Study from The Spine Journal shows chiropractic treatment gives better movement over exercise
Chronic low back pain is a complicated subject. Chiropractic has already been shown in studies to help with the pain. This study is showing that chiropractic helps with the movement pattern. More and more research is showing that the difficulty with chronic low back pain is that the muscular firing pattern is not normal.
I am a big proponent of both chiropractic adjustments and exercise. The chiropractic adjustments seem to help with the muscular firing pattern. Doing exercises directly after that can help strengthen the muscles that were not firing and help start to solidify the normal firing pattern.
Lumbar motion changes in chronic low back pain patients. Mieritz RM, Hartvigsen J, Boyle E, Jakobsen MD, Aagaard P, Bronfort G.Spine J. 2014 Mar 6. pii: S1529-9430(14)00239-3. doi: 10.1016/j.spinee.2014.02.038
“For the cohort as a whole, lumbar region motion parameters were altered over the 12-week period, except for the jerk index parameter. The group receiving spinal manipulation changed significantly in all, and the exercise groups in half, the motion parameters included in the analysis. The spinal manipulation group changed to a smoother motion pattern (reduced jerk index) while the exercise groups did not.” from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24607844