How often should I get adjusted by a chiropractor?
This cannot be specifically answered for every individual and as I have said before, it depends. I will give you a guide and depending on a lot of circumstances I could give you a more specific answer individually.
If the injury is recent or an acute injury, there will be more adjustments and treatments early to get things healing quickly and you moving faster. This phase usually will not last as long since coming in early usually results in getting better earlier. If the injury is chronic or lasted a few months or years, the treatment will take longer. It will start with more frequent adjustments and treatment up front, but then these types of injuries will have a longer treatment plan.
After these injuries have resolved, the next phase would be to transfer into maintenance care. Getting into this phase, the first question to address is “what are your goals?” Is this something that you intend to just get out of pain and then come back when the pain returns or are you wanting to be more proactive about your health? Whatever your goals are will help determine how often I would recommend coming in for treatment. I have patients that come in every 2 weeks as well as patients coming in every 6-8 weeks. This can take a little trial and error to find what works best for each individual. The research does support maintenance care, every 2 weeks, to help reduce flare up pain intensity and flare up frequency. There are a lot of reasons why those flare ups are less significant, but one factor I see is that patients are more aware of their injuries and are more likely to address them sooner and before they are really bad when they are on a routine plan. Compared to waiting a few weeks, months, or even years and then trying to address the concern, which will take much longer and more treatment to make things improve. Other common factors on frequency of treatment would be how healthy you are, how old you are, how often does this usually happen, are you doing anything on your own to take care of it, etc. All these factors come into play on why that maintenance treatment recommendation is such a wide gap.
Try thinking of movement like this. Generalized movement is a good option. We should move and do activities to keep ourselves moving. When we stop moving, things get worse. Specific movements would be more like yoga, Pilates, workouts, and things that focus on specific moves. This is the second level to moving better. With chiropractic treatment, we are working on the deeper layer of segmental movement. Chiropractic is trying to move the joints of the body like the neck, back, shoulders, knees, etc. at each segment. This will then help the specific movements, which will then help the generalized movements. If you move poorly at the segmental level the other levels are not as good and vice versa can occur as well. Keep yourself moving and I am here to help.
Here is an article, not written by a chiropractor, on how often you should get adjusted. The simple answer is it depends.
Tahoe’s Premiere Sports Chiropractor
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