Donald Backstrom, D.C.

The mission of chiropractic is to help sick people get well, as well as to help healthy people function better in the absence of drugs or surgery. When people are asked, "...what do chiropractors do?" the frequent response is, "...they crack your neck and/or back." Chiropractic spinal manipulation (frequently called an adjustment) often produces an [..]

Every movement, smell, taste, touch, sound, thought, and dream has its origin in the nervous system. Every function of your body, both voluntarily and involuntarily is controlled, at least in part, by your nervous system. To better understand how the nervous system works, it is necessary to discuss what makes up the nervous system. The [..]

For years, chiropractors have treated back pain patients as well as, if not superior to, other healthcare professions. In fact, all of the guidelines published around the world have recommended manipulative care as an initial or first step for the treatment of low back pain and more recently, for neck pain. So why are there [..]

A Mechanical Model Involving the Spinal Dura Mater and the Suboccipital MusclesFor more than half a century respected authors, clinicians, and journals have claimed that various problems of the cervical spine can cause headaches. As an example, in 1958, Beverly Hills neurosurgeon Emil Seletz, MD, authors an article titled Headache of Extracranial Origin, published in the [..]

The relationship between neck pain and our pillow is more important than most of us realize! Though we all may have at one time or another slept on a variety of surfaces, and used any number of pillows (flat, medium, bulky) made of different materials (foam, feather, air, water, or memory foam), it’s usually not [..]

Losing weight can dramatically reduce Low back pain (LBP). For the next two articles, we will look at easy ways to lose weight without the need for fancy, hard to follow diets. As the saying goes, this is a "no-brainer." Time your meals. Set a timer for 20 minutes and "pace yourself" so that you [..]

Whiplash is most commonly studied when it is a result of a rear collision where the occupant of the vehicle is injured from a flexion (forwards) and extension (backwards) whip-like mechanism of injury, but what happens when a T-bone type of impact occurs?The answer to this question is quite similar to many of the factors [..]

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a condition that (typically) evolves slowly over time and often occurs for no apparent reason. The diagnosis is usually made by excluding other conditions leaving you with a diagnosis that in the absence of anything else, "….must be fibromyalgia." Of course, the problem with that approach is that we all want to [..]

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) is a condition in which a nerve in the wrist gets pinched resulting in numbness, tingling, and sometimes grip strength loss. One of the first symptoms of CTS involves waking up at night due to the numb, tingly sensations. This initially occurs once in a while but eventually becomes more frequent, [..]

Can receiving spinal adjustments make a person healthier? If so, how would you measure it?Treating patients with chronic, long-term disabling back pain is truly a challenge. A commonly utilized medical approach to treating these patients (after the initial less invasive course of treatment has failed) is the use of opioid pain relievers (OPR). Opioid pain [..]