Arthritis

I have arthritis, can a chiropractor help me? Does chiropractic fix anything?

Hi, I’m Dr. Wainwright from Tallahassee Spinal Care. I wanted to share with you today a little bit of information about arthritis and try to demystify the topic.

I frequently have patients that come to me that will say “Doc I’ve got all this neck pain and back pain or pain you know different parts of my spine and my medical doctor had shared with me that I have arthritis and I’m not sure if you can help me or not,” so one of the things I wanted to try to do was just explain what arthritis is and hopefully help explain if chiropractic can help you with that.

Arthritis is often used as a catch-all diagnosis by many medical providers when they don’t really know exactly what is the root issue causing the pain that the patient is experiencing.

In short, arthritis stands for osteoarthritis. And basically to keep it simple, arthritis is when the cartilage or the ligaments or the connective tissue between the joints of the spine ends up healing wrong. And it heals stiff and painful and tender.

Now the unfortunate reality is that osteoarthritis is a permanent condition once the ligaments or the cartilage has healed wrong. It will be to some extent tender or painful for the rest of your life; however, patients will come to me all the time with a significant amount of pain that is not actually completely from arthritis but is from other problems or injuries going on in their spine.

What I normally tell my patients is with arthritis, the first thing you really have to find out is to get in real or a better diagnosis of exactly what is going on, what is causing the pain.

Arthritis typically does not cause significant amounts of pain, it is more of just like a general a little bit achiness or tenderness but is not something that tends to be debilitating.

So with that being said, I recommend getting a good history done, a good amount of orthopedic tests and ranges of motion done and all those imaging such as x-rays or MRI or CT. Those are typically the best to help again determine exactly what is causing the pain.

Coming down to the question that many ask is “Okay I do have arthritis can chiropractic help with that? The answer is yes and no. Yes chiropractic can help relieve the stiffness the tenderness and just the general achiness associated with arthritis but with that being said it cannot cure the arthritis your brightest is something that’s going to be there like I said to some extent for the rest of your life. But the good news is is chiropractic has helped thousands if not millions of people with debilitating arthritic pain and helping them get back to doing the things that they like to do normally, such as hanging out with their family, playing with the grandkids, taking the dog for a walk, cleaning the house or just just living life a little bit more normally.

Chiropractic has helped millions of folks with those specific problems, so that is the good news.

So all to say is, if you have been to a chiropractor before you haven’t had your arthritis properly diagnosed or you’re just not sure if you know if you just want to be stuck with that diagnosis for the rest of your life, the main thing to do is seek out a consultation and try to really find out what is going on.

So if you would like to, you can look down at the description of the video below and it’ll have our contact information such as our website and our phone number.

If you call the phone number, I can meet with you have a one-on-one consultation and then I can go through and pretty quickly identify whether or not I think that can help you and whether or not you’re going to be stuck with this level of pain for the rest of your life, or if there’s something that can be done for besides just taking pain pills, or getting shots, and some of the other methods that most people are recommended for.

Just give us a call and I’d love to find if I can help you.