What Longer Chiropractic Appointments Actually Fix

Most people know chiropractic care in Northwest Indiana as a quick, in and out appointment. They might receive E-STIM, heat or ice packs, decompression table time, massage table time, or an exercise to do at home later (that we know you probably didn't end up doing).

This often leaves patients experiencing chronic pain, little to no relief or feeling stuck with maintenance appointments for all eternity. Sembach Chiropractic in Crown Point and Merrillville, Indiana does appointments differently from start to finish. This is why our patient outcomes have been elite!

We format our sessions from 45 minutes to an hour long, and you are always 1 on 1 with the doctor. These longer chiropractic appointments actually allow us to fix the problem with your lower back pain, or any other region, at the root cause. There's enough time to get into the details of your discomfort, every single session. Longer appointments also mean that your services are not shortcut by what the insurance models push patient after patient through. Someone at a desk, who's never met you, is not influencing the plan of care you have! We'll walk you through just how different things are when you become a patient at Sembach Chiropractic.

Your Current State of Pain Leads the Appointment:

Each time a patient arrives for their appointments at Sembach Chiropractic, we discuss the current state of the injury or pain. For example, if sciatica pain is present, we are discussing the amount of nerve pain present and how far down the leg it is shooting - does it reach the foot? Or just the lower buttock? Other offices may take this information, but the rest of their appointments go the same as it always does with the same treatments, and reliance on the patient to make changes at home alone with exercise and lifestyle changes. When we get information about your activities lately, we use it to tailor your care for the day and to help update your exercise programming regularly.

Our next step in the appointment is to determine the degree of manual care needed for the day. This means that we are always evaluating whether or not you need a spinal adjustment, cupping, graston techniques, or dry needling. It also means that at Sembach Chiropractic, we're not just servicing these procedures for an insurance payout. Your care and outcomes are not dependent on how many times per month you are getting adjusted. Your soft tissue work is based on what works best for you too!

Outlining Sembach Chiropractic's Manual Care Strategies:

Chiropractors are most well-known for their spinal adjustments. Dr. Caitlin has received excellent praise on her manual skills in this area, and often works with patients who have dense muscle tissue and active backgrounds. Patients will often receive adjustments at the hip joints, ankles, feet, shoulders, elbows or wrists as well. She typically uses a blend of Diversified technique and Motion Palpation techniques that keep patients comfortable throughout the whole process. Spinal adjustments are utilized as a singular piece of the pain puzzle at our office, not the whole picture. We can recognize when adjusting is warranted, when it's best to not do an adjustment, and the patient isn't becoming what we lovingly call "addicted to the crack". Neither party is relying on the adjustment to do all of the healing!

At Sembach Chiropractic, we also use a handful of soft tissue techniques to figure out what is best for you, whether that is cupping, graston, or dry needling. We often try all three techniques and request feedback from the patient about which yielded the longest result. We look to use the technique that relaxes the muscle tissue the longest, and reduces the overall pain level. Dr. Caitlin Sembach also uses a technique called Dermal Traction Method, which focuses on relieving tension on superficial nerves that can become inflamed and attribute to additional pain. This technique is often very effective with lower back pain and neck pain patients. Using this technique with movement, can reduce the amount of pain that is present and tell us a lot about the root cause.

In addition, we have found that some techniques work greater than others for specific conditions. For example, elbow pain patients typically see better results with dry needling than cupping. Lower back and sciatica pain patients see a better result with cupping than with graston technique. Our clinical experience and feedback with these soft tissue techniques allows our patient's to feel better, faster!

Exercise Therapies and Functional Rehab Time

The final piece, and a large part of treatment time, is dedicated to exercise therapies and functional rehabilitation. At Sembach Chiropractic, we believe that the exercise therapies, when programmed appropriately to the patient, becomes key for a long-term result. If only serviced soft tissue work and spinal adjustments, the patient may be experiencing the same old pain two days later. We find it important to work on how the body is moving, the relationship between your joints, tendons, ligaments, muscles and nerves, and how adaptable the body is to movement and load. Basically, how prepared your body is to live life without worrying about your every movement!

With the addition of rehab to the end of each session, we are seeing how your body moves or compensates, in real-time. Exercise form, additions to your exercise program from us, and weak points in your movement can be addressed quickly. The exercises done during each session get progressively difficult as each patient gets better and stronger - so you're never stuck doing the same old, band or bodyweight movement. Think of it in the same way you increase weights when you go to the gym consistently! Longer chiropractic appointments allow us to do multiple exercises, 1:1 each visit. Which also means the patients get more exposure to the exercise, heal faster and progress to the next level easier.

Sembach Chiropractic also sends each patient home with digital, customized home exercise programs. These programs include your functional rehab exercise name, description of form, sets and repetition numbers, and digital videos to match. These are texted directly to the patient, so the patient does not lose their information and can refer back to it at any time, even after graduating from treatment at Sembach Chiropractic. Our patient's rave about how easy it is to access these wherever they are!

You Actually Graduate Here

And that's correct, you read that right. Patients do not have to feel like they need to keep coming back for treatment with Sembach Chiropractic for the rest of their lives. Our mission is to solve problems for the patient and return them to their activities or work life, confident that they can do it without additional intervention!

If a patient is loving their treatments, they may ask to continue for additional performance-based skills. If other injuries happen or are present, we'll also welcome you back. But overall, Sembach Chiropractic makes sure you have resources at your disposal whenever you need them after your treatment plan is complete, and we don't expect that you will come in for treatment forever.

Longer Appointments, Better Outcomes

When you picture how a longer chiropractic appointment goes one on one with the provider, it is a no-brainer that the outcomes would be better too. In summary, longer format appointments and evidence-based treatment methods allow Sembach Chiropractic to fix the root cause, help patients achieve their long-term goals, and put pain in the past. These types of appointments have seen phenomenal results in patients with lower back pain, sciatica, neck pain, rotator cuff injuries, nerve pain, shoulder instability, knee arthritis, hip pain, cervicogenic headache pain, plantar fasciitis, and other sports related pain.

People in Crown Point and Merrillville Indiana who are looking for a premium standard of care should look no further than Sembach Chiropractic to put together a patient-centered, customized plan to reach long-term, pain-free results. You can access a FREE Introductions Call with Dr. Cait here. This allows for us to get to know you better, set expectations for Comprehensive Examination, and make sure we are the right fit for your needs!

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