“Why do Chiropractors use the Chiropractic adjustment?”

Great Question! The use of manipulation is not well understood by most people, including Medical Doctors that aren’t trained in the practice.

We’ll look at some of the technical reasons for the use of spinal and/or extremity manipulation in this post…

The chiropractic profession has to shoulder the majority of blame for many people not understanding what we do and why we do it.

Many studies have demonstrated that chiropractic adjustments/manipulation can help a variety of problems and can result in excellent improvement in symptoms of neck pain, back pain, and headaches.

The question remains…

“Why does a Chiropractor often adjust a joint resulting in a popping noise?”

The reason is that it is often the fastest path to restoring range of motion to the joint.

It does this by going beyond the movement that occurs with stretching and exercise.

These treatments, rehabilitation or home exercises with stretching and exercise/strengthening are important.

It’s the timing of when to do what type of movement that is important.

A slow stretch of a muscle results in a reflex mediated primarily by GTOs (golgi tendon organs) that causes a contraction of the muscle.

You can feel this yourself by slowly stretching your hamstring muscle at the back of your thigh while you feel it with your hand. What you’ll feel is that the muscle will contract as you stretch it.

This can be used therapeutically, but if the goal is to improve motion and relax a muscle then it very well may be contra-indicated at that time.

Some people go to a Massage Therapist for pain or tightness. It can help in some situations.

Generally a massage will result in some of these slow stretch responses – in addition to some activity in the receptors located more superficially in the skin. It will also often improve local blood flow that might help some problems.

Chiropractors often use a fast stretch of a muscle will initiate a reflex primarily through the muscle spindle receptors that will relax the muscle. This relaxation can help restore normal joint mechanics.

Additionally, the muscle spindle receptor is the only receptor in the body that can change. A fast stretch, as seen with a Chiropractic Adjustment, can reset the length of the receptor allowing a chronically tight muscle to relax.

Restoring this motion helps mechanically disperse local chemicals of inflammation that for example might be building up after an injury.

If local soft tissues are torn, scar tissue will start to form.

If the local motion is restricted at this time then the scar tissue will form with that shorter length. This will result in chronic losses of motion after healing and generally lead to more pain… and too often chronic pain that can last a lifetime.

If you consider a disc injury, then restoring motion is even more important because a disc is avascular. It relies solely upon local movement to get the supplies into and the debris out of the area.

As far as pain goes, our bodies are wired in such a way that the large diameter nerve signals that originate in muscles and joints turn off/inhibit the small diameter ‘pain’ (nociceptive) nerve fibers.

Improving movement and firing off these larger fibers with an adjustment has a high probability of turning off pain signals.

Melzach and Walls talked about this in their Gate Theory of Pain.

Restoring motion has other central (brain based) effects.

Our brains are heavily dependent on information from the muscles and joints of our bodies telling us where we are in space.

Changes/losses of this information results in problems with postural and motor control output. Often resulting in changes in muscle tone and ability to correctly coordinate movement.

This increases the potential for injury.

There is more, but this is just to give you some idea of why Chiropractors ‘pop’ the joints.

There is much more to the Chiropractic Adjustment than it would seem at first thought and it’s also something that a person can not accurately do themselves.