Hey guys, Dr. Jon here from Beyond Bones. And I want to show you some reasons why we take x-rays on every patient that we see. The reason is really simple.
We take X rays because we know what a normal spine should look like we know what the normal structure of the spine should be. And anytime we vary away from that, we introduce the possibilities of having problems, symptoms, discomforts, whatever it may be. It could be headaches, low back pain, neck pain, hip pain, sciatica doesn’t matter. So we take x rays on every single person so that we can see exactly what is going on. And I want to show you some examples that we’ve seen recently. So you can see how different the structure of the spine can be.
So what we see here, this is a lateral view of somebody’s neck. This is a side view of somebody’s neck, this is the head up top, we have the neck below, we want to see a nice curvature backwards, see shaping arc right here, just like this person has, this person actually has a pretty nice spine. In between each one of those little rectangles there are little blocks, we should see an empty space, that’s where the disc resides in the spine, very important, there should be a nice little gap there for that disc to sit. Now, anytime we vary away from this, we can have issues.
I want you to check out this image here. This is a 25 year old woman who works at a desk typically who battles headaches, you know, maybe every week, every day almost, you can see clearly that her curvature is no longer there, it’s very straight starting even to reverse in the wrong direction. This is a huge problem. If she doesn’t do anything about it then it’s just going to get worse. Now what we see is that this spine, again, is very straight doesn’t have the right curvature and the discs, those little gaps in between the bones are starting to degenerate. They’re thinner, there’s a lot of compression in there. This is the breakdown of the joints. We want to avoid this at all costs, because there’s big consequences to that. Again, this is another example of that this here is a 50 to 60 year old gentleman who is really hunched over and has lost a lot of his function in his life. Joints are very degenerated.
So to put it simply, this is why we take x-rays on every patient, everybody that we see so that we can discover where the problem areas are and what we need to do to get them feeling and functioning at their best