Can chiropractic help with hip pain?”

Now, that’s a great question. Now, why typically does someone have pain in one hip and not the other hip? Sometimes it can be both, but a lot of times it’s really just one, really just like a toothache, that hip pain. Now, what we have found is that most of the time the hip pain comes from a secondary problem.

There’s something else that’s created the hip pain because a lot of times you can go in and work on the hip, and it might feel better temporarily, but it’ll keep bothering you.

Obviously, hip pain doesn’t come from a drug deficiency, so taking medications, even cortisone shots, will not fix hip pain. It might mask it temporarily, but it doesn’t correct the ultimate cause. So where does hip pain come from?

Well, what we have found is, I’m going to say 99% of our patients that have come in with hip pain, actually their hip pain started in their neck. And I know that sounds crazy but “I don’t have any neck pain. I don’t have any headaches.”

Well, but your body can have even a slight misalignment in the top of the neck and, in turn, when the bone moves, it takes the head and throws it a little bit out of balance. Now, the brain doesn’t like it, so the brain responds by sending messages down, forcing the body to compensate to level that head.

When this bone gets out of line, your body can’t reposition it. What it can do is go and move other bones down below there until the brain levels again. It’s called the writing reflex. The writing reflex’s whole purpose is to make sure your brain, the control center, the head computer for the rest of the body has to be level. It has its own leveling system to make sure it’s always perfectly balanced.

If one of these bones gets moved, rotated, to compensate, the body will drop down one shoulder, lift up one hip, making one leg shorter than the other. What that does is it throws your weight distribution off and will cause one hip to be raised, which in turn forces it to work abnormally carrying more weight. If you pull one hip up, now all of a sudden, your body tilts that direction and will put more stress on that particular hip.

Now, it’s usually not all of a sudden, boom, I have hip pain. It’s usually a gradual process because the body compensates, slowly putting more stress on one side. So now instead of working the way it was designed, now all of a sudden, it’s working differently, and it starts to wear abnormally, and it starts to wear down, creating the pain. If left alone, eventually, it can actually cause arthritis, degeneration of the hip, and could force possibly to have hip replacement surgery, stuff like that.

What I would suggest is if you have hip pain, find an Upper Cervical doctor near you. At least find out, could your hip pain be secondary to something going on somewhere else like up in the neck? If so, correct the top, correct the bottom. It’s like pulling a rope at both ends: everything balances out and levels itself. It takes that stress off that hip and then redistributes the weight the way you were designed. You’re designed to be balanced from top to bottom. If you have hip pain, find an Upper Cervical doctor near you.