Our primary purpose is to help individuals and families achieve optimal health by restoring and maintaining proper alignment of your body - especially the spine. The main services we offer are:

Relief Care

Relief care is designed to allow a patient to get relief from immediate symptoms such as pain, pins and needles or colic. In our office, we will always perform a thorough examination of your spine. It is important to understand that relief of symptoms often does not mean your are 'fixed'. It's a bit like replacing a tire that has blown out because of faulty wheel alignment. It will get you going for a while but unless the underlying faulty alignment is fixed, the new tire will just blow out again.

Relief care typically lasts for 3-6 weeks.

After achieving relief of your symptoms, we will offer you corrective care as described below.


Corrective Care

Corrective care is specifically designed to restore proper alignment of your spine. Recent research allows us to now know what is correct alignment of your spine. This is very important knowledge as with this we can now accurately establish what is normal in your spine and what is abnormal. We can then take steps to restore the region or regions of abnormal alignment to normal with certainty.

This before and after x-ray shows the side view of a patient's neck. The blue line shows correct alignment and the red line shows the patients alignment. It is easy to see that the alignment on the left is severely abnormal and the alignment on the right is almost perfect.

Abnormal alignment left uncorrected causes progressive degeneration of the spine - wearing away of discs and formation of degeneration (osteoarthritis of the spine and spurs). This degeneration puts pressure on the spinal cord and spinal nerves making your body progressively sicker and weaker.

Normalization of this alignment stops the process of degeneration(arthritis) and oftentimes results in significant reduction of degeneration.

Corrective Care is essential for any spine with abnormal alignment if you want your spine and body to remain healthy for as long as possible. Note that Corrective Care has a clear and objective end point i.e. when the spine is restored to normal alignment.


Maintenance Care

After achieving correction of your spine to the best level possible in your case, we will always offer you Maintenance Care to maintain the correction achieved. Even with good correction, stresses in life can cause loss of correction if care is not taken. Please read the section on Chiropractic for more information on cause of misalignment. If you understand the causes, you and your family can minimize your need for Chiropractic Care and maximize your health.


Babies

We have extensive experience working with babies from newborn and in fact with mothers even before their babies are born. Some babies can have remarkably severe misalignment of their spine either due to the birth process or intra-uterine constraint. In our experience, this misalignment is a common cause of baby problems such as colic, irritability and recurrent ear and respiratory infections. It is easy to find out if this is the cause of any problem in your baby - babies typically improve dramatically in 1-3 weeks of starting chiropractic care, sometimes even with the first adjustment - so you will know very quickly if we can help.

Typically, correction of spinal problems in babies is much quicker and easier than in adults as commonly; spinal misalignment in adults has been present since birth!

Many families choose to have the spine of their babies regularly checked by a chiropractor even if they are not overtly sick. These families report to us that they have healthy, happy babies as a result.


Pre-Teens

While all age groups can benefit from having correct alignment of their spine, pre-teens require special mention. Typically, boys grow rapidly until about age 15, then slowly to age 18 or so. Girls grow rapidly to about age 13 and then slowly to age 15. Most of the rapid growth is due to increase in leg length and spine length and the slow grow due to spine growth only. This means that certain distortions of the bones of the lower limb and of the spine cannot be corrected after this growth has ceased. Vitality Chiropractic strongly recommends you have your pre-teens checked for any spinal distortion, scoliosis or Short Leg by age 13 for boys and age 11 for girls. We get very upset when we examine a young teen and find problems that could have been fully corrected 2 years ago which now cannot.


Scoliosis

Scoliosis is any curve in the spine when looking from behind. Curves are normal when looking from the side, but from behind, the spine should be straight. There are several different kinds of scoliosis - some are relatively straightforward to correct. Unfortunately, most cases (some 85%) are idiopathic meaning the cause is not understood. These abnormal curves develop most commonly in adolescent girls. It can be difficult to see with the untrained eye until the case is severe and can progress quite rapidly once started. For these reasons, we highly recommend screening for girls in Year 6 or 7 and again in Year 9 for this condition. Please click here for more information.


Posture Correction

Frequently, people are aware that their posture is not good but do not know what to do about it. We specialise in restoring proper body alignment and posture.


Short Leg Correction

A short leg, or anatomical leg length inequality (LLI), is when the actual bony length of one lower limb differs from that of the other (that is a difference in the length of the femur or tibia from left to right). Research indicates that up to 3 mm of difference is ideal but that even 5 mm of difference increases the probability of low back pain significantly.

In an adult, this LLI cannot be corrected without surgery, but it often can be effectively compensated for with a correctly calculated shoe lift under one heel.

In a child, this LLI often can usually be grown out given correct treatment if aged 11 years or less for girls and 13 years or less for boys. Typically, correction will take place at 1 mm per month. We have however successfully corrected an 11 mm short leg in a 15 year old boy (over 12 months). We are experienced in this work and have had much success.

Please note that this is a bony length difference accurately measured using special x-rays. Do not confuse with an apparent leg length difference as observed when lying down due to muscle imbalance or inaccurately measured using a measuring tape. While this may be manipulated away and 'fixed' in a visit or two, a true LLI cannot.

Click on one of the topics below to learn how
chiropractic can improve your health: