Can I Click My Own Back?
Can I adjust myself?
When we see a client for a new patient examination, we often ask them, “What things have you tried in the past to get rid of your pain?” and we get the normal treatment methods including massage, physiotherapists, exercises, yoga, hot baths, Voltarol gel, drugs like Ibuprofen, Paracetamol, Tramadol amongst many others. A lot of our clients would tell us that they can click their own backs and this provides relief, which is then followed up by, “But I’m sure that’s not good for me.”
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Is It Bad To Click My Own Back?
If you can click your own back, isn’t that the same as what a Chiropractor does? Well, unfortunately not. Otherwise, we would all be out of a job.
What tends to happen is when you have physical stress on your body, you get a problem area develop. We call them subluxations. It’s a fancy word for misalignment. You can get a global subluxation and the most common one you see is where the curve in the neck starts to straighten and this is called a “forward head carriage”. This is developed from too much sitting in front of the desk using phones, screens, driving, which we all do, and we start to lose that curve. That is more of a global subluxation.
An individual subluxation is where one of the vertebrae will become under stress and put pressure on the nerve surrounding it, causing the nerves to not function properly.
This becomes more locked up over time and to compensate for that lack of movement, the vertebra either side of this one will start to move a lot more.
When you’re cracking your own back, you’re moving these vertebrae either side and it feels great momentarily for a day and as you do it more and more, it starts to feel good for half a day and then more and more it starts to feel good for a couple of hours until you find that you’re doing it sometimes six times an hour because the relief wears off.
This is because the joints either side of the vertebra become more and more hypermobile. This is where they become looser, and you need to do this more often to get relief.
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What a Chiropractor would do is locate the joint that is subluxated, adjust it in order to restore normal movement through the rest of the spine. This gets rid of the individual subluxation but also of the global subluxation to try and restore normality through the spine to prevent this from happening again.
Where possible, please do not adjust your own spine. It can cause wear and tear in other places and cause other parts of your spine to function differently, which will then make it harder for a Chiropractor to correct.
If you want any more information on how you can keep your spine mobile without having to crack it, please follow this YouTube link here. One of the best exercises for spinal stretching is a child’s pose exercise. It induces extension through the top of the back and then it takes the pressure off the lower spine and pelvis, causing flexion through the hips. This is a lovely stretch for someone who works at a desk all day. Hold this for 30 seconds and repeat up to 5 times.
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What we treat at West Chiropractic:
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