Why may a Chiropractor send you for an x-ray?

Video transcript 

Dr. Mymy (Chiropractor) and Dr. Beau (Chiropractor) from Total Health Chiropractic Bell Park answer a couple of questions that are commonly asked in practice – why may a Chiropractor send you for an x-ray? What are they looking for?

Beau: We don’t send everyone for x-rays – it depends whether we think it might be beneficial for you. Sometimes, if your pain is really serious – a lot of people put up with with a lot of pain until it gets really bad, then they go and see somebody about it. Quite often, people who who are coming in to see us are experiencing pain that’s very intense, so it’s important to work out why it’s happening. X-rays show us any evidence of fracture – if there’s been a car accident or something like that – it can show us fractures and dislocations. It can show us if there’s anything in there causing it, say a tumor or bad degeneration or arthritis. If there’s been destructive bone lesions… there’s a lot of stuff you can find on an x-ray.

X-rays are also good because they show us things like bone density. Things that might affect the way we (Chiropractors) work on you. Whether we do a high velocity adjustment on you, which involves pushing on you with our hands – that’s that classic ‘crack’ that Chiropractors are famous for – or maybe something more gentle. So we can use things like an activator, which is  a spring loaded device which is more gentle. We can do mobilisations to get your joints moving more gently. X-rays just give us a lot more information about how to best look after you.

Mymy: So, pretty much we want to minimise risk with the manual adjustment as much as possible and that’s why we send a lot of our patients for x-rays, just to rule out anything serious like you (Beau) mentioned before.

Beau: It all depends on what you’re coming in with. Some people need them, some people don’t.

Mymy: It’s also good for us to see the actual structure of your spine . The alignment of your spine – is it straight, is it curved, are you hips level? Because you might look in the mirror and you might notice that one hip sits higher than the other, but you just want to reconfirm that. Those x-rays will show us the structure of the spine and the hips as well.

Beau:  They will also let us know what exercises to give you, where we need to focus on in your spine, how bad the problem is, maybe how long the problem has been going on for, how we can best solve the problem for you –

Mymy: And how long it’s going to take us to help you, roughly, as well –

Beau: Exactly. If you have arthritis – what type of arthritis? Any genetic disorders like Shulman disease. Any discs that have lost height. Lots of different stuff can show up on an x-ray. It all depends on who is coming through the door.

If you have any questions about x-rays, feel free to contact us or get in touch with your trusted health professional.