Advanced Health Chiropractic treats patients with neck pain using unique and specialized treatment methods such as chiropractic biophysics. A thorough consultation and exam is performed and advanced structural and functional digital x-rays are taken to determine the best treatment method to address spinal shifts and soft tissue damage.
At Advanced Health, what is a new patient visit like for someone complaining of neck pain?
Dr. Luke Stringer: At Advanced Health, we pride ourselves on, what we call a day one process. And obviously if you’re a new patient, you’ll reach out, and Amber, our receptionist will set you up with a date anytime to come on in. You’ll come on in, you’ll fill out the standard paperwork, and then we’ll get going with the consultation.
During the consultation, we’re essentially going to be doing a history of what your main concerns are, your neck pain, how often you’ve been experiencing it, how long you’ve been experiencing it before, and we’ll also go over previous treatment methods. What have you done to try and correct it? We can see what has and what has not worked previously. And then we’ll obviously discuss how the pain not only feels, but also how it affects your life. Is the neck pain preventing you from working as hard as you can, are you missing out on that promotion? Is your neck pain not allowing you to go to the gym and workout without any pain? And we’ll put some goals in place centered around what you want to achieve with us.
Then we shift into both orthopedic and a neurological exam. We’re going to take the joint and the structures within the neck through range of motion, and we’re going to see if we can find any dysfunction within the joint or the tissues that indicates essentially what could be causing your neck pain.
Following the exam, we then like to shoot digital x-rays in our office at a hospital grade. Essentially, if you build a house, for example, you’re going to build it with blueprints, so if you treat the spine, you want to know exactly what’s going on within the spine. X-rays in our office are unique. We’ll shoot the additional structural x-ray, so they’re going to allow us to evaluate structural shifts, but we also shoot a functional x-ray. Essentially, it’s a biomechanical assessment of the spine.
So, we can actually move your spine through motion as we take the picture. By doing that, we can actually pinpoint joints within the spine that aren’t moving. Because if a joint’s not moving, you increase the stress and tension onto the joint, the tissue, the nerve, needs to be diagnosed and addressed. Essentially, that’s what happens on the first visit.
The second visit is when you come in and then we’ll go through all of our exam finds and our x-ray finds, and we’ll pinpoint your issue and then we’ll go over what it takes to essentially get you out of pain and get you living without restriction again.
Can you describe some of the specialized treatment methods you use to treat patients with neck pain?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Absolutely. And first and foremost, our office, Advanced Health Chiropractic is a chiropractic office, right? So, getting the spine in alignment and the joint functioning is key. And we do that through chiropractic care.
Now myself, my wife, who own the practice, we went to Palmer Chiropractic College, that’s where the first adjustment was performed in 1912, and it’s where the Palmer family developed the profession. It’s called the Fountainhead of Chiropractic. And the technique department at Palmer is world renowned. So, we pride ourselves on quality treatments, and the different ways you can adjust the spine. From manual to instruments, and we can also design a program around the patient.
We also practice something called chiropractic biophysics, which is the most tried, tested, researched form of chiropractic. And essentially, it involves what we call traction, which allows us to bring the spine back into alignment. And by doing that, it has massive effects on the joint, the tissue, the disc, and it actually offers long-term objective changes, which are more for the long-term.
Also, in the office we do lots of physical therapy. Physical therapy is going to be involved in improving mobility within the joint and obviously stabilize and strengthen the joint. And then we also like to do a lot of soft tissue work. And the soft tissue is going to actually address the muscles that have been essentially damaged through that compensation.
So fortunately for us, when you blend in all those forms of treatments, we’re quite unique, and that’s why we’re extremely busy and servicing thousands of members in the Chicago family with helping them get their lives back by living pain free.
What type of technology, tools or devices do you utilize in your treatments?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yes, so technology is essentially going to be the digital x-ray, right? Specifically, that motion study. It’s quite unique and it’s a real specific way of evaluating the spine. And by doing that, you can literally pinpoint the joint that’s causing the issue, so it offers real effective diagnosis.
And then tools and devices, essentially, we like to use our hands in our office. So, if we’re doing a manual adjustment, it’s obviously essentially done with our hands, and that’s quite high skilled, but we do have tables and instruments that we can adopt for certain specific patients that may do better with a different type of adjustment.
Essentially what separates us is the traction that comes through chiropractic biophysics. We can literally objectively change the shape of your spine for the better, which is really, really unique. We’re only one of two chiropractic biophysics clinics within the city. So, it’s quite unique for us.
At Advanced Health, do your treatment programs include exercise plans, nutritional counseling, or any other holistic treatments, along with chiropractic?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Absolutely. So, we’re all based on holistic health. What created the body heals the body, and we like to address it in essentially that way. So actually, the plans are really comprehensive. Again, we design it around the need of the patient. So specifically, what do they need to get better? All plans certainly include, we just touched on it a little bit, exercise plans, absolutely.
So, if we’re treating neck pain, for example, goal one: How do we improve the range of motion? So, you’re going to be doing some mobility work and some stretching work. Second thing we’re going to be doing is going to improve joint functionality. So, we’re going to be adjusting. And then as we discussed on our previous podcast a couple of podcasts ago, tech neck is a huge issue. People who work in a corporate environment, spend too much time looking at their computer or the phone, it shifts your spine out of alignment, creates poor posture. So, you’re going to be doing essentially, a traction program with us. So yes, you’d be doing lots of different forms of exercise.
Nutrition, we don’t do too much on, however, as chiropractors, we do preach on living a chiropractic lifestyle and eating well. Good nutrition is certainly part of that. And as we practice in the city, you have lots of people who come in with those corporate lifestyle diseases. Fatigue, insomnia, just people who are just fatigued consistently. And diet is imperative to essentially combat that. So, we definitely go through, do 24-hour food recalls, recommending things they should and should not be eating. And essentially when you combine people who move well and people who think well, and then obviously, get the spine and the tissue and the joint out of a stress state, then people always tend to do well with our treatment plans.
How does the treatment protocol you follow at Advanced Health, make you unique from other clinics in your area?
Dr. Luke Stringer: Yeah, I really think we’re unique in not only the way we assess the patient and diagnose the patient, but also how we treat the patient. So, we touched on this a little earlier in the podcast, but essentially, we like to call it the 360 degrees of wellness. We’re addressing spinal shifts, both on an individual level and a global level, we’re treating structural issues within the soft tissue via certain soft tissue probe treatment protocols, which is usually a key piece that’s missed in getting people healthy and well. We also address the compensatory patterns. Fixing those corporate or fixing those compensatory patterns from people who have those repetitive jobs and have to sit for a living or lift for a living. So essentially, we need to strengthen those weakened muscles and essentially switch off all those big dominant muscles.
When you apply all of those three aspects together, repetitively over a period of time, the body always responds really, really well. And that separates us from other clinics I feel.
Learn More
If you are interested in speaking with Dr. Luke Stringer visit www.southloopchiropractor.com or call (312) 987-4878 to schedule an appointment.
Click here to receive more information & to schedule your consultation.
