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What kind of pain do you have? Is it constant, intermittent, acute, or chronic? Does it stem from illness, injury, or inflammation? There are many types of pain and many ways to combat it. But often pain persists beyond a normal time frame and won’t respond to traditional treatments.
At reNu Medical & Injury Center in Newark, Delaware, Dr. Matthew DeFroda and our team specialize in managing pain of all sorts from multiple sources. You might be surprised to learn that the agony in your arms or the weakness in your legs can benefit from chiropractic care. Here are the facts.
Defining chronic pain
If you experience a traumatic injury like a car crash, a fall, or a collision in sports, you expect to feel pain immediately and for it to last a while thereafter as you heal. But eventually, it should go away.
Chronic pain is different; it hangs on for three months or more, often years, long after the injury has healed. This chronic pain plagues about 50 million Americans.
What’s worse, it’s directly linked to other health problems such as depression, anxiety, limited mobility, drug abuse and addiction, and significantly decreased quality of life. No wonder it’s the No. 1 reason people seek medical help.
If you suffer from chronic pain, you understand the frustration of finding a treatment that can relieve your symptoms without leading to dependence on medication. And that’s where chiropractic care comes in.
Where does pain come from?
Typically, pain is the result of your nerves sending a message to your brain that something is wrong. It’s a brilliant design that alerts you to danger and causes you to instinctively protect the injured body part.
Nerve problems
Chronic nerve pain can happen if there’s something pressing on your nerve, such as a bony protrusion from a vertebra, a tight muscle, or inflammation. Often, the pain radiates to other parts of your body along the same nerve line.
For instance, you may have a pinched nerve in your lower back, but you feel the symptoms — pain, weakness, and tingling — down your leg. In these cases, Dr. DeFroda can move bones in a way that relieves that pressure, relaxes muscles, and allows inflammation to subside.
Secondary pain
It’s common to experience new pain caused by the moves you make to protect an injury. When you have underlying mechanical dysfunctions, your body responds by overcompensating and changing its normal movements, which leads to pain in other areas of your body.
Tight ligaments and muscle spasms are common. In this case, Dr. DeFroda realigns your musculoskeletal system, alleviating the pressure on your nerves and allowing your muscles and ligaments to do the jobs they were meant to do.
How chiropractic care addresses chronic pain
Dr. DeFroda expertly diagnoses the source of your pain to determine whether you’re a candidate for chiropractic care. If your pain stems from musculoskeletal issues, he offers several chiropractic modalities customized for your unique pain profile.
He may use his hands to perform manual manipulation, which guides your body back into position, realigns your joints, and restores your mobility. Or he may use a special table that has multiple segments that move independently of one another to help adjust your body.
He may even add K-Tape® or RockTape® to your therapy to support your body’s natural healing.
We also emphasize the importance of physical therapy and exercises that target the muscles surrounding your injury to strengthen and support your body’s natural structure.
What conditions can chiropractic care treat?
Dr. DeFroda treats pain that stems from a variety of medical conditions, including:
- Spinal stenosis (narrowed spinal canal)
- Herniated discs
- Osteoarthritis
- Headaches and migraines
- Sciatica
- Neck pain
- Shoulder pain
- Carpal tunnel syndrome
- Whiplash
- Arm pain
Chiropractic care is safe and effective for people of all ages, even children and babies. Every year, about 22 million people seek the help of a chiropractor, and only about 35% of them have back pain. The rest are suffering from neck, arm, or shoulder pain, or headaches.
If you have chronic pain that you can’t manage with other treatments, it may be time to give chiropractic care a try. Either call our office or request an appointment online today to set up a consultation with Dr. DeFroda.