Case 10: severe lumbar disc and bone degeneration
What an amazing restoration of function and Quality of Life!!!
In this case, we have a 68 year old male. You guessed it: referred by one of our established clients. He was very active (pickleball, snow boarding, surfing, volleyball, body building, etc), but one day…. he woke up and was not able to stand up straight. He had all the tell tale signs of a disc injury: sharp stabbing pain in his low back, radiating pain into his legs, loss of posture, and it even hurt to breath!
Here is the interesting thing: he never had any issue in his back prior to this episode! Goes to show that “feel” is a bad four letter “F” word.
So we began to adjust his spine, very carefully at first, because as you can see , he has virtually no disc between L4/L5 and L5/S1. In addition to specific, subluxation correcting adjustments, we also performed a variation of McKenzie Disc Therapy on him. This was necessary in order to get whatever herniated disc material there was, away from the delicate nerve tissue.
Did I mention that he is 6’5″ tall? Biomechanically, that poses challenges to his care, especially when it comes to the Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s) that he was accustomed to participate in.
I think the re-exam x-rays of his lumbar (low back) spine speak for themselves. He gained more than 12 degrees of lumbar lordosis (proper lumbar curvature). The bones of his lumbar spine, specifically L1/L2/L3, aligned up on top of one another in a proper arch formation. There was correction to the L4/L5 alignment which, medical model says, can’t be corrected without surgery. Here is visual proof that the spine can be corrected without surgery.
Correcting his subluxations when present, in the proper direction, with the proper adjustment, allowed HIS innate intelligence to make structural corrections to his spine. He regained his ADL’s and has since gone back to doing all the physical activities he wants, without fear of “blowing” his back out again.
Keeping the main thing, the main thing.
That is the difference between principled, subluxation based spinal structural correction and the pain-based model of chiropractic. By focusing on correcting subluxations, we will always get to the root cause of the spinal dysfunction that is robbing people of their QOL. If you use a pain-based model, the pain may go away for a short while, but the structure will persist in its dysfunction, resulting in the symptoms coming back, and usually with a vengeance!
