Have Chronic Back Pain in Wichita? Here’s How Functional Medicine Can Help
Functional medicine is nothing new for chiropractors. In fact, functional medicine and chiropractic are complementary approaches to healthcare. Both consider the entire body when diagnosing patients, and chiropractors are taught how to identify and treat underlying issues by using functional medicine techniques to evaluate the whole body, instead of just treating the obvious issue. At ICT Chiropractic in Wichita, we treat back pain using both methods.
Chiropractors are trained in many areas of medicine such as biochemistry, nutrition, and laboratory testing, which prepares them to consider out-of-the-box treatments for issues like chronic pain, which has become extremely common in the United States. According to the American Chiropractic Association, chronic back pain is the single leading cause of disability in the United States.
Keep reading to learn more about functional medicine, and how back pain doctors can heal or prevent back pain.
Chiropractic Can Be a Type of Functional Medicine
Functional medicine is defined by the Institue for Functional Medicine as a “systems biology-based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease.” This means functional medicine practitioners are focused on finding the root issue that is causing the surface-level symptoms rather than just focusing on a patient’s current symptoms.
Traditional healthcare is known for treating individual symptoms and making patients visit more than one type of doctor to figure out what is causing their negative health symptoms. This system focuses too much on medications and specialists. But there’s another path forward.
Functional medicine healthcare providers are trained in more than one medical discipline and can use that knowledge to better care for their patients by evaluating their entire body, and lifestyle choices. Chiropractors and acupuncturists are two types of functional medicine doctors that can help you get rid of back pain – or prevent it from ever happening.
How a Back Pain Doctor Uses Functional Medicine
When you think about going to a chiropractor in Wichita, you probably only think about getting the usual spinal adjustment, but that’s not the only service available at ICT. Our chiropractors use functional medicine techniques every day. They don’t simply ease body pains through individual treatments but consider the patient’s entire body and health history when determining the proper treatment.
At ICT our back doctors in Wichita provide many more services than a traditional spinal adjustment.
Services offered at ICT include:
- Dry Needling: Promotes decreased pain, improved muscle efficiency, and better motion range by deactivating myofascial trigger points.
- Cupping: Dulls pain, breaks up scar tissue, and relaxes muscles and connective tissue by placing the cups on the back in a series of positions to produce suction and create a vacuum effect.
- IASTM: Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization uses instruments to break up myofascial adhesions that occur after an injury or workout to improve range of motion and mobility.
- RockTape: This specialty kinesiology tape only stretches one direction creating a bio-mechanical lifting mechanism lifting the skin away from the soft tissue underneath, allowing more blood to move into an injured area and accelerate recovery.
- Myofascial Release Massage: Restores range of motion and eases pain by targeting fascia through applying subtle pressure to an affected area of the body to allow the fascia to elongate.
- Acupuncture: Reduces pain, balances energy, and boosts wellbeing by inserting needles where nerves, muscles, and connective tissue can be stimulated.
Spinal adjustments are just the beginning of chiropractic services, and when combined with additional services, your pain can be reduced and potentially gone for good when the root issue is addressed with additional services like the ones listed.
What Types of Back Pain is a Functional Medicine Chiropractic Doctor Good For?
Functional medicine is good for most types of body pain, especially back pain, because negative health symptoms rarely exist on their own and can be treated properly (or prevented) if the doctor can determine the root cause of a patient’s back pain.
Back pain isn’t simply back pain, it is either disc herniation (which causes muscle weakness, numbing, and tingling down the leg) or sciatic pain (which causes numbness or tingling and/or sharp, achy pain that can spread from the low back all the way down to the foot or calf). These conditions are treated on an individual basis, but at ICT, we utilize a variety of services including dry needling, IASTM, and myofascial release in addition to chiropractic and acupuncture. As functional medicine practitioners, we provide treatment, but also provide at-home corrective exercises that will improve breathing, posture, and bracing to prevent the pain from returning once it’s resolved.
At ICT we want to ease our patients’ pain with in-house treatments and provide them with additional information to avoid future injury.
Find Back Pain Doctors in Wichita
At ICT we pride ourselves on utilizing functional medicine with every patient. We want to provide detailed care to each patient to rid them of the pain they are experiencing, and do what we can to make sure they don’t experience pain in the future. If you’re experiencing back pain, schedule your first appointment online today.
