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Changing spine pain – McGill and Cambridge explain using dynamic disc models

spine pain, models

Ed Cambridge: “Our colleague Jerome Fryer created some models for us, and this is some of the work that has come out of our lab with you and Christian Balkovec about the dynamic changes we see after herniation. Where we have disc height loss at one level, creating hypermobility at the adjacent level. So here you can see, when you move the spine around there is a stiffening effect down in the lower joint and in the upper joint hypermobility. That’s what we see when an injury propagates from one joint to the next. The patient says, “Well, the pain used to be lower but now its starting to creep up my back a little bit.” “

Stuart McGill: “Fabulous. Another little take on that … By the way, these are all cast from real human specimens. So this is the real deal. Once again, Dynamic Disc Designs has been so clever in representing the biofidelity. We start to see how this disc has been damaged, and it’s quite lax as we move it around. So those micro-movements now are triggering pain just at that level. And this joint has normal stiffness, but then look what happens. Over time, the join changes because of the change in mechanics. The lax disc now cases a bit more arthritis in those facet joints, because they are now responsible for much more motion. So then, look what happens to the cascade. As the person now extends, look what happens. The joint that was hypermobile has now bound up, has no mobility because the facets have bound up and all the motion is now left at the previously stiffened joint. The polar opposite. And then you need some kind of mobility to pop those facet joints open again after they’ve been jammed.”

inflammatory mediators

The changing spine and the anatomy. Professional LxH Dynamic Disc Model

Stuart McGill:  “So, when you understand the cascade of change that happens at a joint, it might be kicked off with a little bit of a flattened disc, which puts more load in the facet joints, which causes a little bit of arthritic growth. In two years, the joint has changed and so have the pain patterns and the mechanics. So, it really does lend insight to allow us to understand the cascade of how the patient reports those changes and their pain changes over the years. And it better allows us to show them what to do to wind down the pain sensitivity. “

 

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