How To Tell If You Have Bad Posture | Chiropractor for Posture in Boulder, CO
Hey guys, Dr. Duff and Dr. Emery here. Today we’re going to talk about two ways that we evaluate posture here in the office.
How We Evaluate Your Posture
Now the first way that we evaluate posture to see if there are any misalignments or if there are any postural distortions is by looking with our own eyes. And as the doctors were trained to look at specific landmarks on the body to line up on this nice line from the front and from the side. So I’m going to use Dr. Emory as my example today. And she’s going to create some fake postural distortions for me, and I’m gonna explain how I look for those, and really how they can affect our bodies in that putting pressure on things like the muscles, the joints, and also the nerves.
Misalignments and Forward Head Posture
Okay, so Dr. Emery, she’s going to create her her fake misalignment here, with her posture, where now she’s starting to dip over to the side, you can see this change in the shoulders is causing a lateral flexion of her thoracic spine, causing your head to translate off to the side as well. She’s also creating some forward head posture. And so when we look at the head and neck area in that kind of posture, we have this tilt here, this shift here and starting to come forward. What that does to the spinal cord is now because our spinal cord is inside of our vertebral bones. As that moves, it starts to smash the nerves over on that left side, creating more dysfunction and pain in those nerves. And all those nerves they travel to all of our organs and our muscles in our upper digestive area. So a lot of people misalignments like this can have things like stomach issues, they can have liver issues, pancreas, gallbladder, come up with things like trouble digesting fats, they can have gas Enos, bloating, indigestion, acid reflux, even lung conditions, heart conditions, palpitations, differences in blood pressure, lung infections, like bronchitis, or asthma, pneumonia, so on and so forth. And when it comes to the head and neck area, it’s a little bit different. As this starts to shift over her head starts to translate as well, that’s going to put stress on the spinal cord off to the left side, which is like taken, putting a kink into a hose. And when that kink enters the host, that water can’t get through it, there’s a blockage at that point in her neck, where it’s preventing all of that communication and energy from flowing up and down at that point, now, these misalignments in the head are really detrimental to our health, because that’s literally where all that energy and communication and signaling starts in the brain and has to pass through that point to get to the rest of the body.
We Also Use a Computer Digitalized Postural Assessment
So misalignments like that, I’ve often seen things like neck pain, shoulder pain. I’ve also seen headaches, visual disturbances, auditory disturbances, congestion in the sinuses, dental and throat issues, thyroid conditions, as well as a big one. So what we what we seek to improve is once we evaluate it, we want to get it back to this baseline with a number of exercises, stretches, adjustments, and tractions, so on and so forth to get back to that point. And we see that those those conditions, they tend to improve as a result of fixing our posture. So when we evaluate posture, one of the ways that we do it is with our eyes, like we just showed you another way is we use a computer digitalized postural assessment, using our, our tablets to take pictures of our patients in draw lines on them. So over here, I have a great example. And it may be a little bit difficult to see but work with me here, we have a picture of one of our patients that we have the green line representing normal where it’s supposed to be. And the red line is these landmarks that we use to evaluate where that patient is. So in this particular patient, we have the hips starting to jump too far forward, and then we have the head coming forward as well from the side. So with that patient, what I try and educate them on is when we when we use when we have our posture in that type of position, it jams up different areas of our spine. So when our hips start to come too far forward, it creates this discrepancy in our spine, we’re now starting to jam up the portion of the low back and compress those nerves here on the back area. When the head comes for too far like this, the neck area starts to crank, creating interference and all of the nerves in the upper back and neck area.
Forward Head Posture Creates Additional Pressures on Your Spine
An interesting fact is, for every inch of forward head posture that is created, there’s an extra 10 to 15 pounds of pressure across the shoulder area. So it becomes really detrimental, the more that these postural distortions begin to accumulate. So we want to assess the posture first using both the doctor’s eyes as well as our computerized digital assessment. And then we want to talk about ways that we can get that back into its normal position for better function of the body and better health as well.
