At Proactive Spine Care, we have been the Tacoma chiropractor for thousands of people over the past 25 years, and many of those have had problems that developed or were made worse by misalignment in their musculoskeletal system.
One of the basic misalignments we have seen and helped easily is a leg length inequality. A leg length inequality is the growth of one leg that is a shorter than the other. A leg length inequality can be a little or it can be a lot.
We have seen many patients who have seen other chiropractor, physical therapists, medical doctors, and massage therapists only to have their pain resist treatment, or the pain returns. In these cases, we begin care by looking for things that may have been missed or overlooked, and determine of these are contributing to pain. Subtle leg length inequalities have been found to be a contributor in back pain, neck pain, hip pain, knee pain, foot pain, and even headaches. Providing treatment to help compensate for the leg length inequality has often led to better pain relief and improved care.
We have seen that accounting for a leg length deficiency and providing simple and inexpensive treatment to address that can reduce and even eliminate pain in some cases. The trick is to provide proper treatment before damage sets in.
Leg length deficiencies add stress to the muscle sand joints in the weight bearing system. This happens because neutral weight bearing equilibrium is "off", just as a building will be "off" and tilt to one side if the foundation is not level. Leg length inequalities result in unleveling of the postural and musculoskeletal weight bearing system. This often results in joint strain, muscle strain, imbalance, and asymmetrical movements.
A recent study published in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association (September 2015), notes that leg length inequality of 20mm or less is associated with osteoarthritis of the spine and lower extremity joints. It also describes how this simple examination finding is often neglected in addressing degenerative conditions in the lumbar spine, hips, and knees resulting from altered biomechanics changes that accompany leg length inequality. This is likely a problem of damage caused by repetitive micro trauma.
Clearly, better care needs to focus not only on the cause of immediate pain, but on contributors as well.
If you are looking for a Tacoma chiropractor, Fircrest chiropractor, or University Place chiropractor who is skilled at thorough evaluation and diagnosing underlying causes of pain, and skilled at taking natural treatment steps to help more completely, give us a call. We are here to help. 253-564-1288.
