What is Extremity Chiropractic?
Although most of the attention in chiropractic is focused on the spine, chiropractors are also trained in manipulating joints in your extremities. These include your elbows, wrists, shoulders, hips and knees.
By realigning these joints and restoring normal strength and function, extremity adjustments improve your body mechanics. This helps you remain active and reduces your risk of injury.
It Relieves Pain
When joints are out of alignment, they can cause pain in the arms and legs. This can limit your ability to perform normal activities. Extremity chiropractic can help relieve this pain and improve your ability to move around. It also reduces the need for pharmaceutical painkillers that can be harmful to your body.
Family Chiropractic are trained to adjust the joints of your body that lie outside of the spine, including the ribs, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands, hips, knees and ankles. These joints can suffer from misalignments, just as the spine can. These misalignments can lead to pain and may cause your body to compensate by using other joints, which can result in a vicious cycle of increased pain and injury. The goal of extremity adjustment is to realign these joints so they have normal strength and function.
Depending on the type of joint injury, an extremity adjustment can include manipulating the ligaments and bones that make up the area. These adjustments can also include the use of tools like decompression tables and drop tables to apply traction or force to the affected area.
In some cases, a chiropractor will use an electronic impulse adjusting instrument that replaces the typical popping and cracking sounds of manual manipulation with an electrical impulse. This allows the chiropractor to apply a controlled amount of pressure to a joint without the discomfort and risk of causing damage to the surrounding tissues.
Some injuries that can benefit from extremity adjustment include tendonitis and arthritis. Tendonitis is a condition that affects the tendons, which are thick cords of tissue that attach muscle to bone. It can cause pain and inflammation in the joints and is often caused by repetitive strain injuries. Arthritis is a chronic condition that can cause pain and stiffness in the joints.
If you are experiencing a joint injury, it’s important to seek treatment as soon as possible. If you wait, the pain could worsen and you might require more aggressive treatments, such as surgery. Seeking early intervention can also reduce your risk of recurrence and increase the chances of full recovery.
It Helps You Stay Active
The spine is the foundation of our bodies, housing our nervous system. It is also home to many muscles, tendons and ligaments that control movement throughout the body. When these muscles are overworked, or misaligned, it can lead to pain and other health issues. Chiropractors use a variety of techniques to help align the spine and reduce inflammation in the body. These methods are effective and safe. They can even be used to treat injuries from sports and other activities.
While most people think of the spine when they hear the term chiropractic, extremity adjustments are also a big part of this practice. The extremities include the arms and legs, as well as other joints in the knees, wrists and ankles. Extremity chiropractic includes a wide range of treatment options, from gentle manipulations to deep tissue massages. All of these techniques are designed to relieve pain and improve joint mobility in the extremities.
Every joint in the body is surrounded by and supported by muscles, tendons, and other soft tissues. When a joint becomes misaligned, it can put pressure and stress on these supportive tissues, causing them to become weak or stiff. These changes can also affect the way you carry your body weight, putting too much pressure on some areas and not enough on others.
Regular chiropractic care can help keep your joints healthy and reduce the risk of injury, so you can stay active and enjoy the activities you love. This type of care is especially beneficial for athletes, who often overwork their muscles, tendons and ligaments. Regular visits to a walk-in chiropractor can ensure that their muscles and joints are functioning properly, reducing the chance of injury and boosting performance on the field or in the gym.
If you have been suffering from back, shoulder or knee pain, you may be hesitant to hit the gym or go for a run. But if you make an appointment with your local chiropractor, they can help relieve these pains and allow you to get back to your workout routine. You may even find that you’re more motivated to work out when your body isn’t in pain, so you can burn more calories and achieve a healthier, stronger body.
It Reduces Your Risk of Injury
Chiropractors are known for hands-on spinal adjustments that can return your spine to its proper alignment. However, they don’t stop there — they also provide adjustments to joints in your knees, wrists, feet, and other extremities. These joints are integral to the musculoskeletal system, and they play important roles in how well you can function in your daily activities. They can also affect how well you can perform your favorite sports or recreational activities.
Joint injuries and misalignments can cause a lot of pain, stiffness, and discomfort in the extremities. They can also lead to a decreased quality of life because they might keep you from performing your usual activities or limit the types of activities that you can do. Fortunately, extremity adjustment techniques help to relieve these issues and improve your quality of life.
Our chiropractors are trained to adjust the bones in your axial and appendicular skeletons, including your shoulder, elbow, hips, knees, ankles, and fingers. The bones in the axial skeleton are those that connect the skull and spine, while the bones in the appendicular skeleton are your arms, legs, feet, and hands. Regardless of whether you have a traumatic injury or a chronic use injury, our chiropractors can help you reduce the pain and other symptoms in your extremities and increase their function.
In addition, our chiropractors are skilled at assessing your body’s alignment and making adjustments when necessary. This helps to relieve muscle tightness and edema. In turn, this can improve your balance and stability and reduce your risk of falling and injuring yourself.
Finally, our chiropractors can also help to reduce referred pain by relieving the pressure on nerves that are carrying sensations from your injured areas to your brain. When you feel pain in your foot, for example, the nerves in that area send signals to your brain that tell you it’s your heel.
When you think about chiropractic care, your mind might immediately jump to the spine, as that is where most of the benefits of chiropractic are felt. The fact is, though, that our chiropractors are also trained in adjusting joints in other parts of your body, including the elbow, wrist, and knee. This technique, called extremity adjustment, is a part of the chiropractic philosophy that focuses on the whole body and its wellness.
It Boosts Your Immunity
With the flu season in full swing, it’s a good time to give your immune system some help. Kids are going back to school, and that means a lot of germ exposure – the kid who sneezes all over their shared desk, the kid borrowing a pencil from the one that didn’t wash their hands after using it, and playing with a ball that hundreds of other kids have touched. Keeping up with your diet, exercise, and avoiding stress are all great ways to boost your immunity, but chiropractic care can take things even further.
Your body’s immune center relies on the nervous system to communicate effectively, and a misalignment in the spine can weaken your defenses. Chiropractors can perform spinal manipulations that relieve compression of nerve pathways in the spine, preventing communication interference and improving your body’s natural disease-fighting response.
Immunity is closely linked to the nervous and endocrine systems, and studies show that regular chiropractic care can support your immune system’s ability to detect and respond to foreign invaders, like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. It can also help your immune system fight existing infections, and improve the speed at which it responds to new threats.
The specialized spinal adjustments that are part of chiropractic care reduce inflammation, improve blood flow to the brain and throughout the body, and reduce the stress associated with the nervous system. These all have a positive impact on immune function, including the production of white blood cells and the activation of other immune-boosting cells.
It’s important to note that while studies do indicate that regular chiropractic adjustments can improve immune function, they also have small sample sizes and don’t include symptomatic patients. Until there is stronger evidence, it’s best to avoid any claims that chiropractic “confuses or boosts immunity.” While many things can strengthen your immune system, a balanced diet, moderate exercise, and enough sleep are the most effective tools for maintaining a healthy immune system. This is true whether you have a specific health concern or just want to stay in tip-top shape.
Although most of the attention in chiropractic is focused on the spine, chiropractors are also trained in manipulating joints in your extremities. These include your elbows, wrists, shoulders, hips and knees. By realigning these joints and restoring normal strength and function, extremity adjustments improve your body mechanics. This helps you remain active and reduces your…