There are so many different types of arthritis and diseases that can cause you to have arthritis as a symptom of a larger problem. All of them can make doing your everyday activities incredibly painful and sometimes impossible to complete without forms of pain relief. According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), the main forms of arthritis and diseases that can cause arthritis are Osteoarthritis, Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Childhood Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, Gout, an inflammatory condition, and Lupus, an autoimmune disease.
Some types of arthritis are genetic and cannot necessarily be avoided because of factors such as family history, like Psoriatic Arthritis (PA), Ankylosing Spondylitis, and Rheumatoid Arthritis. Then there are types of arthritis that are caused by degeneration of things such as cartilage, like Osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis is the most common type of arthritis in the world and has the most to do with chiropractic and benefits the most from chiropractic care.
Explaining the Root of Symptoms of Arthritis in Chiropractic Terms
So what exactly is arthritis in general? How does it cause things like such small but powerful medical conditions such as joint inflammation, joint stiffness, neck pain, and more?
Well, we’ll break down what exactly is going on in your body during these moments with a description straight from one of our Visionaries, Dr. Frank Hahn. Essentially, it’ll start with your brain registering that one of the bones or joints in your body is out of alignment. Your brain recognizes joints as either stable or unstable, there is no in-between. Joints are either in the right alignment or are out of alignment. When they’re in the wrong alignment, your brain will recognize the joint as being unstable and send you pain signals to do something about it. But what do people most often do? They ignore it, hoping that the pain will go away on its own, which occasionally it will do. However, allowing the pain to continue will make that pain grow more intense as time goes on because your brain is trying to urge you to take care of the problem.
Sometimes people will also take an anti-inflammatory medication, muscle relaxer, or even prescription medications for pain relief from arthritis pain, anything really to try and get the pain to go as well. It might help the pain go away temporarily, but all you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable of your arthritic condition: you have to treat the pain at the source, which is where chiropractic can jump in and save the day.
Dr. Hahn explains that “Your brain is highly intelligent. It’s going to say, “If you refuse to do something about it (the pain), then I’ll do something!” According to him, what happens is that your brain will begin to fuse your misaligned joints together to stabilize that unstable joint. It does that through little bone spurs, which form on the edges of bones and connect one bone to another bone. Due to these bone spurs fusing the bones together themselves and integrating themselves further into the bone, it creates a big problem for the spinal disc.
These bone spurs sticking to the disc pop the spinal disc and fluid starts to leak out. That’s what’s called a disc herniation. So now you’re left with a herniated disc that is going to leak that fluid until there is no disc left and the bones have the opportunity to move closer together for fusion. That’s how your brain recognizes and stabilizes unstable joints through the fusion process, or osteoarthritis.
How Does Chiropractic Care Factor Into Arthritis Patients’ Treatment Plans?
So, as you’ve probably realized from the explanation of arthritis, it is essential to make sure your bones are lined up properly. This can happen with chiropractic therapy, physical therapy, or just keeping up with a daily stretching program and gentle exercise routine. Now that chiropractic is growing to be an even more well-respected practice over the years in mainstream society, medical doctors are now starting to recommend that their patients dealing with arthritic pain go in for chiropractic treatments. The kind of manual therapy used in chiropractic adjustments can be exactly what arthritis sufferers need to finally find relief from their joint pain.
Some people are skeptical of chiropractic and don’t think it’s one of the safest therapies out there. We see how that can happen, with all of the misinformation out there regarding chiropractic. However, the Arthritis Foundation themselves says that “…if you have back or neck pain due to osteoarthritis, chiropractic is one of the safest therapies you can use.” They also point out that, even if you’re struggling with a form of arthritis that causes you to deal with active inflammation in your joint tissues, chiropractors may offer several adjunctive therapies and effective treatments that can help such as:
- ultrasound therapy, which produces sound waves that can provide a massaging effect on soft tissues
- low-level laser, or cold laser, treatment, which can help to reduce inflammation
- infrared saunas, which are rooms that use controlled amounts of heat to relieve pain and increase circulation
- and electrotherapy, which can treat soft tissue injuries from arthritis by utilizing electrical nerve stimulation
Why Is It So Important to Continue Going to Chiropractic Treatment Sessions?
Getting those initial chiropractic adjustments allows your brain to recognize everything as perfectly fine and will make it not take action in fixing any joints. If the joint should misalign again, however, then that process will start all over again, which we want to avoid. This is why sticking to a consistent chiropractic alignment regimen is so important and so vital, especially for individuals that are at risk of getting arthritis genetically or otherwise. Chiropractic is best used in the prevention of arthritis, as we’ve shown in the above sections.
However, it’s also been proven to be especially useful in easing existing arthritic pain in individuals. Take this study published in the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine for example. Dr. Mark Hanses and Assistant Professor Richard G. Strunk did a study on a 70-year-old woman who was dealing with osteoarthritis in her hip. She had been struggling with hip pain for over a year and had suffered 2 falls in five years prior to the study because of it. She had started out the study with a Lower Extremity Functional Index (LEFI) score of 42, with a score of 0 being completely unable to use your lower extremities and a score of 80 meaning you have full functionality of your lower extremities.
In order to test the effectiveness of chiropractic treatment on this arthritic patient, the study consisted of 16 chiropractic visits, including hip and spinal adjustments and stretching exercises, over a period of 12 weeks. Can you guess what the results were? They definitely shouldn’t come as a surprise given what you’ve read so far! The patient was found to have an increased range of motion, better balance, faster gait, a much better score on the LEFI, and an overall better quality of life. While there certainly needs to be more research done on other similar conditions and the effect chiropractic care may have on them, this was a promising study showing the true power of chiropractic!
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