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How to Age Gracefully With Senior Chiropractic Care
Admin • March 12, 2020
As you head into your senior years, you may encounter age-related changes that limit your mobility and produce chronic discomfort. Some of the changes stem directly from the aging process itself, while others accompany many years of physical wear and tear on the body.
Fortunately, you can control these problems without adding painkilling drugs to your list of medications. Chiropractic care and related forms of treatment can provide safe, non-invasive solutions that reduce chronic symptoms and help you preserve your wellness. Here are some things you should know about senior chiropractic care.
Aging Affects Your Musculoskeletal and Nervous Systems
Aging creates some obvious changes in the human body, including deterioration of the joints that let you move around and perform basic tasks. In the most common degenerative condition, osteoarthritis, the cartilage between bone ends in the joint wears out, prompting inflammation, pain, and stiffness.
Seniors may also encounter problems stemming from degenerative disc disease. This condition starts as age-related fluid loss within the spinal discs. The dehydration causes the discs to shrink and collapse inward, creating stress and inflammation in surrounding spinal joints.
Age-related bulging discs may protrude until they push against nerve roots or spinal cord tissue. If this happens, the nerves served by that tissue may malfunction. Results typically include syndromes such as sciatica, which can create chronic pain, numb or tingling sensations, or loss of muscle control in a limb.
Weight gain often occurs in seniors as they pursue fewer physical activities or experience metabolic changes that cause them to burn fewer calories. Unfortunately, the extra weight can mean extra trouble for a body already struggling with age-related deterioration, inflammation, or nerve compression.
Chiropractic Care Helps You Control Your Symptoms
Some 69 percent
of middle-aged and senior U.S. adults take a prescription medication in any given month, with 22.4 percent taking five or more such drugs. Multiple medications can interact with each other in some unwelcome ways, making seniors understandably leery about adding to their prescription list.
Prescription painkillers can ease age-related aches and pains temporarily, but they cannot address the underlying joint or nerve issues that make the pain a constant or recurring problem. This may force you to keep taking the painkillers for brief spells of relief even as the physical problems progress.
Chiropractic care lets you tackle your musculoskeletal or neurological symptoms without drugs. Gentle, careful adjustments to your joints can help minimize bone-on-bone friction and pain by correcting joint component positions. Spinal adjustments can do the same for inflamed vertebral joints.
Chiropractic treatment can also take pressure off of nerve tissue pinched by bulging discs or other imbalances. These treatments aim to shift the protruding structure away from the tissue, improving nerve function and relieving neurological issues such as numbness, tingling, or pain.
If you have always assumed that aging bodies simply cannot stand up to chiropractic adjustment, think again. Evidence indicates
that seniors can safely undergo chiropractic care (unless a particular condition rules it out). The American College of Physicians actually lists it as a first-line treatment for lower back pain.
A Holistic Preventative Plan Can Keep You Moving and Feeling Well
Even if you can't receive spinal adjustments, you can still benefit from a chiropractic senior wellness plan. Chiropractic care includes a number of safe, non-invasive practices and techniques that work together, either with adjustment or without it, to help seniors move and function more normally.
Cold laser therapy serves as an example. A low-level laser beam can penetrate the skin harmlessly and painlessly. This energy boosts blood flow, increases fluid drainage, and eases inflammatory pain. Massage therapy provides similar benefits for managing chronic pain and inflammation.
Your holistic senior wellness plan may include exercise recommendations. Therapeutic exercises can help improve your balance, shed excess weight, increase your range of motion, and lower your risk for falls. Your chiropractic treatments may help you get more out of these exercises.
This kind of senior care can even help you resist future illnesses. The more efficiently your nervous system operates, the more effectively your immune system can perform.
If you want to age as gracefully as possible, take a more detailed look at senior chiropractic care. Contact
Davison Chiropractic today.
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Cold laser therapy, also called low-level laser therapy (LLLT) or low-power laser therapy (LPLT), is a non-surgical pain management treatment suitable for some patients who experience back and neck pain or certain injuries. Chiropractors and other health care professionals apply cold laser therapy to the pained or inflamed areas. The procedure uses a low-level laser that emits near-infrared light. The light from the laser is able to penetrate the skin and reach the body's deeper tissues. Once the tissues absorb the light, it interacts with the body's cells and speeds up the healing process. The laser light also helps reduce pain and swelling in damaged tissues. Uses Cold laser therapy is used primarily on patients who have chronic musculoskeletal pain. While the treatment works on different parts of the body for different injuries, like ligament and muscle strains, patients who have lasting lower back or neck pain often find relief from laser therapy. Cold laser therapy also helps patients who have arthritis, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome, hip bursitis, and temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJ). Procedure and Results A single treatment session of cold laser therapy is typically short. Most health care professionals who administer the treatment spend 30 seconds to several minutes holding the handheld laser over the affected areas. Treatment sessions that cover a large area, such as the entire lower back, take longer since the laser device will need to be moved around to target one smaller area at a time. The procedure isn't painful, and you won't feel any vibration or hear any noise. Some patients can feel the laser, but most do not report it as uncomfortable. There is no standard for the number and frequency of cold laser therapy treatments. How many sessions you'll need depends on the severity and type of your condition and how well previous treatment sessions work. You may have to wait several weeks to a month to see the full benefit of cold laser therapy, and some patients need to have several short sessions a week to get maximum relief. Cold laser therapy has been the subject of multiple studies that have shown generally favorable results, though many of the studies have small participant groups. This treatment is FDA-approved, so you know it’s safe and effective. Advantages and Disadvantages One of the biggest advantages of cold laser therapy is that it is a non-invasive treatment method. Since cold laser therapy doesn't lead to any downtime for healing, it can be a good treatment choice for patients who experience pain but have busy lifestyles. The therapy also doesn't involve the use of any medications, which makes it appealing to patients seeking drug-free ways to manage their pain. However, you can combine it with medications and other treatment methods to provide additional relief. The main disadvantage many patients report is that cold laser therapy doesn't work immediately. Most patients need multiple treatment sessions — as many as 30 — to see a significant reduction in inflammation and pain. Another downside to cold laser therapy is that some health insurance providers won't cover the cost of the treatment. But some health care practitioners offer billing or payment plans to help patients afford the cost of the treatment. Risks Cold laser therapy is approved for use by the FDA, and it is considered safe for most patients. The treatment has very few side effects and is tolerated very well by most people. Testing on pregnant women is lacking, so pregnant women shouldn't have cold laser therapy. People who have open sores, suspicious moles, or cancerous lesions shouldn't expose their skin to lasers. Davison Chiropractic offers chiropractic adjustments, massage therapy, and pain management treatments to patients in Davison and Lapeer, Michigan and the surrounding areas. Contact us today to schedule an appointment.
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