Hi, Dr. Steve Battaglino here. I want to talk today about what’s been called by various names, one of them is text neck. Basically, it’s a phenomenon where, because as a culture, we’re looking so much at our smartphones, our tablets, and so forth, we’re looking down like this all the time, and it’s basically putting our neck in this posture so much. And for so many people across the board, that it’s actually having an epidemic effect on our posture; not just in the neck, but all throughout the spine. I’ve never seen anything quite like this in the past. There’s heavy backpack use that has been tied to postural changes, but not like this, not on the scale that this is.

I want to look at some x-rays with you and show you the effects that it has on the neck and the body, and we can kind of extrapolate the effect that it has on the body through the nervous system, which gets affected as well, which we’ll touch on in a minute.

These are before and after x-ray. The jaw is here and the patient’s looking this way. So you see the curve and the first x-ray on the left is actually reversed and then after some care, probably after a couple months of care, we’re starting to see a positive curve and it’s starting to go in the right direction. This kinda shows the same thing where there’s a real straight curve on the left and then a more pronounced healthy curve on the right side. This is the same thing. The before x-ray, it actually looks like the person is doing this, that’s the posture that they’re in. That’s actually what their normal is in the beginning, in the pre x-ray. The post x-ray or the after x-ray, we see that it’s starting to straighten up more, it’s still kind of a straight curve. We’d want to see more of a curvature like this in the neck, but that’s a good start.

And then this is actually an MRI, so this is the same orientation, so the patient’s looking this direction. This is the spinal cord inside. You can see where the curvature is reversed, that it’s putting pressure on the spinal cord right here. So, this is actually something that we want to relieve so that the body can function its best and be the healthiest it can be, and also so that the patient is not having a ton of arthritis in their neck as they age, and there’s so many different symptoms that can arise when you put pressure on the nerves that are controlling things.

This, again, is a reversed curvature here and this is basically same type of thing as we just saw, where this curve is reversed in that middle part. This infographic shows the effects on the rest of the spine with regard to how much the head weighs. So when the head’s in different positions, when it’s really up far forward it weighs a lot more, and it puts a lot of stress on the spine on down to compensate for that. This kinda shows with a picture kind of the affected area and why it’s happening. He’s looking at his phone all the time. Again, before and after here.

When we look at where those nerves are coming from in the neck, so it puts some pressure on this area in the mid neck, that’s where nerves are going down to the arms, but also to the heart and lungs. And we got nerve flow up at the very top that goes all over the place to help regulate stuff. So, with chiropractic care we can help reverse the effects of this new phenomenon, text neck, or I’ve heard it called technology hunchback or all these different names. But essentially it’s that what it is. We can help through chiropractic care to reverse this problem and greatly help the overall health of our patients because we’re removing stress from the nervous system and also heading off a lot of arthritic changes before they happen.

This is Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic, and this has been your health minute.