The Normal Curve and Discs in Your Neck
Let’s talk about the anatomy of the neck for a little bit. This is really important to understand, especially if you’re having symptoms in your neck, like neck pain, headaches, migraines, dizziness, or fatigue.
When we look at the neck from the side—when you look at this model here—this is the base of the skull. This is where the teeth would be up front, and then you have the curve in the spine. A normal neck curve is right around 42 and a half degrees. We can measure this through X-rays.
We also want to see the discs—the shock absorbers that are in between the bones. You can see that those should be nice and open, so they act as shock absorbers. Of course, if it’s bone on bone, that’s not good, right? We want to help prevent that, which there are ways that we can do.
How the Nerves Relate to Your Symptoms
When you see the yellow coming out, that’s coming from the brain. The brain goes down through the spinal cord and then out into these peripheral nerves, which you can see in the yellow right there.
Some of these nerves at the top of the neck go back up into the head, ears, eyes, nose, and throat. If you’re having a misalignment there where it’s putting pressure on those nerves, of course, that’s not going to feel good. Typically, if it’s happening at the top of your neck, this is going to cause things like headaches, migraines, dizziness, fatigue, neck pain, and neck tightness.
If it’s happening lower in the neck, like, let’s say, C5 or C6, this is where it can cause things like neck pain, neck tightness, upper back tightness, shoulder problems, numbness, and tingling going down into the fingertips as well.
Analyzing Every Joint in the Spine
We always want to analyze every single joint in your spine, especially if you’re having some of these symptoms. You have seven vertebrae in your neck, 12 in your mid-back, and five in your low back.
Of course, some people can be a little different, where we have a couple of variations there. But that’s typical for our patients, where they have seven in their neck. We’ll be able to analyze all of those.
Motion Analysis X-Rays
In our office, what makes us a little bit different is that we like to do motion analysis X-rays. It’s called Penning’s Analysis.
Not only do we take an X-ray where you’re looking straight forward so we can see where that curve is—remember, we want it around 42 and a half degrees—but then we have you bend your head forward. The reason why we do that for the X-ray is that we can see how each individual joint is moving on top of the other.
That allows us to pinpoint exactly where you’re having that pressure on the nerve and where your problem is coming from. Of course, from a consultation and an exam, we can get a very good idea. But this allows us to get an objective finding, which is great because, after a series of treatments, we want to remeasure this.
Not only are patients feeling better, but they can see that they’re actually moving better too. Then we correct them beyond just getting them out of pain. We correct the whole reason why they were having it, getting to the root cause for our patients.
Of course, we’ll have them look up too, so we can see how those joints are moving backward as well. It also allows us to see your overall range of motion, which we’re able to analyze before and after a series of treatments. We can see that overall correction for our patients.
Finding a Long-Term Solution for Neck Pain
A lot of our patients are sick and tired of dealing with the pain, and they’re looking for a long-term solution—a long-term correction for that. That comes with finding the root cause of neck pain first.
I hope that helps. If you have any questions, just go ahead and comment below or message our office.
