Chiropractic Maintenance Care
What is Maintenance Care?
Chiropractic maintenance care is a long-term strategy for musculoskeletal pain management. It involves receiving care after acute episodes of pain with the intention of preventing future episodes, reducing the amount of time when/if future episodes occur and managing chronic pain.
What Does This Type of Care Look Like?
Maintenance care at Moyer Total Wellness generally looks like patients returning every 4-6 weeks to receive follow up soft tissue treatments, chiropractic adjustments and helpful reminders or progressions of home exercises. Some patients also enjoy the benefit of our massage services offered at the clinic and choose to receive a massage on the same day as their chiropractic maintenance visit. This is highly recommended as we often see patients that utilize more than one service respond faster to care.
Why is Maintenance Important?
Maintenance care is important because it helps reduce the total amount of days our patients deal with musculoskeletal pain symptoms. Every patient is treated on an individual basis because each patient has their own individual needs. Patients often differ with their specific diagnoses, daily life and physical stresses, diet, genetics, exercise habits and physical needs. These differences amongst our patients lead to different frequencies of follow up visits and the providers here are committed to finding the maintenance interval that best helps you.
What Does the Research Have to Say About It?
This area of chiropractic has been researched more rigorously in the last few years and a recent article published in the Chiropractic & Manual Therapies journal found benefits for patients receiving maintenance care for low back pain. When comparing the maintenance care group to the control group, the authors found participants in the maintenance group had ‘fewer days of bothersome (activity-limiting) low back pain than patients receiving the control intervention, who demonstrated more acute episodes.’ In this study the maintenance care group received chiropractic treatment every 1-3 months regardless of symptoms and the control group was told to seek care only when they were experiencing pain symptoms. The authors stated ‘maintenance care stabilizes the clinical course and increases the number of pain-free weeks between episodes.’ Ultimately, the providers at Moyer Total Wellness want you to feel your best and will recommend treatment plans accordingly. The intention of this article was to help explain the evidenced based benefits of chiropractic maintenance care.
Dange Wolf, DC
Author, Doctor of Chiropractic
Dr. Dange Wolf, DC was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and completed his undergraduate studies in Exercise Science at Western Oregon University where he was an All-American Midfielder on the lacrosse team. After completing his undergraduate studies, he went on to attend the Chiropractic program at the University of Western States in Northeast Portland, where he graduated summa cum laude. In early March of 2021 he moved to Lakewood, Colorado and has been treating a wide variety of musculoskeletal complaints ever since.
Resources
Eklund, A., Hagberg, J., Jensen, I., Leboeuf-Yde, C., Kongsted, A., Lovgren, P., Jonsson, M., Petersen-Klingberg, J., Calvert, C., & Axen, I. (2020). The Nordic maintenance care program: maintenance care reduces the number of days with pain in acute episodes and increases the length of pain free periods for dysfunctional patients with recurrent and persistent low back pain – a secondary analysis of a pragmatic randomized controlled trial. Chiropractic & Manual Therapies 28(19). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12998-020-00309-6
Photo Credit
Moyer Total Wellness