Cianci Chiropractic recorded this webinar of which is one episode. The webinar is produced and recorded for the ear and they were designed to be either watched live on video or listened to via audio. If you are able to, we strongly recommend listening to/watching this episode which will include emotion and emphasis that isn’t obvious when reading a transcript. Our transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and humans. They may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. This is not meant to be chiropractic advice.
Welcome to natural ways to avoid back surgery. In this 30-minute webinar, Dr. CNC will explain several natural ways to avoid spine surgery. Whether you’re dealing with neck and back problems, sciatica or constant lower back pain, you’ll come away from this webinar with the information to help you choose a treatment path that can work for you. There will be time at the end of the webinar to ask questions, and the webinar will be recorded and available on the website within a few days of filming, for you to rewatch at any time. With that, let’s get started. Dr. Cianci, over to you.
What I thought we’d do, we have a lot of things to cover in a short time. What I want to do is list some things that we hear from patients with regard to neck and back problems, I will tell you that we’re going to focus more on the lower spine, the lumbar spine today, it’s more common, but the the overall descriptions kind of apply for both neck and back.
So some of the things we often hear are a patient or potential patient may have heard in their in their history or some other care they have somebody may have told them they have a disc problem. They may have been told they have spinal arthritis, maybe a bulging disc, a herniated disc, maybe they have some degenerating discs in their spine. Again, it may say someone may have said no, I think you have sciatica.
Sometimes you hear words like stenosis, pinched nerves, spinal degeneration, these are all things that people hear. And if we’ve touched on any of those that you’ve ever heard of either yourself or wherever you’re listening to this webinar for, then it’s worthwhile staying on and listening to some of the other things. So some things that kind of make someone a candidate for various types of care. In our office, maybe they’ve had physical therapy that failed, or they’ve had physical therapy that worked three, four years ago, it’s not working as well.
Now, maybe a person has tried different medications, it could be prescription, they could not prescription, but they’ve tried many of those. And again, maybe they work before they don’t work now, or it takes a lot more of the drug for them to get comfortable. Maybe they’re just concerned about liver and kidney problems, which most of the painkillers affect. Certainly there’s addiction to as well, people were real concerned about that these days as well, they shouldn’t be. So maybe they’ve had on steroids. Maybe they’ve taken some oral steroids, where maybe they started off with six pills a day. And then they went to five and the four into three and the two, it’s called a taper if you will, maybe for five or 10 days. And again, maybe that worked before it isn’t working now, or some people don’t want the side effects of those, even if it’s short term. Oftentimes, people may have had injections in their spine. They could have not worked at all, or maybe one worked. They’ve had three or four sets that haven’t worked. Maybe the doctor who’s administering, administering those is kind of concerned and wants you to have too many of those. These are all things that you may have heard, if you’re a patient or potential patient.
Maybe you can’t ride the car as long as you’d like to. People say well, you know, I, I ran into a gentleman the other day as somewhat of a friend of mine, I’ll publicly and I said Why aren’t you going to Maine this year, you go to Maine every year and you go bird hunting. I know you’ve done that for many years, you and your wife go it’s kind of a a yearly pilgrimage, if you will, you’ve done it since you were young. He said now I can’t do it this year, I had to cancel my trip. And I know how much he loves it. And so we talked a little bit, he’s had some of what I listed back and leg problems have been going on for years, he’d been through some of the situations that I listed earlier. And again, each one of them that kind of failed or wasn’t working as well as you’d like. And so, again, I know what you mean, when we talk about a person not been able to sit and stand for a while, we just take a sip of water real quick, on pleased using.
So getting back to that patient, here’s something that he absolutely positively loves to do. He looks forward to every single year, and has for many years. And he’s not able to do that. So we start to see activities be effective with people. Maybe they moved here to play golf three days a week, and they can only play once a week, and then they’re miserable the entire time. So certainly activities start to be a factor. You know, I get I ride the car for a period of time and I can barely stand up but I get out. That’s how this gentleman I spoke of earlier who goes to New England every year. Again, it’s a long ride. He said his ride just from his home to where we met which was 15 or 20 minutes. He had a hard time writing that amount in a car. And again, very frustrating for him and maybe the patients that we see. Again travel becomes a real problem. The holidays are coming and going God I have to get on an airplane and fly somewhere to go see some relatives and I just dread that I dread Having to do that I dread having to ride in a car for a long period of time.
My job requires me to work and sit at a desk all day or a senator computer all day. And again, I’m able to do that for as long as I’d like to. We are things like, you know what my daughter and I go shopping, every year we go Christmas shopping, it’s kind of a big event, we go shopping, we still have a nice lunch out, we go shopping some more, I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up this year. Again, we see more and more and more in effect on person’s activity level. And very often, that’s what drives them here. And hence is our is our focus here. Maybe their legs just hurt. Maybe they say, Well, I thought my legs are gonna give out. I have the hardest time, you know, rising up from a seated position. Maybe there’s been some talk of surgery, maybe someone said, Well, if this doesn’t work, maybe surgery is the next option. Or maybe as you’ve talked to a surgeon and the surgeon is like, Nah, you need we need spinal surgery. I encourage people who come in to actually, you know, do some research on spinal surgery and look at the success rates and certainly the long term success rates. Most surgeons will usually tell you what the possible success rate is. And I can just tell you, it’s not it’s not great. And it’s certainly not great. If you say well, I’d like to have the surgery, to hopefully fix things that may not give you what you want. After that you can have a successful surgery that doesn’t allow you to do activities that you really love and care about. So hence the reason why we kind of approach this in a multi faceted approach, if you will, was a variety of different techniques that can be used. One of the things we’re going to talk about is spinal decompression, I happen to be sitting at a spinal decompression table, we’ve just laid it out here, much like a desk. That’s what we’re going to call the focus, the majority of our time is going to be on spinal decompression, it kind of covers all of the gap, the whole gamut, if you will, a person who needs spinal decompression is a far end of the spectrum had a lot of problems for a long period of times, quote, unquote, the worst patient scenario that you’d like if you were the patient.
But that’s one of the scenarios that use here one of the techniques, we also use cold laser here, that’s another non surgical technique, it works with the body, if you will to decrease inflammation, speed up healing. Fascinating stuff. I’ve seen some remarkable results with that. We also have designed I’ve designed over the last 32 years, some of the best rehab protocols, I find that some of the general other things that are done just generalized abdominal strengthening and just generalized rehab that often patients come in that maybe the rehab or the physical therapy didn’t work. So we have more kind of detailed rehab, that’d be the third one. And then the the fourth option, or mentioned from a non surgical approach is general chiropractic care. We have patients come in with some of what I listed before. And oftentimes the chiropractic care alone will take care of it. And our guidelines that we use to select patients for various protocols.
Again, sometimes sometimes it’s it may be devastating a person’s life. But maybe it’s something simpler, some of the one of the lower level things we do that may end up happening, helping that person, or maybe a combination of those four that I mentioned, either way, we’ll cover the entire gamut of focus more kind of on the spinal decompression aspect. So couple things I’ll go over so you understand what’s happening inside. So many of the patients that walk through our doors have been through a lot, very often they’re confused. They don’t know what the problem is, they may have not seen their MRI, or you see anything explained to them, they might have not had their X rays explained to them. What are the things I’ll talk about is this model here in front of me. And basically, it’s a degeneration model. I’ll just talk briefly about it. Or another thought process in our office is to keep things simple.
We’re not going to try not to use a lot of big terms that confuse people. Again, vertebra, here’s a tumors vertebra, the middle is a disc in the bottom is vertebra too, as well, there’s a nerve that comes out the hole that comes out both sides, not going to get into much detail. But you can see that from a side view, if you will, what that looks like. This is a big, big, thick, healthy disc big thick. What happens is a person’s spine very often gets out of alignment slowly over time, and rather than rubs and rubs and you can see the disc getting thinner and thinner and thinner. You can see the nerves kind of get withered over a period of time. This is the degeneration model. If you want to call it spinal arthritis, you could but very often person ends up here we’ll see on their X rays, we’ll see this progression.
And other thing we’ll try to illustrate here as best we can with a camera is big, thick, healthy discs. They’re fully hydrated, they’re thicker, and slowly over time they tend to degenerate. Some people will mistakenly say, Well, isn’t that just normal aging? Well, we don’t see this in 24 segments of the spine. We generally see it in a couple very often mainly in one area. And we basically target that area when we’re doing different types of care. But that’s what happens. It’s kind of a progression. It’s not normal. It’s Common, but it’s not normal. Again, getting back to our simplicity idea, if you go away on vacation, and the sponges in your sink, this is what will happen to it over time you come back, it’ll be shriveled up dried up and not working like a sponge should work, you know, often will often almost crumble if you will, because it’s dried out. The only way to get this sponge back to working like it should be is that you would put it under water and use your hand maybe the pump fluids in and out. And slowly over time, the sponge would return back to normal like a normal sponge should work. Again, this is what ends up happening.
Here’s a normal sponge, it’s hydrated and working like it should be. This one bends and moves like it should and flexes this one stiff and doesn’t move. It’s the best simple example I feel like I can give you to say what happens to the discs in your spine. As they move in this in this direction. They’re stiffer, they don’t move as well, sometimes the fluid inside will leak out over time. We’ll talk more about that in a second. But that’s essentially what can happen in this progression from one side to the other. Another thing that will show you here is a picture if you will zoomed in on the spine. I’m going to do my best to look at this and point the proper direction. But um, again, we’ve got vertebra again, vertebra disc vertebra disc vertebra just the whole way down the yellow where the nerves were very often will happen is overtime, too much like that sponge thing shrivel up and dry up and the spacing comes together.
What also happens is is the disc will push out the back again, in line with simplicity of explanation. If you take a jelly doughnut and squeeze it jelly comes out the hole. That’s essentially what happens to these discs when they get squeezed when they get compressed. The disc, if you will, will push back on the nerves. So again, the spacing comes together. So what needs to happen is it needs to be compressed, it needs to separate those, those surfaces need to create more space back in here where the nerve is. That’s what ends up. That’s what needs to happen. It’s the reason why someone who sits a lot there gravity who stands a lot during gravity will end up having problems. It’s also the reason that their activity level gets affected because there aren’t many activities that you can do that aren’t in gravity, sports and things like that. And you get out of gravity somewhat when you’re lying down. But most people want to stay healthy, mobile and active. So that’s what has to end up happening. That’s a little diagram that shows it. Getting back to the far end of the spectrum. Getting back to the decompression, spinal decompression, we have a table here in front of us, I’ll explain a little bit about how that works.
Again, the table has two sections to it, the patient is attached to the top and the bottom section of the spine of the tables using a computer decides what needs to happen to help separate the spacing costs and spacing between the vertebrae very comfortably very easily. If you come by the office and look in a room the lights happen to be out very often there’ll be a patient on the decompression table. And the real reason why the lights are out is because again, it’s comfortable, it’s relaxing, and people will often doze off during it. So I’m going to exaggerate the motion here with my hands just so it’s visible on camera. But essentially what what happens is the computer will decide I’ll just make some numbers up here, we’re going to take this patient, we’re going to pull 20 pounds of pressure on the spine for a minute.
And then seven pounds of pressure for 30 seconds, and then 20 pounds of pressure for a minute and seven pounds of pressure for 30 seconds. So it’s essentially a protocol that happens while the person’s on the decompression table. comfortable, easy. They’re on at 12 to 15 minutes at a time. Jelly, they have a program, if you will, that helps to rejuvenate the joints, breathe re rehydrate them. And again, it goes back to the same thing that we talked about the sponge, you put the sponge underwater, and you pump fluids in out of it. And that’s how it goes back to returning more towards normal, it creates more space, if you will. That’s what this table ends up doing. It essentially works the joints in such a way that they take out more fluid, it creates more space and it gets placed there for the nerve to be most people who investigated or want to do it. Don’t want to think about having a bone chisel chiseling away bone or having part of the disk cut out having nerves burned and things like that.
Again, people who are listening to this webinar are more inclined to do those things, rather more inclined to do something non surgical than surgical. So that’s kind of an intro of that we’ve covered covered most of what happens with with people. There are on our website. Some articles that have been written specifically, we haven’t have three of them here. There’s three different ones specifically on decompression that again, that’s the far end of the spectrum. We cover a lot of bases if we talk about decompression, there’s a whole bunch of other different success stories there of people having various other different techniques with the laser with the rehab with a generalized chiropractic.
We’re a combination of those other options. But again, they’re there for you can look through those if you need to have more information. So people want to know what exactly would happen if I thought maybe some of what I saw what Dr. Sands has listed so far. What is it that what would a first visit be like what’s included? What happens there? One of the first things that happens is you get a real thorough medical history, the diabetes, yes or no surgeries, you’ve had cancers you’ve had What’s your mother died of your parent, your father died of anything in the history that you might give to any other doctor, we’re going to have that real thorough history.
The next thing we would do is but in getting back to what I mentioned earlier, is we’re going to be looking at what is it that you’re what is it that brought you here, you want to go off and you can’t, you want to get on the floor and play with your kids or your grandkids, you can’t do that anymore. You want to play tennis, or whatever your activity is, we work toward focusing on that. So we know what’s important to you. But we spend a lot of time on that too, as well, our doctors will, sometimes patients will bring an MRI with them, that’s fine. We have a very, very thorough evaluation process here, which I’ll get into in a minute. And certainly looking at some other other tests that you’ve had done as part of that. But we have some pretty interesting technologies here, which I’ll talk about in a second.
That allows us to see what’s happening so that we don’t miss anything that something’s hasn’t been overlooked. We also tell patients that after we’ve taken this thorough history, we will very often doctors will take the chart and flip it over. And the reason for that is that we don’t want them looking at it the doctors, we want the testing to tell us what exactly is going on with a patient. And later that night, we’ll review the history with the testing, it’s a way to stop, I’ve been in practice 32 years, I’ve seen 1000s and 1000s of people, I can easily say I got it figured out already, I know what to do without even looking too far into it. I’d rather not do that I’d rather have the test and approve it. Getting to the testing after the history, we then have some specialized nerve testing equipment here in the office. And if people are local, that are listening to this webinar, I can bet it’s testing that you haven’t had done elsewhere locally, because I don’t know of anyone in the area that has the instruments, we have to measure nerve function. But there’s some specialized nerve testing that’s done, I happen to have a printout of one this is actually an actual patient here. Not to get into too much detail. But what you’d want to see on this test would be as as much white color as possible, there is some and the colors get worse and worse. Black is kind of off the charts.
This is something that we test in the beginning when seeing patients and also throughout care. This is a way to see what’s happening with the nervous system, and specifically know what’s happening. We don’t want to guess about it. All too often when patients end up here. Previous health care practitioners maybe kind of guessed that it or or kind of thought they had it figured out well, obviously you ended up you ended up here. It wasn’t figured out. So yeah, that’s some nerve testing that we mentioned, history, nerve testing, we then move into as part of your first evaluation in our office. And every patient goes through what I’m describing, which specific orthopedic testing, specific neurological testing, and also specialized chiropractic testing, too, as well. All that information is put together recorded, we also would take X rays of the patient, we’re concerned on how you are in gravity. So your X rays will be taken standing, we will and we want to look at the entire spine too, as well. So that’s how the X rays are done.
We have an instrument here we have x rays in the office here, we can actually send X rays anywhere in the world to develop digital system, we can send them anywhere in the world in five seconds, literally. So if we needed to send them to a radiologist, we can do that in five seconds. If you’re moving from Maryland to Florida, and you want your X ray sent, we can send them digitally to the other doc next Doctor you’re gonna see. So again, that’s that our real job is to kind of prove that you don’t belong here. And we feel as though the screening process that patients go through dictates whether they belong here as a patient, or they don’t belong here, or which one of the different non surgical parameters that I mentioned at the beginning, which one of those or which combination of those is going to be best specifically for you? Again, so imagine an over pet repeated many times history, nerve scans, orthopedic, neurological, chiropractic testing, X rays later that might our doctors get together, study and analyze everything we just described. And then credit come from that, look, look at that and come up with a decision.
Can we help you yes or no? So what’s causing your problems? Can we help you? How long will it take and how much will it cost? Those are kind of the four questions that most people want to know. We’ve gotten multiple sets of eyes and multiple minds, if you will, studying and analyzing and looking at see what’s going on and what will be best specifically for you. That’s what happens that night. Very often the first day of persons here during that evaluation process, we’ll give the recommendations for that night and have them back the next day or as soon as they can thereafter.
So we can answer the questions. Everybody wants to know, those four questions. What’s wrong? Can we have a poll? long will it take and how much will it cost? Our results on the far end of the spectrum with regard to decompression, and people who are on the far end of the spectrum, our results in the office with that are better than 90%. And again, as I said, the evaluation process history that dictates which one of the four or combination thereof of non surgical approaches I listed earlier, it, that all dictates and proves that we don’t guess about things we test about it. That’s the way we’ve handled things for many, many years. So anyway, that’s kind of a synopsis of what I wanted to cover with regard to that jam. So back to you.
Question 1
Great, thank you, Dr. CNC. We do have some questions here. So we’ve got five lined up. So let’s start off with the first one. First question. Why might some of the other back pain therapies I have tried not work?
So with regard to that, let’s just say for example, a person says, Well, I did some physical therapy, it used to help it doesn’t help now, are I’ve done some strengthening and it’s not working. One of the things I think that that’s that’s not correct, they’re not It’s not specific enough. Generalized abdominal strengthening, we could all probably use that. But it isn’t real specific. It’s kind of general. And it’s the reason why it’s the fact it’s general versus very specific, that makes it less effective. If you’ve got a problem that’s there long enough, and it’s affected your body, like I’ve described here, it’s probably just not a little simple strength thing. There’s probably more involved there. And if you just work on the one aspect of strengthening your core, it’s probably not going to get it the problem, eventually the problem will overwhelm the strengthening that you’ve done just it’s just not specific enough.
Question 2
Right. Question number two, what would it mean to qualify or not qualify as a patient.
22:19
So getting back to the four different non surgical parameters with a decompression, the laser, the rehab, and generalize chiropractic, the evaluation process that I mentioned earlier, that dictates which of those four or which combination of those four would a person best benefit from, so they could qualify for chiropractic care, let’s just say, but we don’t really feel like they need laser decompression, they would qualify safe for that. Maybe a decompression patient might qualify for decompression, they meet all those parameters and might have rehab and chiropractic care. So the qualification if you go dictates what parameters, the other parameter. The fifth one is that maybe you don’t qualify for anything here. Maybe you need to go get something else taken care of.
Maybe you do have to have surgery, or maybe you’ve got another health issue that doesn’t allow you to, quote unquote, qualify for care here. Hence the reason for the detailed analysis and history in the beginning. Because we want to make make sure the person is in the right place. So we have patients that come in and we send them somewhere else. Yeah, we could probably help them with some of those four we mentioned, but we feel as though they need to be evaluated somewhere else. Maybe they need to see another specialist. We’ve done that maybe something on your X ray that doesn’t look right. We don’t like it and doctors here don’t like it. And then we they send it off to the radiologist and the radiologist kind of confirms what we thought and the person needs to get something else taken care of. So I’ve spoken about four, I guess the fifth, the fifth option would be no you need to go somewhere else. And we tell people that too, as well.
Question 3
Right. Third question, what is your opinion on those contractions you see on TV where people are hanging from their ankles to get the back relief?
24:06
Okay. Again, just a little bit of description so our listeners can understand. There are some devices where you may have seen on TV where a person kind of hangs from their ankles upside down. The idea is to get them out of gravity. The thing I don’t like about them is this is it. If someone has a degenerating spine, they may have other areas that are degenerating, maybe they have an old football injury in their ankle. We probably shouldn’t hang upside down from that. And you may have an old knee injury, you may have a hip replacement, a knee replacement, we all want people hanging upside down with those issues. And also the idea again, getting back to the lack of specificity.
It’s somewhat haphazard. You hang from your ankles, ankle joints, go to separate knee joints going to separate hip joints going to separate and then hopefully, one or two of the main problem was in the spine separate was 24 segments. So it’s just not very specific. So we have other other injuries to be concerned about. Also, hanging upside down is not the best thing for people with heart disease. It’s not the best thing for people with diabetes, it’s not the best thing for people with hardening of the arteries, we don’t really want the heart to kind of work backwards. So there’s other issues that can happen.
And again, the device that’s been described here is something you do at home, it’s not under, again, it doesn’t have any specificity. It’s something done at home, I wouldn’t want to have someone doing that without someone there to watch them. And again, it’s not specific enough. Anyway. Specifically, with regard to what does similar thing is the decompression table, we can actually target and get at a specific segment or few segments that need to be decompressed, if you will, rather than just, again, a generalized approach. This just happens to be a lot more specific. Right.
Question 4
Next question from one of our attendees is, why can’t any other doctors mentioned some of the some of the solutions that you’ve talked about today?
26:07
I think it really gets down to, you can’t be an expert in surgery and an expert in non surgical approaches, there’s too much to learn in surgery and too much to be part of, you can’t be an expert in drugs and objections, and then also be an expert in non surgical approaches. So that’s really what it’s all about most. For instance, like with me, I feel as though I’m an expert in non surgical approaches to avoiding surgery. For patients, I don’t recommend what technique should be used in surgery, I don’t tell patients will you need surgery and tell your doctor, your surgeon to do this technique, it’s not my area of expertise, I’m not going to comment on it. So again, there’s their specialist in surgery and a specialist in non surgery. And again, most, most surgeons know that and don’t cross that line. And I would cross it either. So it’s a it’s a lack of you can only know so much you can’t know everything about drugs, injections and surgery and also no non surgical approach is too much to learn.
Question 5
Right, thank you. Last question. Now, if I come into your office for an initial consultation on this, how long does the first testing appointment take sort of what’s involved?
Just to back up a little bit. Again, that’s where we take a person’s history. We do the nerve scans we mentioned earlier, orthopedic, neurological, chiropractic tests, X rays and gravity, we looked at the whole spine, our doctor sit down with that later that night. So the time that patients here, we usually schedule an hour for that. And then the next visit will be explained that we scheduled usually a half an hour, so we can explain it thoroughly to as well. But the first day person patient could plan to be here for an hour.
That’s all the questions we have today. So thank you, Dr. Cianci, you and thank you everyone for your time and your participation. If you would like to learn more about the help Dr. CNC and his team can provide, please call the office at 410-820-4070 or look us up online – there’s a forum online there for questions and for booking and appointments, if you so choose. Thank you again for your time and have a great day.