How to Age Gracefully With Senior Chiropractic Care

As you head into your senior years, you may encounter age-related changes that limit your mobility and produce chronic discomfort. Some of the changes stem directly from the aging process itself, while others accompany many years of physical wear and tear on the body.

Fortunately, you can control these problems without adding painkilling drugs to your list of medications. Chiropractic care and related forms of treatment can provide safe, non-invasive solutions that reduce chronic symptoms and help you preserve your wellness. Here are some things you should know about senior chiropractic care.

Aging creates some obvious changes in the human body, including deterioration of the joints that let you move around and perform basic tasks. In the most common degenerative condition, osteoarthritis, the cartilage between bone ends in the joint wears out, prompting inflammation, pain, and stiffness.

Seniors may also encounter problems stemming from degenerative disc disease. This condition starts as age-related fluid loss within the spinal discs. The dehydration causes the discs to shrink and collapse inward, creating stress and inflammation in surrounding spinal joints.

Age-related bulging discs may protrude until they push against nerve roots or spinal cord tissue. If this happens, the nerves served by that tissue may malfunction. Results typically include syndromes such as sciatica, which can create chronic pain, numb or tingling sensations, or loss of muscle control in a limb.

Weight gain often occurs in seniors as they pursue fewer physical activities or experience metabolic changes that cause them to burn fewer calories. Unfortunately, the extra weight can mean extra trouble for a body already struggling with age-related deterioration, inflammation, or nerve compression.

Some 69 percent of middle-aged and senior U.S. adults take a prescription medication in any given month, with 22.4 percent taking five or more such drugs. Multiple medications can interact with each other in some unwelcome ways, making seniors understandably leery about adding to their prescription list.

Prescription painkillers can ease age-related aches and pains temporarily, but they cannot address the underlying joint or nerve issues that make the pain a constant or recurring problem. This may force you to keep taking the painkillers for brief spells of relief even as the physical problems progress.

Chiropractic care lets you tackle your musculoskeletal or neurological symptoms without drugs. Gentle, careful adjustments to your joints can help minimize bone-on-bone friction and pain by correcting joint component positions. Spinal adjustments can do the same for inflamed vertebral joints.

Chiropractic treatment can also take pressure off of nerve tissue pinched by bulging discs or other imbalances. These treatments aim to shift the protruding structure away from the tissue, improving nerve function and relieving neurological issues such as numbness, tingling, or pain.

If you have always assumed that aging bodies simply cannot stand up to chiropractic adjustment, think again. Evidence indicates that seniors can safely undergo chiropractic care (unless a particular condition rules it out). The American College of Physicians actually lists it as a first-line treatment for lower back pain.

Even if you can't receive spinal adjustments, you can still benefit from a chiropractic senior wellness plan. Chiropractic care includes a number of safe, non-invasive practices and techniques that work together, either with adjustment or without it, to help seniors move and function more normally.

Cold laser therapy serves as an example. A low-level laser beam can penetrate the skin harmlessly and painlessly. This energy boosts blood flow, increases fluid drainage, and eases inflammatory pain. Massage therapy provides similar benefits for managing chronic pain and inflammation.

Your holistic senior wellness plan may include exercise recommendations. Therapeutic exercises can help improve your balance, shed excess weight, increase your range of motion, and lower your risk for falls. Your chiropractic treatments may help you get more out of these exercises. 

This kind of senior care can even help you resist future illnesses. The more efficiently your nervous system operates, the more effectively your immune system can perform.

If you want to age as gracefully as possible, take a more detailed look at senior chiropractic care. Contact Davison Chiropractic today.