“Hey Dad, are you ready?”

Your daughter’s voice echoes down the hall, but you don’t want to move from the chair.

“Just a moment.”

In five minutes, you’ll have struggled to walk the few feet from your chair to the car where your daughter waits for you to take her to the fall festival. She’ll wander around, looking at jewelry and mugs while you search for the next place to sit.

Back pain has become the extra guest on any outing, and it’s exhausting. You wish you could walk with your daughter at the festival, take your wife contra dancing, zip down the hallway at work when the boss calls a surprise meeting.

But pain has taken that away. Pain is the army surrounding your body, keeping you from the things you love.

If you are having pain when standing which goes away when you sit, you could have spinal stenosis.

Spinal Stenosis

Spinal stenosis is a chronic condition which must be contained and controlled. Basically, the hollow where your spinal cord travels narrows to compress the cord. Most often, it happens because of a degenerative process in your body such as arthritis.

While stenosis most often occurs in your neck or lower back, the symptoms will usually show up as numbness or tingling in extremities such as the legs or shoulders and arms. With lower back, or lumbar, stenosis, you’ll have pain when walking, but find relief when you sit down. With neck, or cervical, stenosis, you’ll experience pain in your neck.

Long Axis Traction Can Help

If you want to avoid surgery (and with price tags starting at $90,000, who doesn’t?), chiropractors can help with long axis traction. Long axis traction allows the chiropractor to decompress your spinal cord, helping you to find relief from the pain.

Chiropractors are generals in the war on stenosis. Using long axis traction, they can help your spinal cord find relief and battle the bulges caused by this narrowing.

Unfortunately, it’s best to think of stenosis as an ongoing siege, a chronic condition which must be contained and controlled rather than something which can be cured. But with a chiropractor on your side, you have a better chance of containing the pain and avoiding surgery.

I treat people from all across the region, and I am located in Weaverville, NC. Many of my clients live in Mars Hill, Marshall and Asheville.

Give me a call or text today at  828-777-6115  and let’s break the siege of pain together!

The post Unrelenting pain from Spinal Stenosis appeared first on Weaverville chiropractor.

Everyone has pain.
Some of us have occasional pain, some have mild pain, some have pain that can be relieved simply by sitting down and putting your feet up.
Most often, clients come to me with severe chronic pain – the pain that makes you take notice. The pain that invades your life and changes your habits. The pain that doesn’t go away.
If this pain occurs in your back or neck (and it could be traveling down your leg or arm as well), then you may have an issue with your spinal canal being compressed. This condition can be caused by bulging spinal discs, spinal stenosis, foraminal stenosis, arthritis, spinal injuries – the list goes on.
Basically, something went out of whack in your neck or back. Maybe your spine bends or curves. Perhaps you hurt yourself. Or, a genetic disposition to arthritis or stenosis could be showing up. Whatever the case, when that event occurs, your spinal column (that little space in your backbones which holds your spinal cord as it travels down your back) shrinks.

How Can I Fix This Pain?
One of the most effective ways to treat this sort of pain is with long axis traction. This treatment decompresses the spinal cord, making it easier for any bulges in the discs to be pulled back into balance.
Long axis traction helps you avoid surgery, the traditional treatment for these issues. And the faster you catch these bulges, the better! The longer you allow bulges to occur, the worse they will get – and the longer you’ll need to continue treatment.

What is Long Axis Traction?
Chiropractors use long axis traction to decompress their clients’ spines. This treatment stretches the spine, allowing the bulging parts of any spinal discs to return to their normal position. When this occurs, the pressure on the nerves is relieved.
To treat you, a specially designed table uses a cable and pulley system to pull your body and create the traction. This pull, the traction, causes negative pressure on the discs, allowing the fluid to move back into place.
Because of the gentle nature of this treatment and the way that it allows the body to find its balance again, this treatment provides real long-term healing.

Who Can Help Me?
Consulting a chiropractor about long axis traction is the first step. Once a professional checks you out, you work with them to form a healing plan to find a way out of pain. Sometimes you don’t even need this sort of drastic approach, and as I said earlier, the sooner we start, the more likely we will be able to avoid surgery.
I treat people from all across the region, and I am located in Weaverville, NC. Many of my clients live in Mars Hill, Marshall, Alexander, Woodfin, and Asheville.
Give me a call or text today at 828-777-6115 and let’s get you out of pain!

The post Decompression Therapy for Neck or Lower Back Pain appeared first on Weaverville chiropractor.

Do I have Plantar Fasciitis?

It starts with a sharp pain on the bottom of your foot, traveling to the front of the heel. It becomes painful to put your weight on it. Those first few steps upon arising in the morning can be agonizing. The pain originates in the flat band of tissue called the plantar fascia, which joins your heel bone to your toes and supports the arch of your foot.

What Causes Plantar Fasciitis?

There are multiple factors that might cause inflammation of the plantar fascia such as flat feet or overly high arches, poorly fitting shoes, and tight Achilles tendons, just to name a few. The pain is caused when misalignment of the bones in the heel and foot put stress on the muscles, tendons, and ligaments of the foot. This makes the foot more susceptible to damage and inflammation. If these misalignments are not corrected, the body responds by depositing calcium at the bottoms of your feet, resulting in heel spurs. When the ligaments become inflammed pain is the result.

Plantar fasciitis is the most common cause of heel pain. Two million Americans a year are given this diagnosis. It is often seen in runners, pregnant women, overweight people, and wearers of shoes with inadequate arch support. It typically affects people between the ages of 40 and 70, but often affects younger people, too.

Conventional treatments include NSAIDs, icing, stretching, strapping and taping, and in some cases patients are given steroidal injections. But steroids carry risks, including an initial flare-up in which the pain may actually worsen for several days before relief, if any becomes evident.

For many of our patients, drugs are just not an option. That’s why they seek chiropractic help for their foot pain. Let’s just say they’ve come to the right place.

How Chiropractic Treatment Helps Plantar Fasciitis

Some conditions clear up by themselves. Plantar fasciitis is not one of them. Don’t waste time! Delay in treatment usually results in prolonging your misery.

Chiropractic approaches to plantar fasciitis employ gentle, low-force adjustments to correct misalignment in the affected foot. Although many patients start feeling some relief at their first visit, it’s important to know that recovery from plantar fasciitis takes time. After all, you use your feet all the time!

Chiropractic care can help you deal with a very significant contributing factor to plantar fasciitis: bad posture. Your gait and the amount of impact inflicted upon your feet are both impacted by your posture. Seeking chiropractic treatment to improve your posture can improve the way your feet function as you walk or run. This is why eliminating bodily misalignments can make treatment of plantar fasciitis far more effective.

Chiropractic on its own can be an effective treatment for plantar fasciitis. It’s also a great compliment to other therapies, such as physical therapy and myofascial release to speed healing and provide improved mobility.

It Takes Time

It’s important to be patient. Plantar fasciitis may take several months to heal. After all, you didn’t acquire the condition overnight. It took years to develop. Adding chiropractic to your recovery plan helps you to feel better faster, reducing your pain and shortening your recovery time.

My therapies include myofascial release (Graston technique), ultrasound, targeted stretches of the foot and calf, as well as adjustment of the lower extremities and pelvis. Chiropractic is a whole body approach to wellness, Even though the pain is in the foot, as previously mentioned, the foot is not isolated from the rest of your body.

My approach to plantar fasciitis (as well as other conditions) is the result of decades of practice. I have helped countless patients with sports injuries, sciatica, shoulder pain, wrist pain, and foot pain (with plantar fasciitis being a favorite of mine).

Make an appointment today and start feeling better. Call or send a text at 828-777-6115. Nothing makes me feel better than making you feel better.

The post Why Do I Have Heel and Foot Pain? appeared first on Weaverville chiropractor.

A severe headache might make you feel alone, but nothing could be further from the truth. Nine out of 10 Americans report having headaches. Some are mild and annoying, and some are debilitating. The worst kind can put you in bed in a darkened room, nauseated and wanting to die, if that would make the pain go away. For Asheville headache sufferers, there is a natural solution: Make an appointment with Weaverville Chiropractor, Dr. Chris Thompson, and get to the root of the problem instead of just treating symptoms.

If you look at the drugstore shelves for headache medication, the choices are overwhelming. Pain medications are a double-edged sword. They may alleviate some of the discomfort, but at what price to your body? Over the counter (OTC) pain medications come with side effects; some are serious or potentially fatal.

Large doses of OTC meds have been linked to liver and kidney dysfunction, rashes, allergic reactions, stomach ulcers and more Seek immediate emergency help if you experience rashes, breathing difficulty, or swelling of the face, lips, tongue, or throat after taking OTC medications. Sometimes the headaches are the result of withdrawing from the OTC medication. This is the rebound headache mentioned above.

Even if you do experience pain relief without obvious side effects, medication does not get to the cause of your headaches. When the headaches return, your only recourse is more medication.

That’s where chiropractic care comes in. Chiropractors are experts in finding the cause of your headache (and other) pain. Headaches can be caused by poor posture, spinal misalignment (also known as subluxations), and forward neck posture (too much time staring into your computer). Other headache triggers are blood sugar changes, excessive exercise, loud noise, bright lights – the list goes on.

Headaches can be triggered by food allergies, stress, or even withdrawal from over the counter pain meds. Don’t dismiss them lightly. About 5% of headaches can be warning signals of more serious physical problems. The rest are known as primary headaches. They are not signals of other diseases, but the primary focus of concern.  Whatever their cause, a visit to Weaverville Chiropractor can help.

For tension headaches and headaches originating in the neck, spinal manipulation, one of the primary tools of chiropractic physicians, has been proven to be a very effective treatment option.

Research shows that spinal manipulation – one of the primary treatments provided by doctors of chiropractic – may be an effective treatment option for tension headaches and headaches that originate in the neck. A 2014 report in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics (JMPT) found that interventions commonly used in chiropractic care improved outcomes for the treatment of acute and chronic neck pain, and that chiropractic care, including spinal manipulation, improves migraine and other headache types.

In addition to back and neck adjustments, your visit to Weaverville Chiropractor may include:

• Ice
• Electrical stimulation
• Myofascial release technique
• Graston technique: Instrument-Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (IASTM) to release adhesions in the connective tissue for skeletal muscles

So don’t just suffer through headaches. Make an appointment today, and take the first steps toward the Well-Adjusted Life.

The post Natural Headache Relief Without Drugs appeared first on Weaverville chiropractor.

As body parts go, our shoulders are amazing. The way our shoulders are designed reveals both weaknesses and strengths. On the weakness side, the shoulder is a very shallow ball and socket joint. This makes it unstable and dependent upon a group of four muscles and their tendons for support. This group of muscles and tendons is called the rotator cuff.

The advantage of such a shallow socket is that it creates a really wide range of movement and flexibility. Our shoulder sockets allow our arms to move in most any direction, providing for an impressive range of motion. Our shoulders participate in nearly everything we do, from sports to everyday activities in the office.

Those office activities, as well as sports, put stress on our shoulders, and over time they begin to show signs of complaint. First comes “Rotator Cuff Syndrome.” If left untreated this can lead to rotator cuff tears and trauma.

How Do I Know If I Have Rotator Cuff Syndrome?

1.    Do you have shoulder pain when you raise your arms above your head?

2.    Does shoulder stiffness or pain prevent you from scratching your own back?

3.    Does your shoulder hurt if you sleep on your side?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might have rotator cuff syndrome.

Rotator Cuff Syndrome is inflammation of the muscles supporting the shoulder joint. This inflammation creates pain and stiffness that may spread to the neck and shoulder blades. Symptoms might range from a deep stabbing pain or a dull ache in the shoulder when reaching back or above the head. Activities that once were easy become painful, like playing tennis or golf, reaching for objects on high shelves, or using a hand-held hair dryer.

What Causes Rotator Cuff Syndrome?

Repetitive lifting is one cause. So is sitting at a desk all day, hunched over a computer. Front upper body muscles shorten and become tight, while rear upper body muscles lengthen and weaken. This causes a forward head posture and a rounding forward of the shoulders, creating stress on sensitive rotator cuff muscles.  If left untreated, this can lead to micro-tears in muscles, followed by pain and inflammation.

Some groups of people are more prone to Rotator Cuff Syndrome. Baseball, golf, and tennis players may develop repetitive motion injuries. Susceptibility increases with age, and diabetics often show symptoms.

Over time, Rotator Cuff Syndrome may result in a full-blown tearing of the tendons that support the shoulder’s four muscle groups. Don’t let that happen to you. Seek treatment as soon as painful shoulder symptoms appear.

Chiropractic and Shoulder Pain

Common medical treatments for Rotator Cuff Syndrome are steroidal injections and surgery. We recommend these only as a last resort.  Surgery is traumatic and may have a difficult recovery time. Steroidal treatments are limited to just a few, due to the destructive nature of steroids on the joints, tendons, and muscles themselves. They also increase the risk of additional injury, since the shoulder will “feel better,” without addressing the cause of the problem.

Regular chiropractic care can alleviate rotator cuff inflammation and reduce or eliminate pain naturally, without surgery or injections.

At our office we treat Rotator Cuff Syndrome with a blend of healing modalities. First, a comprehensive exam can identify sources of pain and inflammation. Then we address the problem through physical therapy, adjustment of the humeral scapula joint (shoulder), and neck and spinal adjustments as needed. Many of our patients report long-lasting, natural relief of their pain and inflammation.

So if you suffer from shoulder pain in Asheville, Weaverville, Mars Hill, or Marshall, call for an appointment today. Our comprehensive evaluation and treatment program can put you quickly on the road to recovery.

The post Doc, My Shoulder Hurts. A Lot! appeared first on Weaverville chiropractor.