Spinal Anatomy Lesson

📍 📍 📍 Hey, Dr. Ryan Alter your Delray Beach Chiropractor. Another 📍 Anatomy Lesson for you. I really want you to understand 📍 what’s going on in the spine so you know what’s happening here, and you know how to better 📍 take care of yourself. This is what we call a motor unit. It’s basically a model 📍 of two of your vertebrae.

We have 24 movable segments in the spine called vertebrae. These are two of them, 📍 and you can see the associated disc and 📍 the associated nerves. So we’ve got a disc. We’ve got a vertebrae, this white block, we’ve got another disc and another vertebrae, and then we’ve got the exiting nerves that come out between those vertebrae.

Keep in mind, these nerves control and coordinate the entire body, okay? They run their, the electrical system of the whole body anyway. What happens is because these are movable with the everyday unavoidable stresses of life, Sitting, 📍 bending, any traumas, car crashes, sports injuries, they can and typically will cause these little vertebrae to shift and it looks like this.

And you can see there what’s happening is the vertebrae starts to come backward and it starts to irritate that nerve. Okay, and the chiropractor’s job, my main 📍 job is to find out which vertebrae are in trouble 📍 and using adjustments. Also, in my office, we use what’s called decompression, but we’re trying to get that vertebrae back forward to open up that nerve hole we want to make, make sure there’s 📍 no pressure on that nerve.

And here’s another key point that most people 📍 don’t understand. When this vertebrae gets stuck like that, it starts to decay. It starts to wear out and it’ll actually turn into this 📍 over time with these big bone spurs off there, chunks of new bone. The disc starts to crush, the nerve can get crushed 📍 and it becomes a big mess.

And so when you leave this like that, don’t get that adjusted whether you’re having symptoms or not, this fixation or 📍 this mechanical problem, it would be similar to having a piece of food caught in your tooth. So if you have a piece of food caught in your tooth, And you don’t feel anything and you just leave it there, what’s gonna happen?

📍 Big giant cavity. Same with your spine, misalignments in the spine, that cause a fixation, a loss of motion, and you’re gonna wind up with a cavity in your spine. So it’s crucial. You want to make sure that you have no fixations in your spine. And how do you do that? 📍 You do it with great chiropractic care.