Chiropractic Assessments through X-Rays

Video Transcript

"So again as we are looking at the cervical spine on x-ray here, we have two views. This is a lateral shot and this is what we call an "a to p" or front to back shot, so again we talked about the cervical spine having seven vertebrae. This is number one, two, three, four, five, six and number seven. Typically the neck should have what we call a "lordotic" position or this kind of "c" shape here and it might be; I'm not sure how easy it is to see but typically the "c" shape we are looking for is following this soft tissue line. In the instance here, a little bit flatter than it should be so what this does, this doesn't provide the strength and support for the nervous system so that's one thing we look for. Additionally we're also looking at these disc spaces, if this is the vertebrae; you're seeing the space in between. We're looking to see if there's equal disc spaces because the discs provide basically like a shock absorber or cushion that allow the nerves space to transmit. When they're reduced, that pinches the nerves or encroaches upon them. We're also looking at the back of the vertebrates, make sure they're in alignment, not one shooting forward or back relative to one another. If that is the case then we're dealing with some kind of ligament instability and if you can imagine if you have vertebrae slipping into one another that's going to cause all kinds of problems for the nervous system as well. From front to back, again we should see things nice and straight. When we see things that are curved or rotated, those are direct indications obviously as we talked about before infringement on the nervous system. In this instance here, things are looking pretty good. One more thing I wanted to note here on the lateral version, is we're also going to look for signs of degeneration that are happening and typically on a vertebrae we should see these nice rounded edges. Sometimes we do see these, the early stages here, these little points that are coming out, these are bone spurs and this is just showing that they is undue stress that has been put upon the neck already at this point here and undue stress here is going to cause undue stress obviously on the nervous system as well. So these are all indicators that again there is pressure on this neck that needs to be addressed."