Austin Chiropractor
Neck Pain & Back Pain

This is a transcript from Dr. Echols' Neck and back pain video.

Now, before I get started there is something very important you need to know. This is often what I tell my patients about how to go about handling pain. I ask them “have you ever had a pebble in your shoe?” And they all say “well yah, sure”. “Well, Did it hurt?” “Yah, of course it did.” Well I go, “I want you to know the reason you are having pain in your foot was because that pebble was actually putting physical, mechanical pressure on a nerve. As you walked around and put more and more pressure on that nerve it started to get more swollen and sore until finally you had to pull over and actually pull the pebble out, didn’t you? And they all say, “yah.”

Now I also ask them, and I says “now look if someone was to come up to you and see you limping around, say “hey what’s wrong?” Well, I got this stupid pebble in my shoe and its killing me and they go “oh won’t you try some pain medication or why don’t you try some muscle relaxers. What would you think about this person? You would think they were crazy. That’s because we are trying to handle a physical, mechanical problem with a chemical solution and that just doesn’t work.

The only real solution to having a pebble in your shoe is to sit down and take the pebble out. Which in fact, removes the pressure from the nerve and the person gets relief. You can take pain medication until the cows came home, but it would never, ever fix that problem or handle it. It may give you some temporary relief, but I think it is pretty obvious it would never handle the situation. You could also say something might suggest you inject that area with cortisone or some other steroid because there is all that pain and inflammation in there. Again, as soon as that wore off the problem would still be there and come back. Some people also suggest surgery for this kind of thing. Why don’t we cut the bottom of your foot out so the pebble will rest up there without putting any pressure on there. That would be kind of a, drastic solution. Again, this is a mechanical issue, mechanical problem, physical problem and it can’t be solved by chemical means.

Ok, so this is one of the machines we use in our office. It’s called a Surface Electromilogram. Actually, all you need to know about it really measures stress along the musculature spinal column. And today we are going to demonstrate it on Shannon here and see what kind of results we get.

“Look straight ahead and stand very relaxed.”

So normally a normal scan will be in the green areas here. The little bars are fairly balanced and even and there in green. When we start running into problems we will see the red or purple bars. You can see how much larger it is over here on this side than this side. Also, a big problem up here in the neck area, it’s actually 261% greater on this one side which can indicate some sort of spinal imbalance here. So let’s go do some treatment and then we’ll come back.