If you have arthritis in your knees, hips or other joints, you might not initially assume that having your spine adjusted by a chiropractor would have any effect on the pain. After all, that would be working on the wrong joints wouldn't it? It turns out that chiropractic care can have a positive effect on arthritis patients, easing their pain and making it easier for them to complete the activities they love. Here's how:
Chiropractic care adjusts your posture.
When your spine is out of alignment, you may not realize it, but you tend to carry yourself improperly. This often means that you put more stress on the joints on one side of your body than the other. For instance, you might lean slightly to the right, meaning your right knee, hip, and ankle are supporting more weight than the left. This can increase the pain you experience if the arthritic joints are the ones being forced to carry more than their share of the weight. When your chiropractor adjusts your spine and fixes your posture, this causes the weight to be evenly distributed again, taking that excess strain off the joints and helping to alleviate the pain.
Chiropractic care alleviates pressure on spinal nerves.
A misaligned vertebra may be putting pressure on one or more of your nerves, which can actually make the pain you experience with arthritis worse. Pressure on certain spinal nerves can also cause muscles around the joints to tighten, which enhances the pain of arthritis. When your chiropractor adjusts your spine to alleviate these pressure points, or subluxations as they are sometimes called, your pain may become less pronounced.
Chiropractic care leaves you looser, so you can move properly.
When your spine is out of alignment, your whole body moves more stiffly and is less flexible than it could be. This may be causing your arthritic joints to experience more strain with movement than they are intended to experience. By adjusting your spine, your chiropractor makes you better able to bend and flex properly as you move, causing your muscles to take up more of the strain and your joints to take up less of it.
Chiropractors focus on promoting whole-body health. As you can see, adjusting the spine does more than alleviate back pain. It allows the whole body and all of its joints to function more properly, which can have a positive impact on your arthritis pain.
Share6 October 2015
One day, in the middle of helping my kids to clean up the house, I lifted a box weird and threw out my back. It was frustrating, but I assumed that it would go away on its own. I was wrong. After trying everything I could think of to resolve the problem, my back still hurt and I couldn't stand up straight. After a week of suffering, I made the decision to meet with a chiropractor. He inspected my back, took x-rays, and figured out that I had slipped a disc. I started a grueling physical therapy routine, but after a few days, things started to improve. Read this blog to learn more about chiropractors.
