From Chronic Pain to Healing: What Your St Peters Chiropractor Wants You to Know About Recent Discoveries
If you're dealing with chronic low back pain, you know how bothersome it can be when treatments only provide transitory relief. While many questions remain unanswered, current research is making progress in explaining disc deterioration and exploring innovative approaches that may lead to more successful treatments. Old Mill Chiropractic is keeping close tabs on all of this to help our St Peters back pain patients most effectively.
Understanding Your Disc Health: The Hydration Factor
Your intervertebral discs are like spongy spacers located between your spine bones, filled mostly with water-based molecules called proteoglycans. When discs become dehydrated over the years, their shock-absorbing capacity decreases, causing pain and accelerating deterioration. While staying hydrated won't heal disc problems, it may assit your discs' natural function—though we still need more research to clearly establish this relationship. We can talk more at your next St Peters chiropractic visit about ways to hydrate your discs.
Early Promise: Lab-Grown Disc Components
Research by Chopra and colleagues (1) has shown progress in creating "biomimetic proteoglycans"—lab-made versions of your disc's natural building blocks. In laboratory studies, these engineered molecules can copy some properties of healthy disc tissue. However, these studies are just beginning, and it may take time to determine if this treatment will be both safe and effective for people|this research is still in early stages, and it will likely be some time before we know if this approach can safely and effectively help human patients like our St Peters back pain patients.
Why Decompression Techniques May Help
Exploring Natural Pain Pathways
Some of the most preliminary research by Melrose and colleagues (3) is investigating whether compounds from natural sources, like venoms (wow!), could be developed into targeted pain treatments. This work is still in its beginning phases and concentrates on figuring out how pain works rather than coming up with ready-to-use treatments. It may be many years before we see practical applications, if any emerge at all. Fasincating!
What This Means for Your Current Treatment
While these research developments are hopeful, they don't change your immediate treatment options. What they do suggest is:
- Lifestyle factors like hydration and movement patterns may be more important than we previously understood.
- Current treatments your chiropractor uses may have stronger scientific support than before.
- Future treatment options are being researched, though timeline and real-life applicabililty remain uncertain.
- Managing expectations is important—breakthrough treatments take time to develop and prove safe.
The reality is that back pain treatment remains challenging, and while research is advancing our understanding, most of these discoveries take time. Your best approach remains working with your St Peters chiropractor at Old Mill Chiropractic who knows current evidence-based treatments like Cox® Technic while staying informed about emerging research.
CONTACT Old Mill Chiropractic
Listen to this PODCAST with Dr. James Cox, on The Back Doctors Podcast with Dr. Michael Johnson as he illustrates how The Cox® Technic System of Spinal Pain Management talks about disc degeneration and the back pain that accompanies it.
