How & Why Your Spine Degenerates & Chiropractic Care
When your spine is overloaded or placed in positions of stress during your daily activities or due to an injury, accident, or illness you may come to suffer from persistent low back pain, hip pain and knee pain, neck pain and headaches.
Preventive chiropractic spinal check-ups and care are crucial for staying mobile and reducing pain. Children from an early age should have their spines checked, particularly before and during their growth spurts, just like they do for their teeth with dental checkup.
The Limited, Disorganized Repair of Your Spine & Nervous System:
Some tissues such as skin, and large organs including the liver can regrow quite readily, while others have been thought to have little or no capacity for regeneration following an injury. For example, the cells of the small intestine take 2-4 days to replace themselves. Skeletal muscle has a significant ability to regenerate after a tear with rest.
However, there are 2 organs for which this is not the case and that have very limited ability to repair themselves: The heart and the Central Nervous System.
The heart cells have limited proliferative activity and when a heart muscle is injured, it does not grow back.
- CNS: The central nervous system (the brain and nerve housed within the spinal canal) is not capable of self-repair and regeneration.
- PNS: The nerves of the peripheral nervous system (ones that have already exited from the spine) have some ability for repair and can grow back. However, that recovery is usually not full and it is slow.
- Vertebral Bones: Though the bones of the vertebrae are living tissue, the disc and facet joints respond to stress, loads and injuries in an “unproductive manner” inadequate repair, leaving the spine in a state of dysfunction as arthritis sets in.
- Herniated Spine Discs: Spinal discs do not have a blood supply, so they do not easily get the nutrition required to heal well.
When a vertebral disc develops tears on the outside which is quite common, a disc extrusion may develop. This means that the inner disc material called the nucleus pulposus is given a pathway to leak out and the disc and vertebrae connected, become less stable. The body’s natural healing response to lumbar disc extrusion involves an inflammatory reaction aimed at removing the herniated material by resorption and repairing the damaged tissue. Over time, the size of the disc herniation is reduced.
While the body can absorb the herniated material, the underlying, tears in the outer disc often persists and lumbar disc extrusion can be a recurrent problem. As a result, you may experience repeated episodes of disc herniation and back pain over time.
When the spine becomes injured, there is inadequate biological repair and progressive mechanical insufficiency. Spinal discs and facet joints start to degenerate, and then other psychosocial risk factors kick in to determine how much pain you will experience.
When spinal tissues fail and degenerate, there are associated signs and symptoms such as:
- Loss of segmental spinal facet joint motion that Dr. Horowitz can detect through motion palpation and with the PulStar® computerized scanner
- Loss of gross or overall spinal motion
- Pain and a feeling of instability in your spine
- Episodes of spasms and restricted motions
- Episodes of Sciatica or Radiculopathy
- Changes to your deep tendon reflexes, muscle strength and sensation
Can Chiropractic Care slow the Progression of Spinal Degeneration?
Overall, most guidelines support the use of spinal manipulation in healing spine pain and consider it safe. Spinal manipulation has been shown to reduce pain signals carried by spinal nerves.
However, there has not been long term research studies on Spinal Manipulation and spinal arthritis prevention.
A recent study in the Journal Bioengineering in April 2025, by Thomas Hedman et. Al discusses the research on damage of the outer disc material and how disc degeneration leads to segmental spinal instability. Disc degeneration begins when people are 20 and 30 years old and progresses thereafter. Loss of segmental stability results in altered motions and deformations in the spine and may be associated with disc pain.
The researchers state that it is not clear from the current research if acute back pain is partly or fully due to deficient passive load support and altered motions
but state that it increases the possibility of muscle and tendon strains and sprains, leading to acute but recurrent inflammation and pain. They suggest that masking the pain with medications, may be detrimental because it can cause a person to continue postures and activities that may be causing further spinal degeneration.
It is likely that the segmental instability correlates with areas of reduced motion that Chiropractors palpate and detect in the spine. They suggest that this altered motion, and instability should be a focal point in the management of low back pain.
Another study revealed a strong correlation between degeneration in one spinal disc in the lower back and the levels above or below and how important prompt treatment is in disc degeneration to prevent the progression of degeneration to neighboring discs.
By addressing issues early, chiropractors can help patients avoid long-term discomfort, improve their quality of life and potentially, slow or prevent degenerative changes in their spines.
