your first visit

If this is your first visit to our office, let us commend you for your excellent choice of a health care system that strives to correct the CAUSE of dis-ease, by maintaining balance and harmony within the Neuro-Musculo-Skeletal System, (the internal milieu), through spinal manipulation with the use of the Hands. Chiropractic also provides an excellent means for preventive health measures. Just as everyone should have a Chiropractic Doctor for their neuro-musculo-skeletal day to day problems, they should also have a Medical Doctor for their more serious life threatening problems. Annual visits to your MD are paramount and wise and are often 1-2 times/year and maybe more depending on problem type and severity. However, more frequent visits should be made to your Chiropractor, since muscle, joint, bone, and nerve injuries are much more common. Therefore, knowing when to choose a Chiropractor or MD requires an educated, responsible decision that is up to each individual and not your Medical Doctor, though he may better inform you.

On the first visit, your doctor of chiropractic will question your health background, investigate the nature of your condition, and determine whether previous illnesses, injuries, or accidents may have led to your current problems. A good case history provides specific information that your doctor will want to discuss with you, then combine it with the examination findings to determine the most effective health care program for you.

"Chiropractic is a philosophy, science, and art of things natural, and a system of adjusting the articulations of the spinal column, for the correction of the cause of disease..." Therefore, the chiropractic examination will involve steps that lead to specific analysis of your problems from a chiropractic standpoint. This means of correcting your problem will be exact, and therefore will depend on the precise findings of your doctor's examination, x-rays, and perhaps-other tests.

These tests may include: range of motion checks, your ability to turn or bend section of the spine, areas of muscle involvement, and pain indicators. A number of orthopedic tests which require you, with the aid of the doctor, to perform specific movements with your spine and various other joints will help determine areas of severe nerve deficiencies. Leg balance checks help determine pelvic (hip) subluxations. Palpation, actual feeling of the spinal bones and various articulations or joints, gives the doctor a direct perception of the musculoskeletal structures. X-ray examination is often used for viewing these structures.

Correction of spinal distortions is performed uniquely and individually by each doctor of chiropractic. There are various techniques and approaches utilized by doctors of chiropractic and each one used correctly "adjusted" restores the spinal column to a more favorable position. When a spinal bone is misaligned, causing irritation to or pressure on the nerve, it is termed a "vertebral subluxation", meaning that the spinal bone has moved out of its normal position to an extent less than (sub) a dislocation (luxation). This is considered by doctors of chiropractic, to be the ROOT CAUSE, one of the most often overlooked causes of disease or dis-harmony in the body, within the health care industry. It is the intelligence and communication factor to which every chiropractor looks, for the restoration of life and health following adjustment.

A doctor of chiropractic is specially trained and skilled at locating and correcting the cause of disease. Your chiropractic will want to explain his or her method of care so you will understand the basis for your specific care program, designed to give you maximum benefits.