Prefer to read? Here’s the gist of what Dr. Tim spoke about in this video clip.

The Importance of a Normal Neck Curve

So this here behind me is an X Ray of what a normal curve in the next looks like. This has to be 40 to 45 degrees. With the proper curve your head falls back over the shoulders and everything is in balance. 

The reason why this is important is because this is where your brain stem sits, which is the control center for all your higher level functioning in your nervous system. This is also where the spinal cord begins and it’s very important to make sure that your brain is able to communicate normal health and healing through the spinal cord without any interference.

When you lose the curve in your neck, what happens is it stretches the spinal cord. Let me show you exactly what that looks like. 

This is an example of a spine. When you have a curve in the neck, everything’s relaxed. When you lose the curve, it starts to stretch, to degenerate the spinal cord, and it puts an extreme amount of stress on the brain and the nervous system. This is what that looks like here on an X Ray.

Now what this does is it stretches and degenerates your spinal cord and this decreases your body’s ability to adapt to stress and it affects every major system in your body, muscles, tendons, ligaments, organs, chemicals. It’s all connected to the nervous system.

How Your Body Heals When You Have a Problem With Your Spine

This here shows exactly how your body heals when you have a problem with your spine. That’s not a neck or a back problem. That’s a health problem because your health is regulated through the nervous system. Your brain communicates through the spine and out the nerves that go into your body.

So if you’re having issues in your neck, it is also affecting:

• Your heart and your lungs.
• The glands of your throat, like the thyroid gland.
• The nerves that go into your sinuses and your inner ear -regulating balance.
• For people who have allergies, it affects your eyes, ears, nose, throat.
• The brainstem, which goes to every major system and regulates higher-level functions.

How New Life Chiropractic Rocklin Helps Restore the Normal Neck Curve

So I want to go through with you today just how we help people restore this normal curve. Many times I see people come in with their neck completely straight and through a series of corrective chiropractic care in the office and at home, we’re able to restore that curve and their nervous system function. We even help people maintain this over time so it never goes back like this again.

So I’m going to go through the different techniques we do here in the office and show you how we’re getting results like this with people that are coming in and restoring that cervical curve.

Step 1: Mobilization

The first step to restoring this cervical curve is mobilization. And there’s two things that we do both here in the office and we give the patients to be able to do at home. Number one is cervical tractioning.

Cervical Traction

Cervical Traction is important because it decreases the tension on the brain stem and the spinal cord. It opens up all the disc spaces and it starts to rehydrate and restore normal function to the things that move and support the spine.

This system goes underneath your neck and your chin. And we do live tractioning anywhere from 20 to 60 repetitions, one to two times a day.

Wobble Disk

The second mobilization exercise is done on a wobble disk and we do three different movements.

1. side to side
2. moving the entire spine forward and back
3. rotation.

This further mobilizes the spine from the pelvis all the way through the low back up into the neck and into the skull. This prepares you for the best adjustment possible so we can make the most corrective change

Step 2: Chiropractic Correction

Once we properly prepare the spine for the adjustment, we actually make the correction. This is the most important thing we do by far and there is nothing that replaces the adjustment. There is no amount of stretch, exercise, or any kind of modality that you can do to restore the normal function of the spine without doing the proper adjustments.

That being said, we do some very unique adjustments that most chiropractors do not do, which is why we get a different level of results and see the kind of restorative correction that we do.

One of the things that we do here is drops on the cervical spine itself. So if you see this area here, what we can do is help restore loss of curve in the neck by bringing it here and just doing the light drops that actually help restore that curve, retraining the things that move and support the spine.

Also, we use this instrument called an arthro stem. An arthro stem pulses at six pulses per second, which is faster than the body can resist and we can do certain kinds of adjustments to help restore that curve back in the neck.

So we’re doing three different things with each adjustment.

1. Restoring motion with the manual chiropractic adjustment.
2. Doing curve correction with drops
3. Doing cervical retraining with the arthro stem.

All these things help re-mobilize the spine, reduce the subluxation, restore the brain and nervous system connection, and also start retraining that natural curve.

Step 3: Neuromuscular Reeducation

The third step in the correction process is where we help stabilize, retrain posture, and create new healthy patterns in the nervous system. This is a process called neuromuscular reeducation.

So after we’ve made the correction, we mobilize the spine. We’ve made the structural and neurological changes, now we want to start to strengthen the things that move and support the spine and reteach the brain a new healthy pattern.

One of the things to restore the cervical curve is we use this head weight. This head weight goes right over the forehead just like this. And we stand on a vibration platform that enhances the effects of anything that it is that you do for neuromuscular reeducation, postural retraining, strengthening and stabilizing of muscles, tendons, and ligaments.

We stand in the vibration platform for four to six minutes. During this time what this weight does is it actually helps improve posture, brings your head and neck up and starts to recreate that healthy curve in the neck.

Long Term Relief From Illness and Pain

It’s through all three of these things, plus the home care that we give to patients over a period of time and helping people understand what caused their spine to get like that in the first place, which allows us to get the kind of results that we talked about earlier. And this isn’t just so you feel better, it’s so you function better.

Patients who do this see a relief of the pain symptoms that they experienced that is very common with the loss of curve in the neck, like:

• headaches & migraines
• neck pain
• upper back pain
• shoulder pain
• paint into the wrist and elbows
• numbness and tingling into the arms.

In addition, people who struggle with asthma, allergy problems, thyroid issues, issues with focus, concentration, and sleep also find relief.

All these things are also connected to the same nerves into the neck. So if you or someone you know is suffering from any of these issues, if you know you have postural stress, loss of curve, you’ve been in an automobile accident, you sit chronically, you have strain and stress in the neck and upper back, likely this is something that would benefit you.

If you need help and live in our area, schedule an appointment now. If you live outside this area, go to MaxLiving.com to find a corrective care chiropractor near you who can help you through this corrective process.