hi i'm paula moore the chiropractor from posturevideos.com and i thought i'd
show you today an MRI to get an idea of what spine arthritis looks like lumber
disc degeneration as a fancy word for wear and tear which is the more common
way that we tell people they've got a bit of arthritis in the spine this is a
young 40-something he's clearly got some arthritis in the discs of the spine i'm
going to show you that now just to orient you this is the front
area where his stomach would be this is his back here we've got a layer of fat
and we've got the bony nobbles that you feel
as you run your finger down your spine then we've got the space between
the back of the vertebra and the vertebral bodies themselves and in this
space we've got some white cerebrospinal fluid that's white because the MRI picks
up water within the cerebrospinal fluid and fat and it shows up as white so you
can see there's also white in these cartilage discs as well this is the
spinal cord you can actually see it running down the spinal cord ends around
here and then it tapers down into these nerve roots that look like long pieces
of hair so on someone with arthritis in the discs one of the first signs will be
that we can pick this up just on a simple posture examination just by
looking at them not even touching this is one of the reasons why I've put up my
new service posture analysis (under Shop) on my
website so that I can actually just look at pictures of you and get some ideas of
things that I think might be going on in the spine so in this individual before
he even had this MRI taken I knew he had disc degeneration now of course that
can't be said 100% without an MRI but you can get a pretty good guess on this
person because his spine is very flat if you follow this white arrow what it
should look like from his lower back is we should have a nice
arching in that's known as your lumbar lordosis it should straighten out and
then curve back between your shoulder blades and we can practically took a ruler
and draw along the back of the vertebra on this gentleman now in actual fact
he's flattened so much that he's starting to reverse right through this
area and when I had this person lie on his front and I was examining him
pushing through this area gently this was the area of greatest resistance
because there was no curve in at his spine and you could actually see it
now when we have loss of disc height when they start to get dehydrated that they
go from white to looking very dark so quite a few of his are showing some
darkness and irregularity on these little plates at the bottom of the
vertebra they're called end plates so they're all
getting quite dehydrated and they're tapering at the back but particularly
down here his third disc his fourth and fifth there's five in the lumbar spine
vertebra five four three two and one and you can see that these discs are well
contained and then we get some bulging right here now not enough on this
gentleman that he's irritated the nerves but if that continues bulge or say it
bulges in a number of years from now and there's irritation or swelling that's
inflammation around this nerve root this person would likely come in with
sciatica pain right down the leg because these nerve roots travel right down
through the buttocks and down to the ankle so again we see some more bulging
here and we also see some bulging and look how thin that lower disc is this
person is probably waking with a lot of stiffness in the morning in fact I know
he is so those are some classic signs if you're waking stiff in the morning and
you've got quite a flat lumbar curve you may have lumbar disc degeneration
now you can't diagnose this yourself but you certainly can go to your doctor or
your chiropractor who can give you accurate diagnosis I hope that was
interesting and come on over if you'd liked more information on that
posture analysis go over to posturevideos.comand look under Shop
thanks for watching