Hey, Dr. Ryan Hetland here. Welcome to today's 3-minute seminar.

I wanted to talk to you about X-rays today and why chiropractors take X-rays, number one, and in my opinion, is flying blind without an X-ray. You can only feel so much as a chiropractor and the rest is up to a guess if you don't have an X-ray.

So this video is to give you confidence that chiropractors are highly-trained to take X-rays and look at them. Go to a chiropractor that takes a lot of them and looks at a lot of them. I've taken thousands of X-rays and looked at thousands of them. I got some here in the background that I'll show you.

And, you know, any X-ray decision to take them is to ensure that the patient, you don't harm the patient, number 1, you're ruling out any contradictions to a treatment. I'll show you one here in a minute why you wouldn't want to adjust a certain area of the spine in low back cases.

So if you have low back pain and you're not certain what's going on, you haven't had an X-ray before of your low back, before I would do an adjustment, unless it's emergency situation, I would want that X-ray to tell me if something was going on.

So you want to rule out contradictions. Obviously you don't want to cause any harm to the patient and you want to identify how the vertebra needs to be adjusted. The vertebra, as an example here, it has tons of different ways in which that vertebra can slip or move out of position where it pinches right on that nerve there.

And so, I'll show you one condition called the Spondylolisthesis. Here's a picture of it in a book, I'll show you here. And what you're looking for is this break--the red part right there where it's broken. And you see how that disc is sliding forward there? You can see it right here in that picture.

The disc is sliding forward. I'll show you here. On a normal X-ray-- Let's see if this will show you it right here. Right here is normal where it's all lined up right here. All these vertebra should line up. And then, if you look at this one right here--this is a patient of mine that I've taken care of for a while--do you see how this don't line up, these two lines right here? That's the vertebra.

That's the vertebra literally sliding forward. Now what chiropractors do when we're adjusting is we're lifting the vertebra. As a Gonstead doctor, lifting it up and setting it forward. So if the vertebra's already forward, you would not want to do that with a Spondylolisthesis.

So something that's common enough that you would want for sure take an X-ray for and with Gonstead chiropractic and possibly some other types. Gonstead is what I do so I can speak for that. We're highly trained to see how the vertebra is shifted out of position. It could be shifted up this way and torqued this way and back this way. And when a chiropractor's doing an adjustment, should be as precise and specific as possible to make that correction.

The more precise the chiropractor is at correcting a vertebra misalignment, the better results you get, and that's why we get such good results. So I hope that was helpful for you to understand why we take X-rays, how it's beneficial for the doctor or should be beneficial for the doctor to do a better adjustment for you.

Let me know if you have questions down here below and if I could be of help, please share and feel free to share this with friends and I will see you back here tomorrow.