Treating An Injury in The Body

Dr. Steven Olmos demonstrates the technique of decompression and how it can help treat bodily injuries.

DR. STEVEN OLMOS: The relationship between the way the head sits on the spine is imperative in the understanding of how the teeth come together. If there is any inflammation in the jaw joint, it actually produces a forward head posture that will change the relationship and the pressures on the spine that will end up causing pain the low back. This is a very, very common situation where chiropractors/osteopaths are continuously treating a low back problem that just doesn’t get resolution. Most would not think that that would be of a jaw joint origin. This is something that has been talked about for many, many years. This book, right here, The Dental Physician, written by Dr. Aelred Fonder, is an excellent presentation of how dentists would go about treating scoliosis, which is something that most people wouldn’t think a dentist would have much input into. These are x-rays of a patient with a crooked spine, or scoliosis, and this is an x-ray of straight spine. It happens to be the same patient only two days later, so he came in with a crooked spine. Two days later, his spine was straight, using a technique of decompression. The patient here, as he presented with the crooked spine, with his head off to one side, shoulder up, forward head posture, and sway back, and here, showing the corrected postures by the correct decompression. These are the effects that we're trying to mirror and how we're understanding whether or not, A, the problem is a jaw joint problem, or whether or not the problem is coming up from the feet, back, or other supporting structures. If you have a patient like this one, who the problem was the jaw point and was decompressed using the Aqualizer or some other technique, you would see this kind of a change within a couple of days, just as demonstrated in these pictures. We quantified this work in a paper that was published in Cranio [phonetic] in 2007. In this paper, we took 51 patients from our practice who had various jaw joint ailments, everything from simple capsulitis to degenerative problems, and we quantified the amount of return of head posture. In other words, we measured from the shoulder to the ear and we see that, no matter what the age of the patient is, if they have a jaw joint disorder, they're leaning forward, and by changing the jaw joint, decompressing it, in these x-rays showing you here, we found, on average, that we had 4.43 inches of returning of head posture. This means that, from previous studies we know, that for every inch the head is forward of the shoulder, it adds ten pounds of weight to the cervical and lumbar spine. And therefore, in our study, we've demonstrated that we have removed 45 pounds of weight from these necks and back through this therapy, when the precursor of a person's problem is their jaw joint. This is very important because 96% of the patients who have TM problems complain of back of head pain from this mechanism, and this is obviously the site of BOTOX injections for chronic migraines and this sort of thing. So this is very important to all clinicians to understand the relationships of being able to determine, just because the head hurts doesn’t mean the problem is there. A foot problem, a hip problem, a knee problem can produce the same symptoms, and this is the beauty of understanding why the Aqualizer is so important. By decompressing properly, in the way that we've described, a return of head posture will relieve these extension muscles at the base of the skull, cause them to relax, and now, stop the compressing of these nerves, which is the origin of the pain that many of these patients are complaining about, and the referred pain from the opposing muscles like the - - , and when this head goes forward, these muscles go into spasm, and they'll refer pain to the various areas that people will complain about. So that's what is very difficult about the diagnosis and treatment of head and neck pain is understanding the interrelationship between the jaw joint, which is primary. The brain is most concerned about this jaw joint because it is essential that a person be able to breathe and eat. That's why this joint is so high on the priority list, and that its mechanism of countering for injury then puts its distributional forces and causes pathology in other structures. And conversely, if there's a problem in being able to move, if you can't move in the survival mechanism, then it starts to put muscular contractions that would cause head pain. So that's why the Aqualizer is integral into the diagnostic techniques, as well as therapeutic, as we've described.