Importance of Combining Chiropractic Care With Alternative Therapies

There is a common misconception that if you are receiving care from a chiropractor—whether it is to help with back, neck, shoulder pain, headaches, or another physical ailment—then there is no point in also receiving alternative treatment therapies.

However, this could not be further from the truth, as there are many potential benefits to participating in multiple therapy treatment programs at the same time. The integration of these approaches can help you in more ways than you might have thought possible, especially if you have different practitioners collaborating with one another.

Of course, each type of therapy comes with its own set of benefits, and each professional within these fields also tends to have specialized skills and knowledge that set their services apart.

Understanding Chiropractic Care

If you are uncertain about whether chiropractic care can benefit you, it helps to learn about the specifics of what such care involves. Of course, the chiropractic care that you receive will likely be unique to your specific needs. However, chiropractors, in general, tend to focus on a few key areas.

Chiropractic care can be helpful for a wide range of physical ailments or medical conditions, including, back pain, arthritis, asthma, scoliosis, and blood pressure problems.

Chiropractors tend to treat these various conditions by focusing on manual methods, such as spinal and joint adjustments and soft-tissue manipulation.

By using their hands to apply controlled force to your spine or joints, a chiropractor can guide it through a full range of motion, which helps to restore its natural function and mobility.

Chiropractors can also help diagnose, treat, and prevent mechanical problems in the musculoskeletal system and allow your body’s inherent recuperating and healing powers to shine through without the need for surgery or drugs.

Benefits of Chiropractic Care With Other Alternative Therapies

The types of alternative therapies that you can benefit from in addition to your chiropractic care will depend on the type of ailment, injury, or condition that you have and its severity.

For example, if you are healing from a more challenging or complex injury, the best way to achieve major breakthroughs on your path to recovery may come from combining chiropractic care with physiotherapy. You may require physical therapy as well for the best alternative treatment approach.

Your chiropractor will be able to carefully administer adjustments that will improve the mechanics and movement of your injured body part. Then, your physiotherapist will identify deficiencies in larger or whole-body movement patterns to help you move more with ease and without pain. 

If you suffer from back or neck pain, constant headaches, or have trouble sleeping, another great combination of treatments worth considering is chiropractic care and massage therapy. This combined treatment approach has been known to help with everything from improved posture to reduction in stress and anxiety levels, as well as rapid pain recovery.

Not only will the combination of chiropractic care and massage therapy provide you with a better chance of alleviating the pain that you suffer from, but it can also help prevent such pain from reoccurring in the future.

Examples of Complementary Alternative Therapies

Beyond chiropractic care, physiotherapy, and massage therapy, which are body-based and manipulative practices, there are several other alternative therapies that may benefit you as well in tandem with the main sources of treatment.

Generally, alternative therapies tend to fall into a few basic categories: whole medical systems, mind-body medicine, biologically based therapies, and energy therapies.

• Whole medical systems, which include ayurveda, homeopathy, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, contain a defined medical philosophy on which they structure their approach for diagnosis and therapy.
• Mind-body medicine, which includes biofeedback, guided imagery, hypnotherapy, meditation, and relaxation techniques, is mainly centered on using behavioral, psychological, social, and spiritual methods to preserve the health of patients.
• Biologically based therapies, including botanical medicine, natural products and supplements, chelation therapy, and diet therapy, find different ways to use naturally occurring substances for health purposes.
• Energy therapies, including acupuncture, magnets, Qi Gong, Tai Chi, and Reiki, focus on the energy fields that supposedly exist in and around the body, and manipulate these energies in different ways to promote health and healing.

Safety Factor Considerations

Before you begin engaging in chiropractic care, it is important to fully understand that this kind of treatment approach does come with some known risks. Fortunately, the risks are minor, and do not tend to compromise the overall safety and effectiveness of chiropractic treatment.

Some of the most common side effects associated with chiropractic care include feeling tired, sleepy, thirsty, or achy following an adjustment session. These effects, however, typically decline and disappear after just a few hours.

There are also a few health and safety risks that are connected to complementary therapies. Thus, even though these approaches are often understood to be safer than conventional medical treatments, it is important to understand that this is not necessarily always true.

The main risk is that many of these complementary therapies are not regulated in the same way as more conventional medicine is. Therefore, there may not always be the same level of compliance with safety practices. It is also rather risky to rely on complementary therapies alone, as this can delay proper diagnosis and treatment, leading to potentially serious complications.

In Conclusion

If you have decided that chiropractic care is a good fit and you intend to work with a chiropractor soon, or if you have already begun a chiropractic care treatment program and have been seeing a chiropractor for a while, you may want to consider combining such care with another alternative therapy.

Although chiropractic care can certainly help you in many ways on its own, it also has some defined limitations. However, if you branch out and engage with practitioners in other fields, you can open yourself up to other perspectives and approaches that could help boost your healing and overall wellbeing exponentially.