While there are more than 100 different forms of arthritis including osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, gout, fibromyalgia, and lupus; the focus of this article is on the most common form that eventually impacts all of us….osteoarthritis!
I’ve written articles about Fibromyalgia but let’s focus on osteoarthritis, commonly referred to as Degenerative Joint Disease or DJD.
DJD is a wear and tear arthritis. I commonly use the analogy of a vehicle and its tires. If you put new tires on your vehicle you expect to get a certain number of miles from those tires. However, if the front end is not aligned and the wheels are not balanced what happens? Those tires wear out at an accelerated rate.
You can easily replace the tires. Not so easy with the human body. Yes, hip replacements are commonplace but if given the choice would you rather keep your original equipment or have an artificial hip? That’s what I thought!
What Causes Joints to Wear Out?
What causes joints to wear out? Don’t say genetics because the answer is much more within your control. I’ve often asked people why they think one of their hips wore out much faster than the other in the absence of trauma.
After all they take just as many steps with the good hip as they do with the arthritic one! The answer lies in imbalance. DJD is a mechanical problem. If you put more stress on a joint, guess what happens over time. The joint starts to wear out.
But, this happens slowly over years, even decades. You can be completely asymptomatic for many years while your joints are starting to wear out. And, then when you do start to notice, it’s a mild intermittent annoyance…
…until the pain becomes more and more constant and more and more severe, to the point that you can’t ignore it.
So, what do most people do?
Medications Make Arthritis Worse!
They start taking NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) to cover up the pain so they can go on with their lives. That’s understandable but dangerous because the very drugs you take for the pain have been shown to exacerbate the inflammation.
A study over 4 years showed no long term benefit of NSAID use and found that joint inflammation and cartilage quality actually worsened.
Did you get that? The very drugs that doctors commonly recommend or prescribe for DJD actually contribute to the worsening of the condition. If that’s not an example of insanity please show me one.
Instead, let’s look at how chiropractic can help arthritis pain.
4 Ways Chiropractic Can Help Arthritis Pain
The greatest benefit of chiropractic is in avoiding arthritis rather than attempting to remedy an imbalance that has taken decades to manifest. With that said, there are tremendous benefits of chiropractic for anyone suffering from DJD arthritic pain.
As I’ve noted, DJD is the result of longstanding imbalance to the joints causing an accelerated wear and tear. There is no reversing the degeneration but there are ways to improve balance and reduce the stress to those joints.
Way #1: Balanced Foundation – think back to the analogy of the vehicle and the tires here. Your foundation is your pelvis. It is the foundational support for your body and it dissipates and transmits the forces from your legs when you walk.
If your pelvis is unlevel then every single step you take will result in increased forces to one or both hips as well as to the lower back. Multiply that stress thousands of steps every day, day in and day out, week in and week out. Over time this accelerates the wear and tear of the joints.
Establishing a level foundation is the first step of corrective chiropractic care in helping to reduce stress and arthritic pain.
Way #2: Pelvic and Hip Mobility – Another piece of that balance is to make sure the hip joints and pelvic joints (sacroiliac joints) are moving properly. Joints exist for one reason, to provide for motion.
They are akin to the hinges of a door. If you have a door with hinges that do not move well you really don’t have a functioning door. The same can be said of the joints of the hips and pelvis.
If they are not moving properly they simply transmit the forces to other joints. This causes a dramatic acceleration of the wear and tear of the hips and pelvis. This area is critical because it is exposed to dramatically more forces than other areas.
Restoring and maintaining mobility to the hips and pelvis is essential to how chiropractic can help with arthritis pain.
Way #3: Spinal Joint Mobility – As I’ve noted joints exist for one purpose and that is to allow motion between the two bones. While the hips and pelvis are critical, especially when it comes to DJD of the hips and pelvis, the remainder of the spine is also vital.
Any joints that are not able to move smoothly through their full range of motion are exposed to increased stress and will result in an acceleration of the degenerative process.
I regularly observe spinal joint degeneration far worse than expected, due to a loss of functional joint mobility. Restoring and maintaining joint motion is the best strategy to avoid the development of arthritis. In the event of existing arthritis the restoration of as much motion as possible will greatly reduce the symptoms of the arthritis.
Way #4: Postural and Gravity Muscles – Everything discussed thus far has been about restoring balance and reducing excess wear and tear to the joints of the hips and spine. Most of us have movement patterns that increase the stress to our joints and reinforce rather than reduce the imbalances.
Our modern lifestyle of sitting causes a weakening of the muscles responsible for counteracting the forces of gravity. These muscles are called the posterior chain and they connect from the back of the legs through the hips and pelvis, and up the spine through the shoulders.
Chiropractic can often help greatly with other forms of arthritis such as rheumatoid and fibromyalgia though the focus of this article was on the most common form of arthritis called degenerative joint disease.
While it’s never too late to benefit from chiropractic, the sooner you start and the less advanced the arthritis is the greater you will benefit from care. Make sure to find a chiropractor whose focus is on corrective balancing of the spine.
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