What Are The Stages of Spinal Degeneration?

Let’s talk about spinal degeneration.

We’re looking for a slight curve of the spine.

We want that because what we don’t want to go to phase one. In phase one we’ve completely lost that curve. The neck is straight.

It changes the biomechanics movement patterns and the way that these vertebrae hold the weight of your head.

The weight of your head moves forward because your spine moved.

When that happens, it puts more weight over bones.

Abnormal pressure leads to osteoarthritis, osteophytes, or bone spurs.

Over time, your body ends up fusing vertebrae.

As we move to phase two, we can start to see that disk space has decreased and the bones are closer together. That happens because of abnormal pressure; the disks are slowly being killed off,.

That’s degenerative disk disease.

Degenerative disease means that we have a disk that has degenerated due to abnormal pressure.

Points form on the ends of these bones – that’s those osteophytes and osteoarthritis I talked about.

We’ve got to start restoring normal functionality.

You’ve got three ranges of motion. We need to get those back to normal.

Joint motion is one of the most important ones. We have to retrain biomechanics and muscle memory.

We have to strengthen up tissue, but we have to make sure we do the right thing at the right time.

It’s always better to get checked out sooner rather than later.

You can go from down here to where we start getting osteoarthritis in as little as six months. Time is of the essence.