What a Healthy Spine Should Look Like
I want to take you briefly through what I want all my patients to understand, and that is: What is a normal, healthy spine? What is it going to look like? How do we decide if it’s normal?
The first thing I’m going to look for is posture. When I look at a spine, I want to see that we have a posture with ears over shoulders over hips. We want to see these beautiful curves in the spine. We don’t want too much curve or too little. There is a Goldilocks zone. It’s got to be just right for that patient.
Along with the perfect curvature pattern, we want to see that there are no extra parts, no missing pieces, and that everything is doing the job as well as it could—even as good as the day it was off the assembly line.
From the front, we want that spine to be perfectly straight. We want the head and jaw to be level, and the shoulders, hips, and pelvis to be level and symmetrical. If I turn the film around left or right, we shouldn’t be able to tell the difference from one side or the other. That’s our goal.
The Phases of Degenerative Change
To be quite honest, I never see a normal X-ray in my office because people come in here with problems. I’m expecting to find either Phase 1, Phase 2, or Phase 3 degenerative change.
Phase 1 Degenerative Change
We label Phase 1 subluxation degenerative change with a simple definition: The spine is obviously not working well or as designed, but I see no permanent change to the tissue. It is 100% correctable.
Phase 2 Degenerative Change
Phase 2, or Stage 2, degenerative change is actually when we’re growing mild arthritis. At this point, we are seeing some permanent change to the bones. It’s not 100% recoverable, but we can still get fantastic results.
The only definition of change is that it’s obviously not working as designed, and I can see permanent change.
Phase 3 Degenerative Change and Beyond
What we’re trying to avoid at all costs is going to Phase 3 or beyond, which means we’ve had so much arthritic change that now we’re starting to fuse the spine.
Once we start to fuse the spine, I often equate this to pouring concrete in there and just filling in all the cracks and holes. That’s going to encroach permanently on nerves and blood vessels, and we cannot fix that.
At best, we can help symptoms and make people feel better, but we can’t fix that.
Why We Look at X-Rays
Our goal in our office is to catch things early at Phase 1 or Phase 2 and avoid Phase 3 or beyond. That’s why we look at X-rays, and this is what we’re looking for as far as the path of degeneration or health in patients.
