar, NJ
Hi everybody, Dr. Jodi Kinney, I’m continuing my series on arthritis, and how we treat many, many patients who have what we call either osteo arthritis or degenerative joint disease. Doctors and physicians, we use those terms interchangeably.
So I want to just explain to you what degenerative joint disease or arthritis osteoarthritis looks like in the neck spine. So when we look at a normal neck spine, you should have this backwards sort of curve, nice big spaces in between the bones, the curve should be somewhere between like 35 and 40 degrees. Over time, long standing old accidents, long standing injuries, repetitive stress of sitting with poor posture, over years of time, what happens is, you can start to initially lose that normal curve of the neck, now more of the stress is on the front parts of the bones and on the front parts of the discs, the spine can handle that additional stress. So if we don’t correct the spine at this point, we shift into here.
Now in phase two, you start to get permanent loss of disk spaces, little rough edges that start to develop. This is the beginning of arthritis. And once you have arthritis in your neck, we can’t take that away. I can only prevent that from worsening over time, because if at this point, you don’t get it corrected, it can shift into here.
Now in phase three, you have multiple levels of loss of disk space, multiple levels of bone spurs, multiple levels of fixation, fixations and pain and nerve irritation. This is really hard to manage, can we do it? Absolutely. I manage patients with Phase Three degeneration and arthritis all the time. But don’t let your spine, ideally, ever get to that point. That being said, I do treat dozens and dozens of patients who have arthritis and degenerative joint disease in your spine. And it’s one of the safest, most effective things that you can do short of massive amounts of drugs, short of surgery, injections, we never want to go down that road if we can help it. So helping get a better curve back in your neck that’s going to prevent precocious changes in the neck spine. Getting motion and movement in the spinal joints will prevent them from fixating and becoming degenerative and arthritic over time.
So if you’re starting to feel like you have loss of motion, or you know you have early changes of arthritis in your neck, or your back, get into a chiropractor come in and see us so that we can prevent this from worsening, much worse over the over time. All right. I hope that helped and I look forward to seeing you soon.
