Cervical Traction for Neck Pain Relief | Chiropractor for Neck Pain in Boulder, CO
All right Dr. Duff here, and today we’re going to focus on what are some of the therapies we can use to relieve things like headaches and neck pains here in our office.
Assessing the Root Cause of Your Neck Pain
So for headaches and neck pains, once we’ve assessed what the root cause is, and we’ve identified there is an issue in the spine that we can address and help with patients can qualify for doing spinal rehabilitation, also known as traction. So a great one for things like forward head posture and loss of curve in the neck like this is starting to work on lifting the head up and getting more curvature in the neck.
Using Traction to Open Disc Spaces
We have Joel here, and I’m going to set him up in one of our attractions, that that involves putting a harness over the head just below the chin here and behind the school to lift up on the head with about the same weight of his school. And once we get it into this position, we will apply some of the weight as a counterbalance to open up some of the joints and create a space where we can start to get our head back and open up those disc spaces and curves. The second component of it is actually a forward pull into the cervical spine. Also using weight at about a two to one ratio, more weight pulling forward a little bit less weight pulling backwards. And as we get into this traction, this counterbalance starts to feel like an anti gravity as we’re lifting up the head. To reduce that pressure, we’re pulling forward at the same time to accentuate the curvature, which can help reduce the irritation along the nerves and in the joints. So that it can help with things like neck pain, and headaches and all the various symptoms that are associated with that. It’ll help with some of the muscles and soft tissues as well and release that tension. A lot of patients will notice that they feel a little bit lighter, they feel better balanced, where they feel like there’s just less stress in their body and their shoulders. After performing the cervical traction. We start off with just a few minutes. Okay, so we start off with about two to three or four minutes and we build our time’s up. And the goal is to get to about 10 minutes and sometimes more so that we can change permanently changed the structure of the spine by moving the muscles and tendons and ligaments and bones into a more ideal optimal posture.
