The Hidden Injury Many Dancers Don’t Know They Have

This young lady here is a 16-year-old
dancer. And probably at first glance,
you may not see the problem with these
X-rays, but this young lady was
suffering from a lot of lower back pain.
And she’s been dancing since elementary.
And what ends up happening is with
dancing or sprinting, volleyball, a lot
of gymnastics is really, really big.
This happens a lot in gymnastics is the
spine has to accommodate to all that
movement and all that stress. and
oftentimes it needs a lot of extension
through the spine. So, at first glance,
when we look at this young lady from the
front, there doesn’t seem to be a whole
lot wrong. But when we look right down
here at the L5 vertebrae, which is the
lowest vertebrae in your lower back, it
looks different than the top one. It’s
really compressed from the front. It
looks smaller. And then from the side,
we can see why it looks that way from
the front because there’s actually
what’s called a PARS defect there. This
young lady has a chronic fracture in her
lower back that has pushed her vertebrae
forward like that. Now, this wasn’t a
traumatic fracture where she broke her
back. This was acquired over time
because the body needed to find extra
range of motion. So, it simply slowly
made that bone go away in that spot
right there so she could get more range
of motion. Unfortunately, due to this
accommodation pattern, she has also
developed a lot of lower back pain and
there’s not very much space between the
vertebrae in her low back. Simply what
we do to help her is we decompress her
lower back and with gentle effective
adjustments that will not have any issue
on that PARS defect, we get those
vertebrae to move better and increase
the function of her spine. So with
chiropractic care and decompression
therapy, this young lady was able to get
at least a 90% improvement. And with
simple effective treatment over time,
she can maintain