Degeneration of the Spine is something you need to think about

All right let's talk about degeneration of the vertebra.

There's a disc, a vertebra and a disc. So what we want is, we want people to be there. You'll notice the discs are very thick, those are your puffers, they are absorbing a lot of forces that happen through your body and through your spine. The bones are very clean, we would say there's no growths. Everything is working as it should do. We want to stay here for as many years, as we can. We want as many parts of our spine to be in this position for as long as possible.

Now what's going to happen over time if you have an unequal stress on your body you're going to start to go into this process or there'll be parts of your spine that go into this process. So what you might notice if you have a x-ray or if you have MRT some parts will look more like these two: you'll notice the discs are very thin so they can't do that that puffer mechanism that they're meant to be doing. So a lot of the pressure's going onto the bones here and you'll notice the bones have had outgrowing. The reason for that is it's trying to actually fuse those two bones together to create stability. You can see on the other side here there's a lot of fusion happening. There's not a lot of movement happening at that joint.

The issue is, it's a negative cycle. So if you now have less movement that means that there's more pressure, which means it goes more quickly down. The issue is that a lot of people are going to tell you, that this is a normal process. It's not in the sense of okay when you're 30 you're here, then you're 50 you're there, then you're 80 you're here, that's not the case. I've seen 20 year olds who have outgrowing and the discs are very thin at certain parts of their body, but I've seen 90 years olds, who have healthy and thick discs. You know and I think that a lot of these people, who do get really old like 90 or 100 they're often up quite straight. Their spines are working pretty good. You know it's doing the job it's meant to, so as a chiropractor we want to make sure you stay over in these two for as long as possible. That's going to let your body move and let you do all those things that you want to do. So if you do have an x-ray or MRT talk to your chiropractor.

You know we can explain to you where you're at and what you can do to keep yourself in the good areas, for as long as possible. So we'll see you next time. Cheers :)