Long Lasting Neck Pain Relief | Chiropractor for Neck Pain in Spokane Valley, WA
When we go and look at what’s going on with neck pain, first thing that we’re going to do is go through doing a little bit of an assessment that assessment is going to involve a couple different tests as well as looking at motion.
So that motion involves how far I can move that neck, how far I can turn side by side, is there a major difference where pain or tightness is it letting me go very far side to side. All of these things can come from multiple different sources, whether it’s problems with those joints, problems with those muscles, tough trying to control all of that through there. So going through and having a good evaluation is our start to being able to figure out what we want to do for care.
When we’re going through our exams, sometimes we’ll find something that is either a little bit more concerning or something that would need to be looked at a little bit more in depth. If we feel that treatment on the first day isn’t necessarily safe, or we want to make sure that there’s nothing else bigger going on, we might order different testing such as X rays just to see how those bones and those joints line up and look in that neck. If it’s anything more in depth with maybe needing an MRI or things like that. For some sort of disc bulge that’s pinching on a nerve, anything we can possibly be able to go through in order that as needed.
After going through with our exam, if we determine that it’s safe for us to treat, we’re not having any major red flags, risk of serious injury or anything like that, we can normally begin right on that first day. In order to start loosening things up getting things feeling better, getting that pain to drop down so we can start progressing that care going forward. Our last phase of care in the office in order to progress that healing process gets the lasting results that we know that we can get and expect is what we call our stabilized phase. We can think of this as exercise rehab really getting used to using some of those muscles. Again, we can bring some of that pain and discomfort down with our mobilized phase getting muscles to loosen up massage, like techniques adjustment, and that feels good with that. But being able to get those lasting results comes from our exercise, teaching those muscles, this is our job. We don’t have to be so tight all the time teaching those joints, it’s normal for me to be able to move we don’t need to be restricted.
So we go through when we work on the neck work a lot with those muscles in that upper back since all of those muscles will come up into the neck, allow things to be able to hold back, get some better posture through there. Work on the muscles on the side of the neck, making sure that we’ve got that good motion through there. And things don’t again just feel like they want to keep going back to that tightness phase. Really when we can keep up that strength. Keep up that exercise. It just helps keep those results lasting longer and longer.