I’m Dr. Steph Pinnow, your Noble Choice Chiropractor for neck pain in Sun Prairie, WI. And I just wanted to go through one of the methods that we use here in our office to help diagnose neck pain. One of the things that we do is actually the use of digital x-rays, which we have here onsite.
There’s a couple of good benefits of having x-ray onsite.
On-Site X-Rays at Noble Chiropractic Sun Prairie WI
The first one is it really helps us with speed and making sure that we can quickly see what’s going on with you in black and white. Diagnose your issue and get you started with care right away. So get you feeling better, faster.
The second awesome thing about digital x-rays is that it’s lower radiation than plain film x-ray. You don’t have to really worry too much about safety and overexposure.
What I wanted to show you is when you take an x-ray, what exactly is that we’re looking for?
This is an example of the side view of an x-ray of a person’s neck. If you’re a visual person, I’ve got the model here and you can see that this is a side view.
What we’re looking for here is you’ve got the vertebrae right in between here. We’ve got discs in between the vertebrae and then from the top, the spinal cord, now you’re not going to be able to see any of those soft tissues such as the disc or the spinal cord, or even any of the nerves in an x-ray.
We’re really focused on what the bones look like and how well they’re in line with each other.
Here, again, if you’re a visual person, this will help you, but we’re looking at the side view of an x-ray in the neck, just like this.
This over here is an example of what we want to see. A couple of things that are really important in a side/lateral view is what we call it, of the neck.
The first thing that we really want to see is a nice curve, and we call this the reverse C-shaped curve in the neck.
Curve number one important thing, number two is we want to make sure we’ve got good spaces right in between those discs, because otherwise you’ve got the bone rubbing on bone.
We also want to make sure that back here, there’s some nice spaces in between this back part of the vertebrae, that’s where the nerve comes out, got to make sure that there’s lots of space in there so the nerve can talk to the brain and talk to the body, make sure everything’s functioning,
how it should be.
Okay, this is an example of a good normal x-ray the reason that the curve is so important is if this is your neck, this right here, these are the muscles in the back of your head.
There’s about five layers of muscles back here, if your neck is curved, just like the way it’s supposed to be, this is pretty loose, muscles are feeling normal.
When you lose that curve, you start to put extra tension back here on all of those muscles. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you’re going to feel tension all the way down the back of your head, even all the way down to your lower back.
It’s really important that you have that curvature in your neck.
X-rays for Neck Pain in Sun Prairie WI
Over here, you can see this person’s neck is very straight, they probably have some pain, maybe some headaches, maybe not very good range of motion.
The other thing is they might begin to have some degeneration.
The reason for that is if you look back here on this normal one, that weight at the head should be shifted back on the backside of the neck here, all of these big bones, those are meant to bear weight, and by bear weight I mean the weight of your head.
You’ve probably heard this before the human head weighs about 12 pounds. Everything back here is meant to hold that weight.
When you lose that curve, just like this presses the back it looks like here, the weight of the head is gonna start to fall on the front of the bones; not made for that.
That’s when you start to get some of that arthritis that you sometimes see later on in life (sometimes earlier, depending on some trauma).
This is just a quick sneak peak of what we’re looking for, just one of the things we’re also going to do some motion studies. Two that are x-rays while we have you move your head forward and backwards, and we see exactly where you’re moving and where you’re not moving.
Where you’re not moving is those areas that we need to correct.
If you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out, and we are looking forward to meeting you and seeing what your spine looks like in black and white. We’ll see you soon.
