X – Rays yield a lot of valuable information about the condition of a person. In a conventional medical setting x-rays are taken to look for tumors, infections, fractures, birth defects, or any pathology (disease). It is very important to rule out these potential problems before conservative treatment is considered. However, x-rays can yield much more information than that. It is not uncommon for a patient to go to their doctor with back or neck pain and receive a series of x-rays to the area of complaint. In most cases, the patient will receive normal findings on the x-rays. The patient then leaves the doctor’s office maybe with a prescription for muscle relaxers, pain killers, anti-inflammatories, or all of the above. Many times the patient is confused as to how he/she can have intense pain and at the same time have normal x-rays. Again, normal x-rays from a medical perspective means that there were no tumors, infections, fractures, birth defects, or osteopathology. This does not take into account misalignments in skeletal joints or distorted joint postures. Not only are we trained to read x-rays from a “medical perspective”, we also view the x-rays from a biomechanical standpoint. This is usually the missing link in diagnosing and correcting musculoskeletal pain.
Chronic use of pain killers and anti-inflammatories actually leads to more degeneration and disability. Pain is a built-in mechanism to tell you something is wrong. If a person constantly masks the pain with pain-killers, he/she will try to do more activities that they would not normally do without the medication. This promotes more damage to soft tissue. It simply Band-Aids the condition.