Hi. I want to talk about diagnostic thermography. Kind of a fancy word, but essentially, it talks about instrumentation that the chiropractor uses to help do a better job in locating where the spine needs to be adjusted. We’ve talked in the past about x-ray, the importance of x-ray, and I’ve done previous videos on that. So if you’re curious about that, check them out. The importance of x-ray or the value of x-ray is that we can really see a roadmap of what the spine is doing. When we talk about thermography, there’s another element of information that the chiropractor uses to get information about where to adjust. When there’s pressure on nerves, when there’s pressure, especially on one of these big nerves that comes out of the spine, there’s going to be a heat signature on the skin directly above it. There are accessory nerve fibers, basically means like little branch, like a little twig that comes off of these big nerves and goes up to this skin right above it. So when we’re talking about thermography, let me show you what’s up.

This unit right here is an instrument for thermography. And basically, what it does, it kinda looks like a stud finder. So when you’re checking the skin, it’s real sensitive and the needle should be pretty much in the middle. If it goes like this really quickly, that indicates that there’s pressure on a nerve right below that area. This helps along with exam information and information from the x-rays helps the chiropractor determine where to adjust on that day. This is especially valuable information because as the spine heals and rehabs… So let’s say, you have a curvature in the spine and there are one, or two, or three disks there that are kinda sprained and need to be rehabbed and need to heal. As one of them begins to heal, we’ll probably start getting a reading at a different level, maybe one above there, or one below, or two up, something like that. It is because these bones are on… It’s a curve, it forms a curve, and so in that curve, all these bones and disks are sort of points along that curve. So if you start moving one, you’re going to move the whole rest of the curve too. As you rehab one area, it’ll become… The priority will shift to start rehabbing another one on either above or below that. So this instrument really helps a lot with that to tell where the nerve pressure is that day and where it needs to be adjusted.

So I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic (in Petaluma, CA). We do a technique of chiropractic called Gonstead chiropractic. Gonstead utilizes information from x-ray, from exam, from an instrument like this to do real specific adjusting to help patients get better quicker.