How We Help
Without Cracking
The most common concern that I have heard from people about chiropractic over the years is that they are nervous with being twisted and cracked. They are nervous about being yanked or having their back jolted suddenly. I can understand peoples concern. Getting twisted and cracked does sound scary, even dangerous. However it is not dangerous. Study after study has shown that it is pretty much the safest treatment out there.
I can also understand that studies or not, the twisting and cracking keeps a lot of people away from chiropractors.
Fortunately for those who are concerned there are chiropractic treatment techniques that do not use any twisting or cracking. At Bath Chiropractic Office we use a one of these chiropractic techniques.
At our office patients lie fully clothed flat on their stomach for the whole treatment. The patient is not twisted around.
There are no sudden yanks or shoves. To the patient, the whole treatment feels like a series of tiny taps on various parts of their back, neck, hips or knees or feet.
The chriopractic method used at Bath Chiropractic is called Activator Methods. It uses a small hand held device called an Activator. The Activator uses a light quick flick to realign the patient’s joints. If you flick your finger lightly against your arm you will get a sense of what it feels like on your back to be adjusted by the Activator.
All chiropractors seek to do the same thing in providing chiropractic care. All of the different chiropractic techniques (there are more than 30) are means to this same end. A chiropractors aim in providing treatment is to restore normal movement and alignment to the spinal joints and other joints. Chiropractors call the process of this alignment an adjustment.
The hands-on chiropractic treatment is called manual adjusting. With manual adjusting the chiropractor is using his hands to try to realign a patient’s joints. When manual adjusting the chiropractor needs to position the patient, by twisting or bending, to focus pressure on the problem part of the back. He then needs to pull or thrust to realign the joint. The twisting and sudden thrust are to preempt the natural tendency of the patient back muscles to tighten up and resist. With manual adjusting the chiropractor is using his own muscles to move the patient’s joints. The chiropractor's muscles are only as quick as the patients. Without catching the patient off guard it’s a fight between the patient's muscles and the chiropractor's.
On the other hand the Activator instrument delivers a thrust faster than the patient can react to resist. It can move the misaligned joint back into place almost before the body knows it has happened. Because it can move the joint before the muscles resist it can move the joint with very little force. So little force that it feels like no force at all. No thrust like that used with manual adjusting is needed.
It is also small enough, and thus precise enough, that it can be placed on one and only one backbone at a time. There is no need for the patient to be twisted.