The Role of Xrays When Going to a Chiropractor

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To see is to know and to not know is to guess. No health provider should ever guess with your health, which is why when people have their initial consult with us, we take spinal x rays on our non-pregnant practice members. There are two primary reasons why we consider chiropractic x ray imaging essential:

Safety:

Many of our practice members come in due to symptoms such as pain and decreased function, movement or strength that limits them in their day-to-day activities. Often, this pain occurs after physical traumas such as falls, car accidents, or injuries. At this point, our biggest concern is to consider your clinical symptoms and rule out red flags (i.e. fractures and instabilities in the bones and joints that we’ll be manipulating). These red flags are incredibly important to catch because they often warrant a referral elsewhere so that you are further assessed by a PCP or specialist, or have additional studies done like magnetic resonance imaging or blood work).

Other times, people come in with chronic pain and no recent history of physical trauma. It’s still important to get a better visual on the structure of these people because many people are unaware that they have congenital anomalies and sometimes these anomalies require that we modify the way we render treatment in our chiropractic practice. Additionally, some of these people take medications or have medical conditions that could compromise the density, quality and overall health of your bones and joints, examples being people who have received cancer treatment, long-term corticosteroids due to asthma, and those who have inflammatory conditions such as Chron’s disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

The list can go on and on, but the takeaway is that our number one priority from the start is to ensure that we’re taking all the measures needed to make chiropractic care and spinal manipulation safe and effective for you!

Technique purposes:

X rays are an incredible tool for analyzing your body. Usually when you have x rays taken at a medical facility, they’ll assess for fractures, instability, the presence of pathologies, and more. When they don’t find anything in those categories, they may tell you that everything is ‘okay’, but from a chiropractic perspective our scope enables us to focus on analyzing the structural integrity of your spine and confirming that, chiropractic-wise, there are improvements to work towards.

Your chiropractor will work on analyzing your body through x rays and paying special attention to:

  • The lordotic curves in your neck and low back.
  • The lateral curves or scoliosis in your midback and low back.
  • Spinal misalignments (i.e. forward slippage, backwards slippage, rotation, and lateral bending of the vertebral bones).
  • Hip imbalance.
  • Spinal degeneration.
  • Spinal stenosis.
  • Head posture.

In nature, structure is what gives rise to function (for example, imagine trying to ride a bicycle with square-shaped wheels), and so when the structure of your body isn’t ideal, your body’s function will be affected as well. This means that a spinal misalignment can significantly contribute to neck pain, low back pain, headaches, numbness and tingling down extremities, weakness or spasms in muscles, a dysfunction in the way our organs and systems work! Because of this, we know that it’s not enough to to temporarily reduce or eliminate the aches and pains of chiropractic patients, instead our goal is to also correct your structure so that you can experience better function and quality of life years down the road.

All of the progressive spinal structural deformities that we listed above and that are gleamed from x ray images provide a wealth of knowledge for your chiropractor and enables them to better prepare a plan of action regarding how often they want to see you, for how long, and how they want to approach your specific case. When the time comes for your first adjustment, your chiropractor has done all of the work on the back end and knows how to approach your treatment, what techniques to use, where to focus, what to expect, and areas to be cautious of.