What most chiropractors will do is feel your spine and they will tell you that things feel misaligned or feel stuck.
In an upper cervical specific care setting, that’s just not good enough for us. What we understand is that the atlas, or the upper two bones in the neck, only move three and a half millimeters to each side normally and that minimal amount of movement is going to be something that’s very, very difficult to actually be able to heal.
We always want to be 100% certain and specific to what it is that the patient needs as it relates to the adjustment.
So when our patients come in for an initial exam, we always take precise digital x-rays of the motion of the upper two bones in the neck. That’s going to allow us to be very precise with the corrections that we make.
We send all of our x-rays off to radiologists to get a report back before adjusting anybody, to make sure there’s no fractures, dislocations, pathologies, or anything in there that we should be aware of on the upper cervical spine that is going to indicate whether to make a correction or not to make a correction.
That’s why the x-ray is important in the exam setting and upper cervical specific care office – to make sure we’re specific, precise, and safe at all times.