So can I get asked pretty frequently is have had a spinal fusion, some kind of neck surgery. Can I still get adjusted and the answer most of the time it’s yes. It depends a little bit on where that fusion is. If it’s been at the very top of the neck, that complicates things, but doesn’t mean that chiropractic upper cervical isn’t for you.
But the type of adjusting is very, very important. If we have put some hardware in there where we’re locking bones, then we certainly don’t want to be turning and twisting of the neck. It’s not really something I’m into any way. Not, it certainly don’t adjust that way to start with, but in a case where we’ve had a surgery, we put a plate on those bones, generally what they do, we’ve got a couple of bones, we’ve had a disc issue.
Maybe there was some kind of trauma or a car accident that made that a really, really unstable area. They come in, they essentially put a plate on the front of a couple of two bones, sometimes four, put some screws in to lock it in there and that holds it together. Makes it more stable. A lot of times, those people, um, even after the surgery, they still got some numbness and tingling in the arms, maybe some pain at the base of the neck range of motion issues.
And while that range of motion sometimes is limited, of course, by some segments being locked together, what’s really important in that case is that the rest of the neck is as mobile as it can possibly be. Because once you lock one area down, you put strain and pressure on the areas above and below, and you’ll see that those will start to degenerate much more quickly if they don’t have the normal mechanics that they do.
So let’s take a look at an x-ray here just for a minute, and I’ll kind of explain why it is that you can still adjust upper cervical, even if you’ve had that night surgery. So what we’re looking at here, we’re looking at somebody from the side. There’s the front. There’s the back. Here’s the head right here.
Right here is the top bone in the next second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. If seven vertebrae in the cervical spine now, not always, but very commonly it’s in this fourth and fifth, the fifth and sixth or sixth and seventh here. We’ve got the fifth and six bone. We’ve got our plate here in our screws and they’re running into lock that together, but we certainly still have a fair amount of neck above and below.
So it becomes really, really important up here that we have the heads sitting where it is and everything moving the way it should, because we know this segment won’t move. And what I’ve seen so many times is when the mechanics are off, especially right above and right below here. And they degenerate, we get disc problems much more quicker and a lot more arthritis because we have such an unmovable thing.
But when this is down here, we’re still very, very free to adjust upper cervical. When we say upper cervical, we’re talking C1 and C2 right here, they’re far away from this. There’s no twisting and turning. We get the head level and we get the mechanics here that are so important and rotating your head, looking up and down, looking side to side.
If that area is free and can move, it takes a lot of this pressure off here, and we can still resolve a lot of those things. Some of that numbness and tingling down the arms, the pain at the base of the neck, because the head isn’t where it’s supposed to be. And we can improve the range of motion trended tremendously.
So yeah, the fact can I get adjusted after a surgery? Absolutely. We just need to make sure that we’re in the right place. We’re doing it safely gently, and we can still get great results.
