Blood Serum Tests May Point to How McHenry Spinal Manipulation Reduces Pain

“Doc, I feel better!”

“Thank you! My back doesn’t hurt like it did.”

OrthoIllinois Chiropractic hears these types of things all day long. We love it! It is the goal of our McHenry chiropractic services. Helping our McHenry back pain and neck pain patients to not hurt is the goal of our McHenry chiropractic practice. Usually we have to hear such reports from patients or do physical tests to see how they are responding, but excitingly research is reporting new ways to document pain relief responses.

There are sheaves of cases reports and medical literature published describing how spinal manipulation relieves pain. OrthoIllinois Chiropractic keeps many of these in our library to share with interested McHenry neck pain and back pain patients who are interested. During years of chiropractic education in school and at the post graduate level, chiropractic physicians are taught how to document patient response to chiropractic spinal manipulation. Insurance companies require such information, too, so OrthoIllinois Chiropractic makes sure to record your input and response to the treatment plan. Documentation includes subjective patient reports like the visual analog scale (“How do you feel on a scale of 1% to 100%?”) and objective tests (range of motion and such) easily performed during the examination. Chiropractors strive to help patients with non-surgical care for pain relief! 

Today, researchers report that blood serum testing can record the immediate effects of spinal manipulation! It's not a standard of the examination process yet, but it may be one day! Why? Substance P is a transmitter of pain sensation. OrthoIllinois Chiropractic understands the role of substance P in back pain. Chiropractic care’s goal is to reduce pain. So these researchers found that spinal manipulation done on asymptomatic people increases substance P levels in the serum thereby increasing the pain pressure threshold; the level of pain tolerance is increased. (1) That’s a good thing!  McHenry chiropractic spinal manipulation may produce a hypoalgesic – a reduced pain perception – effect for patients. It’s amazing just how sophisticated spinal manipulation’s effects are!

So if you have back pain or neck pain, come for a McHenry chiropractic visit at OrthoIllinois Chiropractic. Reduced pain may be in your future! Contact OrthoIllinois Chiropractic today.