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Chiropractors work to allow the body to function to the best of its ability at any age from newborns to seniors.
Many people may not realize that chiropractic care can start with newborns. When examining a baby, what is the chiropractor looking for?
Dr. Kyle Robertson: Whenever examining a baby, we’re looking for just very subtle changes in motion palpation and the responses that are actually given by the baby. Now I’ve got an 18 month old daughter myself so I try to adjust her on a regular basis. It’s not what you would think of when you’re adjusting an adult. It’s much more gentle. Usually it’s just almost using just your fingers. It’s very, very light force. It’s safe.
A lot of parents contact us saying that their babies are suffering from colic. They’ve heard that chiropractic care can actually be beneficial for that type of thing, which it is. Adjustments can cause a lot of relief for those babies that are experiencing colic. It’s hard to tell whenever or why a baby is uncomfortable. If the baby is crying, you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes through the adjustments, we can release some of these subluxations or fixations in the spine in order to give them some relief. Babies get muscle pain and joint pain just like we do. The tricky part is they just aren’t able to tell us it hurts here.
Student athletes are becoming more and more competitive. How can chiropractic care help kids become better athletes?
Dr. Kyle Robertson: With chiropractic care, we’re working to allow the body to function to the best of its ability. With the adjustments, we’re helping to free up any of those fixations in the spine and correcting any misalignments. Every time we do an evaluation, we’re feeling and looking for different motion throughout the spine. With other techniques such as the fascial distortion model, which is a soft tissue approach to treating injuries, we’re working to free up different fascial adhesions or connective tissue adhesions to correct any aberrant motion patterns or restrictions that we can find. By correcting these issues, we’re actually allowing them to function at a higher level. If there are these fixations or you’re having loss of motion, obviously you’re not going to have quite as much ability to perform as well as you could if those restrictions weren’t there.
How do chiropractors help people recovering from car accidents and other injuries?
Dr. Kyle Robertson: We frequently see people who are involved in motor vehicle accidents. Most of these injuries are whiplash type injuries or disc injuries, just because there’s so much force involved with the impact of a car accident or any other sort of slip accident. When treating these patients, we usually take a more conservative and gentle approach to start out with because obviously these people are in pain. We’ll usually start with a lighter force technique. We won’t do any of the larger manipulations right off the bat. We want to exactly figure out what’s going on and remodel this tissue as quickly as we can using different soft tissue models and techniques so that it’s able to heal properly and begin healing properly.
A lot of these people end up going through our non-surgical spinal decompression which is something that’s … It’s actually a sophisticated traction device that treats disc herniation. People wind up going through this treatment because there’s larger underlying injuries to intervertebral disc. Common symptoms of this are numbness and tingling in the hands and feet or radiating pain like sciatic type pain. Like I said, that non-surgical spinal decompression is a more sophisticated tractioning system, which is all computerized technology. It targets the injured disc by actually using a specific angle to work a specific disc. Unlike those different things where they’ll hang upside down or something like that, that’s actually spreading all of the traction and focus over all the joints of the body, this is actually focusing on a single one or two discs in the lower back or the neck. For all these treatments, we look at MRI’s so we know exactly where to treat with no guesswork involved.
For seniors, what type of aches and pains can chiropractic care help alleviate?
Dr. Kyle Robertson: With seniors, a lot of the aches and pains that we see are related to arthritis or degenerative disc disease which is basically arthritis of the spine. The best treatment for these seniors is to get a little bit more motion, proper posture throughout those areas of degeneration and to actually help slow down that process from going any further as much as we can. Along with the chiropractic helping them mobilize those joints, we also have a deep tissue laser, which we’ve actually seen very effective results in treating arthritic type pain and any chronic type of pain and injuries as well.
If people start chiropractic maintenance care on a regular basis when they’re young, what type of issues and conditions can they help to avoid experiencing as they age?
Dr. Kyle Robertson: Now more than ever, we’re seeing bad posture start quicker. We’ve got kids on their phones. We’ve got kids on their computers, always looking down. They’ve actually started calling that head forward posture, text neck. Kids are constantly looking down at their phones, looking at texts. That actually can cause a quicker degenerative process in the neck and upper back than we’ve seen before. What we can do, even for kids, we can start adjusting them quicker, educate those patients and the parents on posture techniques, different techniques that we can do in order to re-strengthen and realign those areas so it doesn’t wind up turning into a degenerative disc disease in a few years down the road.
Learn More
If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Kyle Robertson, visit ferraro1.wpengine.com or call 973-478-2212 to schedule an appointment.
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