June is scoliosis awareness month—making it a fitting time to talk about the important role that DCs can play when it comes to both detection and treatment of this particular condition.
According to the National Scoliosis Foundation (NSF),
June is scoliosis awareness month—making it a fitting time to talk about the important role that DCs can play when it comes to both detection and treatment of this particular condition.
According to the National Scoliosis Foundation (NSF), scoliosis affects approximately seven million people in the United States alone. This means that there is high likelihood that you will have patients with this abnormal curvature of the spine that “can impact the quality of life with limited activity, pain, reduced respiratory function, or diminished self-esteem.” And since the NSF further states that it “is a multifactorial disorder, which requires multidisciplinary research and treatment,” this is where chiropractic comes in.
Research has found that chiropractic can help individuals with scoliosis in a number of ways. For instance, one study published in the Journal of Chiropractic Medicine in late 2011 which involved 28 subjects with scoliosis found that, after six months of chiropractic care, they “reported improvements in pain, Cobb angle, and disability immediately following the conclusion of treatment.” Additionally, they still enjoyed these same advantages two years post-chiropractic treatment.
Marc Moramarco, DC, was the first U.S. physician certified in the Schroth Method (a non-surgical treatment that involves the use of scoliosis-specific exercises) in Germany, and he was generously willing to share what role he feels chiropractors play when it comes to scoliosis detection and treatment.
When it comes to scoliosis detection, “DCs can easily identify scoliosis via postural evaluation,” Moramarco says.
When conducting this type of visual inspection, you want to look for “shoulder and/or pelvic un-leveling, a dorsal rib cage prominence to one side (usually the right), and a ventral prominence on the opposite side of the dorsal rib cage prominence,” he says. “Sometimes in boys, pectus excavatum (a depressed sternal area) may be present.”
Two other ways to identify scoliosis, according to Moramarco, are with an Adam’s forward bend test and a scoliometer reading. When doing the scoliometer reading, Moramarco says that a five degree reading should prompt an x-ray. Additionally, he stresses that “history is important as well, because there is a 30 percent familial correlation.”
If scoliosis is diagn