What to Expect

The primary goal of relief care is to help relieve your symptoms as quickly as possible. Just as an Orthodontist applies braces to correct misaligned teeth, the Chiropractic Physician applies gentle adjustments to correct misalignments of your spine, extremities, and organs. Since adjusting the spine is like adjusting crooked teeth, tuning a musical instrument, or going to the gym, all must be done gently and gradually; and time, repetition, and consistency is required to secure and stabilize correction. For this reason, if you must miss an appointment, it is very important that you make that appointment up. During this phase of care, your visits are typically spaced 24 to 72 hours apart until your correction begins to take hold.  The video you watched that further explains how Chiropractic works and these three phases of care is available on our website and is titled, “Making choices”.

In this phase, we will recommend some therapies to supplement your adjustments: Cold laser therapy, decreases pain and increases healing by 40%; Muscle treatments, to relax muscles, improve the function of organs, and the lymphatic system; and Electric stimulation, ice, and an anti-inflammatory diet, to decrease inflammation and pain. Approximately every twelve visits a progress examination will be performed to measure your progress and to ensure that your treatment is on track.  If you are not on track, we won’t hesitate to adjust your treatment plan and make the appropriate referral if necessary, to another doctor or for other diagnostic tests.

The goal of stabilization care is to complete the correction begun in your relief phase of care.  This is even more important than the first phase because even though you may feel better your spine and health is in a very fragile condition.   As your correction begins to take hold, the time between visits can be increased.  Discontinuing care during the stabilization phase of care would be like the orthodontist removing braces when the correction is halfway completed. The teeth would return to their original position. In your case, your original pain and problems will usually return, and often worse. The goal is also to help stabilize muscles and ligaments that support the spine to decrease the likelihood that your original problem will reoccur. A rehabilitation exercise program may be initiated at this time to help support the stabilization process.

This phase is also called the correction phase, as we are working on correcting the root causes of your problems.  We recommend a holistic approach, and this is really what makes our office unique compared to traditional medicine.  We will recommend looking at some of the causes of your spine not holding its adjustments and keeping you in pain such as referred pain from different organs or glands.  These come from inflammation, from emotional stress, nutritional deficiencies, electro-magnetic pollution, allergies, and toxicity. These can be evaluated through blood work, urine, hair tests for heavy metal toxicity, and some non-invasive forms of testing and evaluation we do right in our clinic called muscle response testing.  We will then educate you on treatments we can do for these in the office, as well as let you know what you can do to help yourself against these different stressors.

The goal of the prevention phase is to prevent future problems. Think of this as insurance that your time and financial investments thus far are maintained.  Most people will spend more money in the last two weeks of life to stay alive than they do in their entire life to stay well. It is called wellness care or optimal health care because it is designed to promote the optimal function of your brain and nervous system and keep you feeling and performing your best physically, mentally, and emotionally. 

This phase of care can also be thought of as going to the dentist for periodic check-ups to maintain the health of the teeth or wearing a retainer to maintain the corrections made by the orthodontist. We also have a goal that you and your family never get sick, have optimal energy and overall health, and perform at your best.