Degenerative Disc Disease

Degenerative Disc Disease is a painful condition that is often disruptive to a patient’s day-to-day life and activities. In speaking with patients with degenerative disc disease, we hear their account of intolerable pain and limits on their ability to maintain their per-generative disc disease routine. Patients who come to Kentucky Pain Institute and Spurlock Chiropractic Centre are anxious to have their condition accurately diagnosed and receive treatment advice so that they can put their lives back in order.

There are several causes for degenerative disc disease and our integrated practice – medical and chiropractic – will carefully diagnose the cause of your spine condition and work to eliminate or reduce the pain you are suffering. We do not jump ahead to treatment until we know the precise cause of your degenerative disc disease. To do this accurate diagnosis, we want to know when your pain started, the location of your spine pain, whether and where it has spread to other parts of your body and your history of previous spine injuries.

Degenerative disc disease, a weakening of one or more of the vertebral discs, can be caused naturally due to the aging process or it can present due to a back injury. Small tears begin to appear in the disc wall, causing your pain. As time goes on, these tears start to actually heal. However, this is scar tissue which unfortunately is not as strong as the disc wall.  With repeated injury, this tearing and scarring continues, continuing to weaken the disc wall. Over time the nucleus of the disc is damaged, losing some of its water content which is needed for the disc to perform its vertebra cushioning function. Unable to act as a cushion, the nucleus collapses, allowing the disc above and below to slide closer together. Given this poor alignment, the facet joints of your spine, where the vertebral bones join together, start to twist unnaturally. Bone spurs can occur over time and, if they grow toward the spinal canal, this is a predicable generator of pain, numbness or tingling.

When you visit the Kentucky Pain Institute and Spurlock Chiropractic Centre, you will experience a professional, comprehensive approach from our providers. They will listen to your description of what you brought you to our practice, review relevant medical history, diagnose through state-of-the-art technology and apply the most effective and most non-invasive treatments. Our objective first and foremost is to restore you to your optimal health and quality of life. With our integrated approach, we use chiropractic treatment to restore biomechanical function and correct structural issues of your spine. Our interventional pain management team will treat inflammation with appropriate injections and procedures. Spinal bracing is often used to reduce spinal compression and stabilize your spine.

Kentucky Pain Institute and Spurlock Chiropractic Centre is a well-established practice in Morehead, Kentucky. With several decades of experience, we have an outstanding reputation and have built strong relationships with other healthcare providers in the region, including local primary care doctors and regional orthopedic surgeons and neurosurgeons. We are well aware of today’s environment in which people are receiving pain medication too quickly – often open-ended - without any analysis of underlying conditions. Our patients can rest assured that we consistently adhere to appropriate pain diagnosis and treatment.  Our long history of restoring our patients to their productive lives is the solution you need for your degenerative disc disease. Call us today at (606) 784-1115 or call us Toll Free at (800) 318-4444 to learn more about us.