Cox Flexion-Distraction Certified Chiropractor in Kansas City
Hi Everyone!
I hope you’re enjoying the start of holiday season. I just had a Christmas song stuck in my head this morning…You can make your own judgments on that if you’d like.
Last weekend I attended a seminar in Fort Wayne, Indiana to learn about an exciting technique known as Cox Technic Flexion-Distraction. It is a gentle way of treating severe low back, neck, leg, and arm pain. This pain is oftentimes caused by conditions like disc herniation and spinal stenosis. The thing I love so much about this technique is that it is gentle and, more importantly, it gets results. Most patients who receive this treatment for pain experience 50% decrease in pain over the course of four weeks. If you’ve had back pain, you can understand how much it would change your life to decrease your pain by half.
Scholarship class from Fort Wayne, IN Cox Technic seminar 11/10/2024
One of the main reasons I became a chiropractor was to help alleviate pain in a natural way. For years, I saw loved ones deal with back pain and headaches — I’m included as part of that population too. These conditions, treated medically, take quite some time to go away and likely require a few different types of therapy before finding the one that works best. Don’t misconstrue this, collaboration between all specialists is an important indicator on how a patient’s condition progresses. If everyone is on board with a treatment style, the patient is more likely to get better.
But I’ve never been a fan of the corticosteroid injections that are prescribed for these types of conditions, and I saw firsthand in my small rural Midwestern town that the opioid painkiller prescriptions prescribed for these conditions can ruin lives through addiction. And I’ve seen too many TikToks from orthopedic surgeons who are scrubbing in for a patient’s second or third surgery to repair a disc herniation or spinal stenosis without trying any conservative treatment first. These more drastic procedures, all of which carry a certain amount of risk including chiropractic, should be taken after all other options fail. My trust for the American healthcare system is very low at the moment, considering a new report from the Lown Institue that was released just yesterday.
The report showed that nearly $2 billion dollars has been wasted by Medicare over the course of three years on unnecessary surgeries to correct spinal conditions that had no symptoms. The logic says that these surgeons are simply seeing disc herniations and stenoses as incidental findings on imaging reports and convincing patients that they require surgery BEFORE the pain sets in. (The report made its findings by scrubbing through Medicare submissions that require codes for specific diagnoses — codes for these types of conditions should have some sort of radiating pain that affects activities of daily living, but over 200 thousand surgeries were conducted without any of those telltale signs.)
The cost of spinal stenosis surgery varies depending on where you live, and it even varies between which hospital is providing the procedure. Regardless, these surgeries cost tens of thousands of dollars and 10-40% of those surgeries are anticipated to fail, requiring the patient to return multiple times for more surgeries.
Personally, I audibly gasped when I read this report. Honestly, if private insurance was included in the report, I am confident that those numbers would be even more inflated. It is ALWAYS valuable to get a second opinion when you’re told that you require spinal surgery. Seeing a chiropractor, one who has been proven to be able to treat low back pain patients, is a worthwhile endeavor when seeking pain relief. So much so that the American Pain Society has included chiropractic care as part of their evidence-based guidelines for clinical practice handling severe pain.
I digress…I really enjoyed my weekend of learning from the originator of the Flexion-Distraction technique, Dr. James Cox. While in school at Cleveland University-Kansas City, I took an elective technique class that was taught by (at the time) the only Cox Technic certified chiropractor in the KC metro. Dr. Robert Patterson taught me so much in that class that I knew I needed to get more info. I received a scholarship to attend this seminar and it was definitely worth the trip because now I am one of TWO chiropractors who is certified in Kansas City.
Dr. James Cox, originator of Cox Technic (left) and Dr. Ethan Peterson, Kansas City’s newest Cox certified chiropractor (right)
This technique has a foundation in evidence, not simply understanding the concepts of spinal health and finding a way to apply that logic to treatment like many of my colleagues do. Dr. Cox, with the help of many other evidence-focused chiropractors, medical doctors, and researchers, conducted many experiments to prove that the flexion-distraction treatment does what is theorized:
Increase intervertebral joint space & height
Lower intradiscal pressure
Increase foraminal area
Adjust facet joints and restore physiologic range of motion
Afferentation of neuroexcitatory impulses from disc, facet, tendon, ligaments
All of this leads to markedly decreased pain levels and clearly observable improvements in activities of daily living. That’s what I’m here to do; I want to improve people’s lives by helping them get back to doing what they love, and do so with HALF the pain levels they are used to. Many people with these conditions are told that they will just need to “get used to it”, something that someone who is hurting does NOT want to hear. I will work tirelessly to improve your life, improve your loved ones or coworkers lives, by making their pain more manageable and return them to many of their daily activities. You don’t have to suffer through this, it doesn’t have to be like this forever. You can find relief for your arm, leg, and back pain through chiropractic.
- Dr. Ethan
11/15/2024
