What is Decompression?

📍 📍 What does decompression do? So decompression for the majority of patients, there are some people, but decompression, what it’s doing is pulling the vertebra apart and sucking the jelly back into the donut. Is what most people would say. So a disc is like a jelly donut.

The outside is made of dough, so it’s a little bit tougher. The inside is made of jelly. If the jelly donut gets a cut in it, the jelly comes out of the donut. So it ends up looking like this. So it’ll look like this. On x ray, what would it look like? We would see the bottom of the bone, top of the bone, touching on one side, wide open, so the bulge is going that way.

This is usually when the person would get sciatica going down one leg. You’ll notice how it’ll only be We’re going to be pushing on the nerve on one side. All we need to do at this point is take the two bones, pull them apart, and it sucks the jelly back into the donut. It’s that simple. It’s not complicated at all.

The problem is we pull it back in and you’ll notice people are in pain. It’s a little tough on them. So we can’t take them to the weight that we would need to pull this back. So we started at a lower weight. We increased the weight. And there’s also, if you look at every protocol, it goes up and it goes down.

Yeah. Why does it do that? That’s called imbibition. And so what that’s doing is the disc has no blood supply. So now it has an injury. If you cut your arm, you pull it up like it scabs and it heals. You cut a disc, it will never scab and it will never heal. So a person with a disc injury, yeah, they need to come for the rest of their life.

There is no other option. That’s just the way it is. But when you pump it the way we do where you pull, release, pull, release, it steals nutrients, steals nutrients from the top bone, it steals blood. Those nutrients from the bottom bone and it helps repair the disc so the pumping of the disc helps repair the disc.

That’s why a good exercise for patients to do at home is walk. If anybody ever asks you, what’s a good exercise for you to do at home? Walking, that’s a natural form of imbibition. Every time you walk, it pumps the disc, and then when they get on the machine, if we can get to the weight that we need, we can suck that disc material back into the donut very easily.

If we can’t get the weight that we need, it will be kind of like this where. We take the x ray and you can see that there’s space, but it’s kind of there. That also happens when people don’t come in enough. Why does that happen? Because if we pull it apart and we fix it, it starts going back to where it was.

And then we pull it apart and we fix it, it starts going back to where it was. But if they put too much time in between, we’re never fully getting to where we need to be. That’s why it’s important for people to stick to their plan.