Got symptoms ? Patch or fix its your decision.

People who go to Chiropractors, walk in the door with what’s known as a “Chief Complaint”. This is what most of the doc’s out there work on and they do a great job relieving symptoms. Truth be told if they didn’t the profession would cease to exist.

More often than not these same Doctors ignore the primary problem and treat the “Concomitant or Secondary condition” not the underlying cause of their patients issues. The problem that this presents is that the concomitant/secondary Conditions never totally resolve due to the fact that the Primary Condition was never addressed.

The most common primary condition I find in my practice, is head forward posture. This is where your head acts as a twelve pound weight, using your neck as a six inch lever arm, to transmit stress into the rest of your body such that you end up with a myriad of complaints that can manifest in ways that at first pass, you don’t understand.(Check out the postural correction and ergonomic pages on my website www.EdCampChiropractic.com for more information.)

Why are most of the Chiropractors out there not addressing these issues ? The fact is there is a corrective procedure for this, but it takes time to find this problem, then more time to explain it effectively to the patient and lastly its not something a lot of patients want to do but, I at least like to give them the choice. The path of least resistance for the Chiropractor who doesn’t spend the time… See ya next week at your usual visit. Oh, and you will feel better so it’s not as hard a sell as corrective care.

Patch care as opposed to corrective care,  think of it like a pot hole.  The city regularly  patches them up and in a few weeks or months the pothole reappears and is usually worse than it was before the patch.  If you like the “patch” type care, I’m happy to work with you but I don’t think I’m using my skills to their highest and or best use.

Corrective care however is a commitment of time and resources the goal of which is to better your body and some people have little enough of both.  I do respect my patients decisions one way or the other I just like open and honest communication about what is available to you, and what each patient wants and needs.

Again I want people to know there is an alternative to the see ya next week approach.

The types of repetitive conditions that seem to resolve with corrective care include:

• Posture improves making you look healthier
• Chronic (Repetitive episodes of.) neck pain
• Chronic upper Back Pain
• Chronic low Back pain
• Migraine headaches
• Carpal tunnel Syndrome
• Numbness/Tingling (Arms/Hands)
• Strength-Related Issues for instance, decreased grip strength
• Decreased range of motion
• Digestive Conditions
• Dizziness
• Fatigue
• Muscle Spasm
• Nerve Impingement Syndrome, which manifests as burning, numbness or electric shock sensations in the extremities

If you’ve had any of these symptoms more than a few times, perhaps its time to get evaluated by a Chiropractor who is worried about your long term well being as opposed to getting you in and out in the quickest possible manner.

As usual, thanks for reading and feel free to contact me at my office in San Francisco. The number should you have any questions, 415 922 2225.

And now….. Dr. Camp writes off into the sunset…..

Posture Correction: Chiropractic Care Taken to the Next Level

Sometimes it seems there are as many approaches to Chiropractic as there are practicing D.C.’s. When I was in school the comment was “All the approaches work” but as a practicing Doctor I believe some methods work a whole heck of a lot better than others. Rather than bash the other guy I’d prefer to explain why I believe my technique best serves the long-term interests of my patients. Simply put, I correct bad posture. Read More

People often ask me……

People often ask me: Dr. Camp, what is the most common thing you treat in your office?  I’d have to say it’s a combo pack of pain in the neck and pain between the shoulder blades.  These are the people who tell me “Doc, I store all my stress in my shoulders.”

These people often present with the “I don’t know what I did…. maybe I just slept funny and woke up with pain.”  They are often the ones who say, “One day I woke up and had this odd pain which got worse and worse for a while, and now it doesn’t seem to get worse, but it also doesn’t seem to be going away.”

As far as I’m concerned, these patients appear to be the most difficult for people in the industry to diagnose. They are referred to as “Insidious Onset” patients. Much easier for the practitioner are the patients who say, “I did (insert activity here) and knew right then that I had done something wrong. When this happens we talk about knowing “the mechanism of injury” which really makes our jobs easier. Too bad these are not the most common patients to enter our offices.

There was an orthopedist named Alf Brieg who did an enormous amount of study on people with chronic pain and he made the statement “Eighty percent of the patients I see with Chronic Pain have a postural component to it.”  This just ties in SO well with the concept of  “I don’t know what I did but suddenly I have pain.”  Yes, it takes such a long time for these postural changes to cause the pain, that there often isn’t a specific event that one can attribute to the chronic pain syndrome.

These are also often the people who have some innocuous incident that leads to major symptoms. The folks who say “I bent over to pick up a piece of paper and couldn’t stand up again.” Clearly, it’s not the sudden weight of the paper that did it, more the “straw that broke the camel’s back” situation with a long term problem finally manifesting itself in what feels like a “rude awakening”.

What I find most often with these patients are either a straight neck, and/or one that has a reverse of the normal curve (see the photo on the left) that we’d expect to find in the cervical spine. Sometimes, these reverse cervical curve  (Cervical Kyphosis) patients  present with low back pain.  I know… it doesn’t seem to make sense, but  believe me, people, it’s physics that I CAN but won’t explain now, in this particular article.

How do these necks change into the straight or reverse curves ? One of two ways: “Plastic Deformation of Tissue,” which is commonly slip and fall, car accident, or any other type of trauma that damages the ligaments such that the neck can change from its normal orientation to the ones I have been describing here.

The other way is “Visco-Elastic Deformation of Tissue”, which refers to the body’s being essentially a VERY thick fluid, and the nature of fluid things being to flow into the path of least resistance. I find this often in people who work on a computer for a living.  How do you find out if you are one of these types of people? The only way is with a lateral X-ray to determine the alignment of your cervical spine. I sometimes tease people calling it “computer geek syndrome” and yes, it can strike at any age from people in their teens who play a lot of video games, to adult computer programmers, or the more usual suspects:  people who just do a lot of data entry in their jobs and often work on laptop computers.

Is there and answer for people like this ? Only if you find a Chiropractor who takes pride in postural correction and while MANY say they do… there are few who actually do this type of work. Let me be frank, no amount of adjustments alone will correct this type of condition.  It requires cervical traction in extension to effect these types of change.  You may get symptomatic relief from the typical type of practice, but you won’t have the changes that are depicted in the photo on the right (which incidentally is an “after” X-ray of one of my patients who indeed had a reverse cervical curve when we started working together. )

Why don’t more doctors of Chiropractic do this type of care?  There are many reasons, some of which I won’t go into here, but the main thing is that Cervical Traction in Extension is not fun for the patient so the doctor has to overcome the natural objections of the patient in order to help.  It’s often easier for the doctors  just not to talk about it.  Also… insurance companies don’t care to fix many of the underlying problems their insureds have, hence the patients may have to be willing to pay for whatever portion of the care that is not covered by their medical insurance.  I find that if you have suffered enough, it’s totally worth it to fix the underlying condition as opposed to patch the pain temporarily.

Whatever direction you decide to go  fix or patch, Chiropractic is the discipline that CAN help you.  You just need to find a practitioner who will take the time to explain the options, and who has the willingness to do the type of work that truly effects change as opposed to just providing symptomatic relief.

The answers are out there !

Patch or Fix, and other sundry questions answered.

Just like everything in life there is more than one opinion on how to go about a course of Chiropractic treatment. One question is patch or fix which is better, and like so many other things in life that engenders more questions that need to be considered to make a decision on which approach to take.

RAMIFICATIONS…. Now that’s a word we all understand and the concept that for each choice we make there are consequences and the better informed we are, the better choices we make provided we have the means to make them.

The patch approach to Chiropractic is one where when you hurt you call your Doctor and we you treat as needed to alleviate your pain. This is an approach that makes great business sense for your Chiropractor as we then have a lifetime patient who may or may not get complete remission from their symptoms.

The fix approach takes the view that a high frequency approach over a shorter time frame will actually correct the underlying problem and then prevent the major flare ups that tend to occur with people who have the types of anomalies we are talking about. We still may have a lifetime patient but the frequency of visits is GREATLY reduced and the symptoms tend to go into complete remission.

I often get patients who have been seeing another Chiropractor two to three times a month for… oh… their whole lives in some cases. When I then describe the reconstructive approach to them stating higher frequency for a couple months and you will hardly see me anymore. Their reaction is sometimes “Hey you are trying to rip me off my other Chiropractor doesn’t treat me that way.” My first question is, if you’ve been seeing the other guy three times a month for how many years and you aren’t really better, who’s really the rip off.

Another thing I hear when discussing treatment options is “Isn’t it such that when you start treatments with a Chiropractor you end up going forever ?” This always amuses me and speaks to a sad state of how Chiropractors educate their patients.

NO ONE…… EVER says “Dam once you start seeing a dentist, you can’t ever stop.” This is because people do things that are good for them when in fact they realize the benefits. Clearly we aren’t going out to our patients homes and putting a gun to their heads and dragging them back into the office. (As far as you know anyway.) Truth be told they come in for tune ups because it works.

Perception…. Its all about perception. Suffice it to say I am happy to provide my patients with whatever type of care they so desire. I do think as an ethical practitioner its incumbent on me to flesh out the options and let my patients choose what works best for them.

There are reasons a reconstructive approach may not work for people. One of them being insurance companies don’t pay for a reconstructive course of care. They believe if you are in pain you can have service. If you are out of pain get out of the Dr’s office. Truth be told most people who choose reconstructive care are out of pain long before the treatment plan ends. (And most often it doesn’t return.) Again what makes more sense ? Functioning with some level of chronic pain or actually fixing it.

Another question is does the pain come back if you do the corrective program. The answer is as complex as the variety of people who do it. If in fact you continue to do the things that created the problem and not stay with the home version of the repair…. Yes. So I tell people I work with, if you aren’t going to discipline yourself to do the homework don’t even start. This may be a simple as raising your computer monitor and who wouldn’t do that if they realized it would alleviate the cause of their condition ?

It takes a lot of effort over a short period of time to correct a spine and comparatively little effort to maintain the correction but the onus is in fact on the patient to keep up the good work. Your Doctor and only lead you to the path not keep you on it.

Yes there are a lot of questions in this world and hopefully you find a Chiropractor with a lot of answers.

As always, I’m here to help.

Study Shows: 93% Patients with Chronic Whiplash Benefited from Chiropractic Care

An article published in the Journal of Orthopedic Medicine in 1999 pointed out the superiority of chiropractic care for patients suffering from long term whiplash. Read More

Study Shows: Maintenance Chiropractic Care is Beneficial

From the peer-reviewed scientific periodical, the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, October 2004 edition, comes a study that shows that receiving maintenance chiropractic care after initial care helps patients continue reduction in their disability. Read More

Arthritis Patients Find Pain Relief with Chiropractic

The Annals of Internal Medicine (of all places) published the results of a survey of 232 people who had arthritis and were under a rheumatologists care. Read More