Three Types of Care
Whether you suffer from an acute injury, having endured years of chronic pain, or just want to be at your best in health and performance, we have 3 types of care to better your quality of life
Initial Intensive Care
If an ache, pain or other obvious symptom has prompted you to begin chiropractic care, the first thing you want is to feel better. Office visits and your adjustments may be combined with other procedures to help offer relief as quickly as possible. Depending upon your age, condition, and lifestyle, repeated visits over weeks or months may be needed to reduce or eliminate your symptoms.
Rehabilitation Care
Muscle and other soft tissue damage often remain after your original symptoms have improved. Rehabilitative care stabilizes your spine and promotes more complete healing. Visit frequency is reduced and you may be encouraged to supplement your care with exercise or other self-care procedures. With your ache or pain gone, true healing can occur. Stopping care now may result in a relapse.
Maintenance & Wellness Care
When your health correction is reached, chiropractic “check ups” can help preserve and maintain your progress. Occasional visits can help catch little problems before they become serious. Wellness-minded adults choose this type of care for themselves and their children. Like other preventative health measures, maintenance care saves time and money by helping you stay well.
Why the medical profession supports maintenance care
Medical Research Validates Chiropractic Maintenance Care for Low Back Pain
For generations, Doctors of Chiropractic have been advocating the benefits of preventative maintenance care to their patients who suffer from chronic or recurrent lower back pain.
Two recent research studies generated by the medical profession add evidence in support of the value of chiropractic maintenance care.
The first study published in the prestigious medical journal SPINE concluded that “spinal manipulation therapy is effective for the treatment of chronic non specific low back pain.” To obtain long-term benefits, this study suggests maintaining spinal manipulations after the initial intensive care period. The study revealed that the patients who received spinal manipulation every two weeks for 9 months after an initial month of 12 treatments had significantly lower pain and disability scores than those patients who had manipulation for just the initial one-month period.
Additional evidence was provided by a second study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. In this study, 894 injured workers were followed for a period of one year. During that year, four different types of therapies were made available to the workers: medical management, physiotherapy, chiropractic, and no therapy. Episodes of repeat disability were recorded during the year following the initial injury. In summary, physiotherapy had the highest percentage of re-injured workers followed by those receiving medical management or no treatment at all. The lowest incidence of repeat injury was found among those workers who had received chiropractic maintenance care.
For several years I have been advocating maintenance care to my patients who suffer from chronic and recurrent low back pain as it has been my observation that those patients that stick to a preventative treatment plan tend to suffer far less than those who only seek care when things get really bad. It is great to see these results being studied and published in prestigious medical journals.
