What is Maintenance Care
There are three distinct stages of chiropractic care: relief care, corrective care, and maintenance care. Each stage of chiropractic care is important when it comes to overcoming chronic pain and living a healthy, pain-free life.
Relief Care
Relief care provides initial, temporary alleviation of your symptoms or pain. This typically occurs when inflammation is decreased and joint function restored through a spinal adjustment. Ice or heat may also be incorporated during this phase of care.
Relief care can be temporary if the underlying cause 1s not addressed. In many cases, there is trauma to the soft tissue which requires healing and strengthening. Faulty muscle patterns consisting of weak or overly tight muscles also need to be addressed for lasting results. These conditions are often due to poor posture, repetitive use or microtrauma.
Corrective Care
Corrective care takes longer than relief care because it addresses the trauma and faulty muscle patterns described above Some considerations in
the length of this treatment are the condition and integrity of the spinal column, the age and physical condition of the patient, the severity of the injury and the duration of the problem. Corrective care often includes, rehabilitative exercises and soft tissue therapies in addition to spinal adjustments.
Maintenance Care
Maintenance care is the final stage that ensures that the integrity of the spine is being sustained and supported. Because day to day activities put bio-mechanical strain on our bodies, we must continue to monitor the health and condition of your spine through per odic evaluations. Regular chiropractic adjustments will help ensure you are living at your optimum1 level of health and function!
Chiropractic maintenance care is what I recommend to my patients when they are done with their initial corrective care treatment plan. Maintenance care is simply continuing to get checked after your corrective care plan is complete. This allows me to make sure your spine ·s moving properly and it enables me to find any misalignments before they become an issue. This can also be called “preventative care.” For most patients, they do great getting an adjustment once a month while others prefer to co me a little more regularly.
The benefits of maintenance care are that minor misalignments can be detected before they become symptomatic or well-established. Maintenance chiropractic care allows for improved posture, enhanced function, better athletic performance, reduced injuries and an overall enjoyable pain-free lifestyle. This type of preventative or wellness care can also save time and money by keeping minor problems from becoming more serious.
While one of my goals is to get patients out of pain is just as important to keep you out of pain and give you the best possible quality of life!