Tips to Avoid Neck and Back Pain

Neck and back pain can be caused by physical, emotional and chemical stress on our bodies. Chiropractic care that focuses on total body health can help by offering tips and exercises to do at home in addition to adjusting and restoring the natural alignment of the spine to help improve normal function and alleviate pain.

What are some of the common causes of neck and back pain?

Dr. Dennis Cronk: As we educate our patients, we try to find through the process or exam what some common causes of what they may be doing that may be causing their neck pain. We focus on the physical nature of their lifestyle, whether work or at home. Also mental stress that they may be dealing with in their lives, emotional stress, and also chemical stresses from things that may cause bad reactions in the body. Some of these can be as obvious as sports injuries, car accidents, but more times than not what happens is repetitive stresses to the body that have been occurring over years where the patients may experience pain but goes away and then several years later comes back and it’s more intense. Unless we do an x-ray or proper evaluation, we can find a lot of degeneration in different areas of the spine due to these recurring repetitive physical stresses.

Do you have any tips on managing stress and sleep issues to help avoid back and neck pain?

Dr. Dennis Cronk: It’s common knowledge that without proper rest and too much stress in your life, your body will begin to break down. Identifying what may be causing those stresses in your life – whether it’s physical, chemical or emotional – are important to help the added stress that may occur with injuries. However, once you are injured, you do need the proper care to help the healing and recuperation of the body. As a chiropractor, that’s what we do through spinal adjustments in helping the body restore proper alignment to conserve energy and reduce muscle tension as well as take away nerve interference that will allow the body to function at the level of help it needs to.

Will physical exercise and strength training help people avoid neck and back pain?

Dr. Dennis Cronk: Absolutely. What we focus our patients on when they come here is not so much what hurts them but we actually educate them about focusing on health. When we go down a line of health, we talk about exercise, nutrition, rest, mental attitude and most importantly nerve supply which controls every cell in the body. We’ll go through that process of talking to them about how much they exercise and what they do for exercise, what their nutrition is like as far as processed foods, sugar and foods that they may be highly reactive to and talk about a positive attitude and also a program of getting adjusted to restore the body to its normal functioning level.

Can chiropractic care help people try to avoid ever getting neck and back pain?

Dr. Dennis Cronk: I’d like to say that we can prevent all types of injuries or neck or back pain but like anything else in life, there’s no guarantees. However by getting adjusted and restoring natural alignment and range or motion of the spine, you can see for most patients, even if they do get injured, that they’ll heal much quicker. The down time between injuries as far as recurrence will lengthen and it won’t have recurring issues as often. Regular chiropractic care can maybe not forever prevent neck or back pain but it can definitely restore normal function in a quick and lasting way.

For people just starting to feel neck or back pain what tips do you have to help them to make sure the pain doesn’t get worse?

Dr. Dennis Cronk: A lot of home-type of self-care treatments that we recommend to people between adjustments are stretching and icing and exercise specific not only to the area but to the total body because we are full bodied people. Focusing on health for the whole body is just as important as where their injuries may be. When people start to feel problems, they could do things like icing the affected area and also stretching the affected area. Doing things that people do today through exercise like rolling out the muscles to help lessen the pain or discomfort. Like anything else, they need to get to the root cause of the problem. That’s normally alignment where bones of the vertebrae that are out of place are putting stress along the soft tissues which are the muscles, the discs, and the nerves. As soon as they can get adjusted as well as do the home advice, they’ll be better off.

Learn More

If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Marshall or Dr. Cronk visit www.championchiro.com or call 732-741-1000 to schedule an appointment.

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