How Chiropractic Treatment Can Help with Recovery Time
Pain, stiffness, and other symptoms often continue for days or weeks after an injury, even if the injury was fairly minor. Chiropractic care can shorten your recovery period and help you to return to your normal activities much sooner.
Ways Chiropractic Treatment Speeds Up Recovery
Let's say your back or neck begins to hurt soon after you lift a heavy box or spend 12 hours in the car during a road trip. After resting for days or weeks, you're still in pain, plus your joints have become stiff and inflexible.
Whether your pain is caused by a strained muscle, misaligned vertebrae in your spine, scar tissue, or another problem, chiropractic treatment offers a simple, drug-free solution.
Some of your pain may be due to subluxations. Subluxations happen when the vertebrae in your spine move out of alignment. Misaligned vertebrae can be caused by injuries, but may also occur due to poor posture or even the stress and strain of sitting in the same position for hours.
Subluxations not only cause pain but may also affect your muscles, ligaments, and tendons, causing them to tighten or become inflamed. In addition to treating back and neck pain, chiropractors also offer natural treatments for sprained ankles, shoulder injuries, leg, and arm pain, sciatica, tennis elbow, carpal tunnel syndrome, plantar fasciitis, text neck, and other conditions.
Chiropractic treatment can help:
- Ease Pain Naturally. Pain medications and muscle relaxants help temporarily but don't address the source of your pain. Restoring the natural alignment of your spine with spinal manipulation treatment starts the healing process, decreasing your reliance on medication. Your doctor uses gentle manual pressure to re-position your vertebrae during spinal manipulation. Once your vertebrae are properly aligned, your muscles begin to loosen, and painful pressure on your nerves decreases.
- Soothe Sore Muscles. It's difficult to play with your kids or do yard work if you're suffering from muscle spasms or tenderness. Massage, ultrasound therapy, and other chiropractic treatments relax tight muscles, ligaments and tendons, promote healing, and break up scar tissue or adhesions that can be a factor in pain.
- Restore Range of Motion and Flexibility. Once your vertebrae and joints are properly aligned and your muscles, tendons, and ligaments are loose, you'll probably notice that it's easier to move your body. Treatments also help decrease inflammation, another factor that contributes to pain and poor range of motion.
- Improve Blood Flow. After an injury, your body sends white blood cells and nutrients to the injured area to heal it. Unfortunately, some injuries can restrict the flow of blood. After normal blood flow is restored with chiropractic treatments, healing tends to happen much more quickly.
- Reduce Headaches. Neck and head injuries may cause painful headaches that last for days. Correcting spinal misalignments and relaxing your muscles with chiropractic care offers real relief for post-injury headaches.
Chiropractic treatment can also help you recover more quickly after a particularly grueling workout, improve your athletic performance or play without pain. In a case study published in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine, a patient who developed lateral epicondylitis, commonly called "tennis elbow," was pain-free after just three weeks of active release technique (ART) treatment.
The hands-on treatment breaks up adhesions in muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves, and tissue. Adhesions not only restrict movement but may cause pain, numbness, and tingling.
Are your muscles and joints painful and stiff? Chiropractic treatment offers an effective way to ease your pain. Contact our office to schedule an appointment.
Sources:
National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health: Spinal Manipulation: What You Need to Know