Throughout my past few years of practice, some of the most common misconceptions I’ve heard surround chiropractic adjustments. Every day, I have someone come into my office who has a misconception about the chiropractic adjustment. Even if you google it, all you see are blogs by chiropractors that still don’t tell you the truth. So as a chiropractor, I’m here to set the record straight.

Most patients who walk into my office have already seen another provider for the issues they are dealing with. And the majority of them didn’t see any progress with their previous provider. This leads many of them to come into my office and tell me that they won’t do rehab because they’ve tried it and it didn’t work. I’m not saying I’m better than their last provider or that other chiropractors are bad. The whole purpose of this blog post is to highlight some of the more common reasons why rehab or conservative care hasn’t worked in the past and help patients prevent that from happening in the future.

Low back pain, especially chronic low back pain has become so prevalent and is by far the most common complaint I get in my office. In fact, in 2020, the World Health Organization found that “low back pain (LBP) affected 619 million people globally and it is estimated that the number of cases will increase to 843 million cases by 2050.” They also found that low back pain is the most common cause of disability worldwide. Now, chiropractors like me or physical therapists can help you with that low back pain but let’s talk about how you can help yourself.

Flare-ups are very common when recovering from pain or an injury. Unfortunately, the healing process isn’t a linear progression. Throughout that process, there are many ups and downs, but that’s okay! It’s easy for us to have a bad day and panic. This leads me to step 1.

For years we’ve had the wrong view on degeneration or arthritis. We’ve always heard that degeneration is wear and tear. We also believe that degeneration or arthritis has to lead to pain. But this isn’t true! Another piece to this is that doctors and patients are eager to get an X-ray which leads to a diagnosis of degenerative joint disease. But this might not be the correct approach. Let me explain…

For years, every time we get injured we’ve been told to ice it. And now, anytime we get hurt our first reaction is to ice it. Everyone remembers the acronym RICE, which stands for rest, ice, compression, and elevation. But did you know that RICE is outdated and isn’t the best approach to treating injuries? Yes, even the person who came up with RICE said it’s not the best approach. In the past couple of years, we’ve developed a new approach to treating injuries, and guess what? Ice is not on the list.

Something that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while is why I practice how I do; it may help some of you better understand me and what I’m about. This is something I’m extremely passionate about and may be controversial, but it’s something that I feel I need to discuss.

If you don’t know, I’m a performance and cash-based chiropractor. That means that I do not take health insurance and I am focused on not only helping get out of pain but helping you achieve higher goals and performing at your best.

Pain and injury can be confusing, and when we don’t have a specific mechanism of why we got injured can make it even more confusing.

For these instances, like I like to use a glass/cup analogy.

Imagine you’re a glass of water and you keep dropping rocks in the water until the water level reaches the brim of the glass. At this point, the smallest pebble could cause the glass to overflow. When the glass overflows that’s when we get pain.

We often correlate the pain we feel to tissue damage. But this isn’t true for the most part. Sure, if you break your arm or have a traumatic injury then yes, you did a lot of damage and it hurts like hell. But for non-traumatic injuries, the hurt doesn’t equal harm.

A common injury I see in golfers and even weightlifters is golfer’s elbow.

What is golfer’s elbow?

It’s better known in the medical world as medial epicondylitis. Which is just a fancy way of saying inflammation of the inside part of your elbow.

Are your running shoes causing you pain or even injury? In short, most likely not. This is a very common thing I hear and we're often very quick to blame something small like our shoes for why we're having pain. So if it's not the shoes, why are you having pain with running?