Question
I have been diagnosed with a painful ruptured disc located between C5-C6, and have been told by lots of people to see a Chiropractor, is this advisable and can a Chiropractor do anything for my problem?

In Pain In Paradise...
Karen Sumner
Virginia Beach, VA


Answer
This depends upon just how far gone your problem is.  Most chiropractors are very careful about disc issues and the boards are a bit harsh about direct treatment of them by chiropractors. However, I would personally want to put my eyes on a problem like yours before I turned it away.  Medically, your only options are drugs to kill the pain, physical therapy to mobilize the area and finally surgery to fuse the area to make it more stable.  Physical therapy without adjustments right now would make the problem much worse for you, however, and drugs only kill the pain.  I would be concerned about the mobility of the whole spine because the area of complaint is usually not the primary problem--something else is not working as it should.  By treating the whole area, you can often achieve good results in reducing the pain and other symptoms caused by the disc.

Secondly, you may want to consider a chiropractor who does Decompression.  This technique utilized computer controlled equipment to traction the specific disc in question and can possibly reverse the problem.  I was doing this a few years ago and had excellent results with low back discs similar to yours, but now they have equipment to treat the neck also.

Let me know how this turns out for you.

Dr. P