BULGING or HERNIATED DISC?

Six and a half years ago I was leaving the airport with my new wife. After getting married at a small church in Wichita Falls we had just spent 5 days in Colorado watching the Colorado Rockies play, riding on a hot air balloon, and relaxing in beautiful Vail, Colorado. My wife’s brother, who picked us up from DFWAirport, was driving us to our new home.  We were at the split of US HWY 114 and US HWY 121 in Grapevine when the unthinkable happened. The vehicle next to us suddenly swerved over into our lane and clipped the back end of our small SUV. We flipped multiple times and came to rest upside down on a guardrail. My seatbelt did its job and held me in my seat, but my head shattered the passenger window and hit the guardrail causing a horrible head injury.  My wife was in the backseat and was not wearing her seatbelt.  She was thrown from the vehicle on to the highway shoulder.

 Amazingly, my wife’s brother, who is a critical care and emergency department RN, was not injured.  He along with the first two good Samaritans on the scene, who happened to be an emergency department physician, and another nurse rendered first-aide along the roadside. My wife and I were flown to JohnPeterSmith Hospital where we were treated in the trauma unit.  When my wife arrived at the hospital she was in grave danger.  Vital signs could not be detected at all and I could hear the doctors and nurses in the next room battling to keep her alive. Blood trickled down my head into my eyes and blurred my vision of this fairytale life I had lived the past week following my wedding and incredible honeymoon and I feared it would all come to an abrupt end.

After several hours my wife was finally stabilized. She had endured numerous broken bones as well as substantial internal injuries. She would spend the next two weeks in a drug induced coma, but I was thanking God that she was alive. Weeks earlier I had declared that I would love her “for better or for worse” and I was really hoping to be passed the “for worse” part and looked so forward to the time when “for better” would begin.

At the time of the accident, I was in my third of nine trimesters at Parker Chiropractic College. I had spent almost an entire year learning about the benefits of chiropractic care, but never could have imagined that it would play such a critical role in helping my wife and I regain our health.

I had minimal range of motion in my neck and the headache that set in following the impact of the crash was not subsiding. After several weeks of chiropractic care, the range of motion in my neck was back to normal and the headaches were bearable. My wife was not able to start chiropractic care until many months later, but her healing process was also accelerated as a result of the chiropractic treatment she received.

I have been a Doctor of Chiropractic for almost five years and have been fortunate enough to work with and treat numerous professional, Olympic, college, and area high school athletes. With the combined use of chiropractic and soft tissue treatment I have been able to help 80-90% of the patients who come to me with headaches, neck pain, low back pain, sport’s injuries, as well as other problems.

Over the past several years, I have really been unsatisfied with being able to help only 80-90% of my patients. What about the other 10-20%? What about those people, who suffer from low back and neck pain due to bulging, herniated or degenerative discs? Those people have been told for years that lengthy physical therapy, a lifetime of pain medication, or surgery may be their only choices for treatment. What kind of choices are those? A report in The New England Journal of Medicine states that 51% of all back surgeries are unnecessary. Over the past year a colleague of mine introduced me to a relatively new treatment for these types of problems. This medical breakthrough procedure is called Non-Surgical Spinal Decompression. Through the use of this procedure, I am able to successfully treat bulging, herniated, and degenerative discs as well as sciatica, foraminal stenosis and spondylolisthesis. The quote heard most often in my office is something to the effect of, “I am so happy to have my life back.” I have been blessed to be able to help those in pain, and offer them hope. Our clinic is a quality of life clinic and I truly believe that everyone that walks in the front door can have a positive improvement as a result of our treatment.

I look forward to serving this community for years to come. Here’s to a healthy and blessed 2008!

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