Corrective Chiropractic Care Vs Maintenance Chiropractic Care - What's The Difference?

If you are feeling “off” or suffering from health-related issues and pains, chiropractic care has so many potential benefits for maximizing your health and correcting the cause of your suffering.

​Gaining good health with a chiropractic’s guidance will provide a full body, holistic treatment options. To correct your body’s potential and allow you to thrive, you will go through predominant phases: corrective care and maintenance care.

What Is Corrective Chiropractic Care?

Corrective care (acute care) is when you are being treated for a new injury identified by x-rays or a physical exam. The chiropractic treatments are expected to result in an improvement in the symptoms and begin to arrest the progression of your specific condition. Many times, that condition started with an injury or accident and other times it is through prolonged chronic conditions that have not been addressed that are out of hand. Corrective care starts with understanding and diagnosing all structural issues and spinal misalignments to fully understand what you are feeling and what may be on the horizon of an upcoming problem. Once you can clearly identify the problems, the proper plan of action centered on your goals and vision of life can be designed and executed.

What Are The Benefits Of Corrective Chiropractic Care?

  • Address the cause of the symptoms that you are feeling and found on the x-rays or physical exam
  • Treat underlying misalignments in your body
  • Diagnose the problem and develop a comprehensive approach including adjustments, stretches, exercises, massage, decompression, laser, or nutritional support depending on your diagnosis
  • Improve the weakness causing the injury
  • Repair damaged areas in your body

What Is Maintenance Chiropractic Care?

Maintenance care is a term used in health care referring to the appropriate care directed toward maintaining optimal body function after correction has been completed. In chiropractic, that would include a schedule of regular chiropractic adjustments regardless if you are or are not feeling symptoms. The frequency will differ on each patient and how long they are holding their adjustments in relationship to their radiographic findings. At Thrive, Chiropractic Maintenance care is a type of preventative care that is recommended to avoid recurrences of episode and flare-ups of symptoms. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, preventable illness makes up 75% of the burden of illness and the associated expenses.

What Are The Benefits Of Maintenance Chiropractic Care?

  • Minimize recurrence or exacerbation
  • Maintain your optimized state of health
  • Prevent conditions from developing
  • Provide palliative care and symptom control for ongoing conditions
  • According the British Medical Journal, maintenance care provided:
  • 60% fewer in-hospital admissions
  • 59% fewer hospital days
  • 62% fewer outpatient surgeries and procedures
  • 83% less pharmaceutical costs
  • $1000 less spent on national average for health care services per person

Do You Need Corrective or Maintenance Chiropractic Care?

You cannot manage what you do not measure. When measurements are done from the baseline x-rays and physical exam compared to the post results and have shown improvements, you can graduate the maintenance care. Corrective care goes beyond pain relief and allows you to experience a new level of health than maybe ever imagined. After you get there, maintenance care allows you sustain that hard work for years of success.

Sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17509435/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8345311/