What is the "ICEBERG" effect?
According to your condition Dr Vance has made certain recommendation to reduce your symptoms, which is your initial compliant. Pain is the first thing to leave and the last to become apparent. The mere reduction in your pain is very simple. The onset of pain would be described as the tip of an iceberg as the analogy goes. Usually we can only see 15% of the iceberg above the surface. Below is the remaining 85% which is the cause of the problem and the largest part. Either way you want to avoid both or you can have a titanic problem. Pain may have been what has brought you to our office but it is not what we use to dictate our care. Dr Vance's goal of treatment is to help your body restore itself to its maximum improvement. The goal of our treatment is to have your body function better and more efficiently than when we first met, not merely the absence of pain. Pain can be chemically hidden from us with drugs. Once you stop taking those drugs without making some type of physical correction, the pain and symptoms will return. The difference is patch work verses correction. Dr Vance will give you recommendations for correction of the problems and not merely the "patching" of symptoms.
I want to paint you a picture of current treatment standards. When pain develops sometimes a person goes to an allopathic physician and receives drugs. This can be helpful in the short term for comfort. After a little time then either the drugs stop working or the doctor has said there is not likely any improvement in the future so we will wait until we can do surgery. My dilemma is the patient was merely given drugs to hide or mask the symptoms without any steps to improve from their present health problem, just drugs. Then you are waiting until it gets worse. If this is what you want to do, that is your choice. I believe that physical problems should have physical solutions. Merely turning of the smoke detector in a raging house fire or hiding the alarm does not stop the damage the fire would create. This is the same thing in the body. Even after the damage has occurred and the fire is out, there is significant restructuring that must occur. I call that rehabilitation.
In certain cases a complete correction may not be attainable such as in degenerative problems. A recommendation of maintenance is suggested. Whether you are looking for complete correction or just patch work, we will do our very best to help you obtain you health goals.
It is a very good consideration to have regular checkups to ensure you prevent a physical problem long before it becomes a functional problem. Regular inspections are done on your home, vehicles, and teeth to prevent damage that could be minimized. Changing your oil is part of a normal maintenance on your car to insure the motor to continue functioning properly. Your spine, posture, and nervous system are no different except, you will not be able to use most of the others unless you are functioning properly. If you treat your car like you treat your body, how many miles would you get?
