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Chiropractic part of good health

“Many people are afraid of chiropractors, because they don’t know what it is or they think we’ll be rough. I’ve even had one patient tell me ‘I thought I’d try this before I jumped off the bridge.’”

Little wonder that Deanna Rogge, D.C., owner of Broadway Chiropractic Clinic, 103 North Ave., No. 4, and her colleagues have been working throughout October, which is National Chiropractic Month, to put misconceptions to rest and raise public understanding of chiropractic.

“Chiropractic can help a lot more than people realize,” Rogge said. “If a person has never been to a chiropractor before, there’s a lot of confusion, a lot of misconceptions. But the primary reason people do go to a chiropractor is pain; and many times, it’s after they’ve already been to a doctor.”

Chiropractors are used to relieving pain, Rogge said.

“We do great with pain,” she said. “A chiropractor adjusts not just the spine, but also adjusts the extremities.”

Denise Woods, D.C., owner of Total Care Chiropractic at 40 Arena Way, No. 1, agreed. Said Woods, “80 percent of the population will experience back pain at some point.”

The lower back is second only to the respiratory system in causing loss of productivity, she said.

“Everybody comes to me because they’re in pain,” she said. “I work with quite a bit of athletes’ extremity pain – ankle, knee, elbow. I put together a plan for them, and I really focus quite a bit on core stability.”

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After relieving the pain, Woods works to strengthen weak areas, she said. Only 10 percent of her business is disk-related, she said.

But chiropractic isn’t just about pain, said Lynne Mouw, D.C., co-owner of Mouw Chiropractic & Spinal Rehabilitation Center, 20 Power Drive, No. 1.

“It’s about using it as part of your health care to attain your health – not just to remove something undesirable, which is pain,” she said. “Chiropractic is basically based on some presumptions:

n The body is self-healing

nThe nervous system is basically the master control of the body

nIf there’s any interference to that system, then the body cannot function optimally.”

Mouw compared nerve impulses to the message passed around in the telephone game.

“With interference to that message, the target organ/nerve/cell won’t perform the function adequately, when some measure of that is interrupted,” she said. “As a chiropractor, my job is to identify and correct any interference to that, specializing in focusing on misalignment of the vertebrae. A lot of symptoms can be coming from misalignment of the spine.”

Avoiding germs is only part of maintaining good health, Mouw said.

“We’re so concerned about fighting germs outside our bodies, and we’re not so concerned about strengthening our body’s internal army, which is our immune system – our immune response,” she said. “You cannot eradicate germs. They’ll always be here. But if you strengthen your immune system, you can fight it off. We all want crisis care to be there, but we don’t want to use it if we can take steps to avoid it.”

Chiropractors can do a lot of the things medical doctors can, Rogge said.

“We can order MRIs for patients, so we are pretty good about knowing what they can do and what they can’t do,” she said. “We can order all the tests medical doctors can order. We have comparable training to a medical doctor, except we don’t do the drugs and the surgery, because we emphasize the drug-free healing. We’re very good in diagnosis. We’re not going to get results unless we find the cause of the problem. Different chiropractors may have a different technique to adjust, but it’s all to get the bone in line.”

Mouw starts by evaluating range of motion, muscle tone, temperature differentials in the spine, pain or tenderness and heart rate variability to come up with a health and wellness score, she said. Adjustments are made with care.

“We are very gentle,” she said. “We have low-force techniques.”

The practice offers adjustment-specific exercise instructions, modalities and advice on stress reduction, nutrition, exercise and emotional and mental well-being.

Woods specializes in sports injuries and the Graston technique, she said. The technique offers instrument-assisted mayofacial relief, or relief to the fascia that covers the muscle.

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