Degenerative Disc Disease Treatment Newport Beach
What we work on
- Movement, load and tolerance
- The joints taking extra load
- Fear of movement, which makes it worse
- Managing episodes rather than preventing all of them
Degenerative disc disease is an unfortunate name. It is not really a disease and it is not necessarily progressive — it describes discs losing height and water content, which happens to everybody with time in much the same way hair greys.
How Degenerative Disc Disease Treatment Newport Beach approaches it
By treating the symptoms and the mechanics, not the scan. Where a segment has lost height, the joints behind it take more load and the muscles around it work harder, and both of those are addressable. Degenerative Disc Disease Treatment Newport Beach patients receive here is aimed at movement, load and tolerance rather than at reversing the appearance on an image.
Loading, not resting
The instinct with a degenerative diagnosis is to protect the back. That is usually the wrong call. Discs and the structures around them respond to appropriate load, and prolonged rest reliably makes people stiffer and weaker.
What the scan does and does not tell you
Disc degeneration shows up on the imaging of enormous numbers of people who have no pain whatsoever, and the proportion rises steadily with age. Finding it on your scan does not establish that it is causing your symptoms.
That matters because being handed the phrase can be frightening in itself, and fear of movement makes back pain worse and longer. A good deal of the first visit is often spent taking that weight off.
What to expect
Most people with degenerative changes do well with a course of care and sensible loading. Symptoms tend to come in episodes rather than steadily worsening, and knowing how to manage an episode is more useful than trying to prevent every one.
What to do with the report
If a scan report has left you worried, bring it in and we will go through what it actually says. A great deal of unnecessary anxiety comes from radiological language that sounds alarming and describes something ordinary. Understanding that changes how people move, and how people move changes how they feel — which is not a small effect.