Risks and Concerns with Chiropractic Therapy
- Risk of nerve and bone injury. Although it’s rare to experience a serious injury, there’s a small chance that spinal manipulation can cause bone fractures, injured disks, nerve damage in the lower spine, or even stroke. Those with spine injuries, herniated disks, osteoporosis or arthritis are at a greater risk of injury.
- Medications can lead to complications. Patients who take blood thinners should not have chiropractic adjustments.
Since many variables can complicate chiropractic therapy, it’s important to be clear and comprehensive when consulting with your doctor. If you do decide that the potential benefits of chiropractic for MS are worth the risks, make sure that your chiropractor shares information and result with your neurologist, and vice versa. The better your medical team communicates, the more likely you can avoid serious complications and continue to refine your treatment plan for a better quality of life with MS.
Dr. Donna's Success Story
"Our last two trimesters of chiropractic school were reserved for internships. We finally had the opportunity to use everything we had learned over four years. One of my first patients was an opera singer who had developed multiple sclerosis.
He was always the happiest patient, no matter how ill he felt, and he used his operatic voice to greet to everyone he met in the hallways. His attitude only made us want to help him all the more, though it was often difficult to move him in a wheelchair.
Our protocol included chiropractic treatments on the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar spine; acupuncture to stimulate the different meridians (energy channels) as needed, nutritional recommendations, and lifestyle recommendations. Of course, we always checked to see how he was doing that particular day and evaluated his overall progress every month.
The chiropractic treatments to the spine resulted in increased nervous system input to the rest of the body. A spinal misalignment of the vertebrae will cause the areas of the body innervated by the particular spinal nerve to receive nerve transmissions. In multiple sclerosis, it’s the outer coating of the nerve, called the myelin, which has degraded.
It is not known whether or not chiropractic manipulations aid in the regeneration of the myelin, but we do know that multiple sclerosis patients that receive chiropractic treatments usually report feeling better than when they had gone without treatment.
In chiropractic, all treatment modalities work together. For example, once the nerve flow is going to different body parts and nutrition is taken into consideration, healing process accelerates. The combined effects of acupuncture and chiropractic manipulation are greater than each treatment by itself.
The opera singer said he would be lost without his chiropractic treatments. His wife wholeheartedly agreed."
