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Over the past 20 years, our office has seen over a hundred severe, chronic, post-concussion syndrome cases. They usually follow a similar pattern in the quest for health. Initially, they suffer the typical symptoms that occur following a concussion: headaches, sensitivity to light, depression, inability to exercise, sleep disturbances, and emotional ups and downs.
They seek conventional care and are told to go home and rest and in a few weeks to a couple of months they will have time to heal. Many who suffer a concussion do recover and they do return back to normal activity. However, there is a group of people who suffer concussions and despite all their efforts they never return back to their healthy selves.
They live with chronic sometimes debilitating symptoms that they cannot shake. This leads to chronic depression, despair, and unfortunately sometimes suicide. In this article we would like to discuss these outlier cases that do not recover with conventional treatment and if you are one of these people we will talk about what you can do to get well.
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Injuries that produce concussions are the result of a rapid jarring acceleration-deceleration injury that rattles the brain against the skull producing micro-tears and shearing of the brain tissue. Everyone who has had a concussion or anyone with cursory knowledge knows this is how a concussion occurs.
The missing link to these long-standing post-concussion cases is NECK INJURY. The head weighs 10-12 pounds and sits on a bone at the top of the neck called the atlas that weighs two ounces. When an injury occurs with rapid acceleration and deceleration the brain is injured and simultaneously the head-neck junction is injured.
The ligaments, soft tissue, and muscles that anchor the head to the neck can tear, resulting in spinal misalignment. Spinal misalignment at this most critical junction of the spine then irritates the brainstem and spinal cord and if severe enough affects the central nervous system to the point that the body is no longer able to adapt and function normally.
What ensues is a long dark road of chronic symptoms that no doctor is able to diagnose or treat. No matter how much sleep, how good the diet is, how many massages one gets, the person is still left with chronic headaches, cognitive problems, depression, sleep disturbances, emotional disturbances, and despair.
Fortunately, there are answers. But the answers often lie outside of the mainstream model of health care. Your author found this out the hard way after a head injury in 1991 that left him with 2 and half years of misery and eventually drained his parents of 20k dollars in health care costs only to be told it was all in his head.
The good news is I ended up in a Blair upper cervical chiropractic office and recovered my health. The rest of the story is history and now I find myself in Sarasota Florida setting up a third upper cervical clinic looking forward to serving the patients that have almost lost all hope as I did almost 30 years ago.
Upper Cervical Spine Injury, Post Concussion Syndrome, and Health Restoration
As we discussed in the first part of this article we believe that the upper cervical spine is intimately connected to the reason why some post-concussion cases never fully heal back to their healthy state. The good news is if you are one of these people described above there is hope. Getting to a well-qualified upper cervical chiropractor can be a godsend. It was from me and it is for thousands of people that find them suffering from chronic health problems.
The brainstem housed but the atlas(c1) and axis (c2) is the most vital part of the nervous system and basically controls all function in the body we are not conscious of, There are many different mechanisms that are at play that result in nervous system irritation following trauma. When there is an injury to the upper cervical spine there is an immediate increase in muscle tightness in the neck and lower spine.
When the upper cervical spine is injured there is reduced motion in the joints which causes the postural muscles to become imbalanced and hypertonic. Most commonly there is a loss of the normal cervical spine lordosis (backward c- shaped curve). When there is a loss of the cervical curve tensile stress occurs to the spinal cord causing it to be less efficient and functional.
There is then a cascade of neurophysiological changes that occur as an adaption to the nervous system insult that can express itself as a plethora of different symptoms. In short, in order to correct the underlying reason these physiological changes take place, one must get to someone who can locate, analyze, and correct the underlying spinal misalignment so the body can heal and function normally.
Once the patient has been in a chronically imbalanced state it can take months to recover. With that said you can either take medications and treat symptoms or you can get to the root cause of the problem. We have found that chronic long-standing post-concussion syndrome patients do exceedingly well when they get under and stick to a long-term upper cervical recovery program.
What Exactly Does a Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractor Do?
Blair Upper Cervical doctors are specially trained to locate spinal misalignments in the upper cervical spine and correct them. Spinal misalignments are located by running a battery of neurological tests that locate the spinal segments that have been injured and misaligned by a prior neck injury.
Once located, precision imaging in the form of digital x-ray or cone-beam computed tomography (Cbct) is used to precisely determine which joint has misaligned and the angulation of the misaligned joint. Each person’s anatomy is different and therefore imaging is used to uncover the blueprint to be used to correct each patient’s individual misalignment pattern.
Once this information is gleaned, a gentle, light correction is made without twisting, popping, or pulling. The patient is then monitored overtime to ensure that the correction is holding. If the testing indicates the need for another correction, then it is performed.
However, the goal of Blair Upper Cervical Care is for the patient to stay in “adjustment”. It isn’t the correction that produces healing. It is the removal of nerve irritation and the adjustment “holding” in its normal position that allows the body to function better and proceed through a healing process.
This is how Blair Chiropractic care can often help remove the underlying cause of many who suffer from migraine, tinnitus, vertigo, Meniere’s disease, neck pain, migraine headaches, and other chronic health problems by supporting the body in healing itself.
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