Spinal decompression is most favored nowadays for treating herniated discs. In this kind of a condition, pressure on the spine causes the disc herniations to expand, which in turn exerts stress on the spinal nerve roots in the vicinity. Spinal decompression treatment helps in easing this pressure so that the damaged discs contract and return to their original size.

Spinal decompression can also be used to treat degenerative disc disease. Spinal compression can result in the discs moving closer to each other. This could put pressure on the nerves and lead to back aches. Spinal decompression takes the pressure off the degenerated discs and thereby provides relief from back pain.

Facet joint syndrome is a medical condition that can be remedied through spinal decompression. However, spinal decompression cannot promise very lasting results for this condition. When a person suffers from facet joint syndrome, they have to deal with pain as a result of arthritic changes to their vertebral bones. Spinal decompression tries to solve the problem by creating more space between the vertebrae that helps in minimizing pain.

The older forms of decompression such as pulley and weight spinal traction systems are no longer used. Nowadays, chiropractors used a spinal decompression technique called Cox Technic. Other practitioners use methods such as Vax-D, DRX9000 and Accu-Spina.

If you have been looking at a spinal surgery option you may want to think about spinal decompression. Spinal surgery usually produces poor results and often results in pain and complications. If spinal decompression does not solve your back pain problem, the chances are that the cause of your pain may not have been diagnosed properly. Many patients who complain of back pain are usually suffering from psychosomatic back ache. This means that the condition of their spine is not really the cause behind the pain. In such cases, spinal decompression may be able to provide symptomatic relief and act as a pain reliever.

Spinal decompression, despite being non-invasive and non-surgical in nature, is not totally free from risks. You may need a thorough physical examination, an X-ray or an MRI scan done before you can opt for this form of treatment. Always consult with your primary care giver before going in for spinal decompression so that you know that it is right for you.

People who suffer from back and neck pain usually experience symptoms such as weakness, numbing, and tingling, hence, affecting their daily activities. Pain-killers and other drugs may be able to relieve these pains. But if a person has tried medicines, as well as, chiropractor and physical therapy and yet the pain does not subside, he can either have surgery or spinal decompression. Surgery, as we all know, is painful and could cause complications. It is also very expensive and risky; that is why spinal decompression, which is an alternative to soothing back and neck pains, is available. It does not require needles or operations so it is less costly and more convenient.

A very obvious advantage of spinal decompression to surgery is its recovery time. A person who opts for spinal decompression does not need to stay in bed for long periods of time to recover. Treatments for spinal decompression are done per session. And once a spinal decompression session is completed, the person can go out of his physician’s clinic and go on with his daily activities. Unlike sedatives and painkillers, spinal decompression, has no side effects. It will not make you nauseous, dizzy, or drowsy. A person does not need any drug to go with this treatment. Also, spinal decompression will not interfere with one’s other medications; so a person receiving heart treatments may have both spinal decompression and heart treatments at the same time without having to worry about complications.

However, there are also certain disadvantages that should be considered before deciding on this kind of treatment. Firstly, a person should go for a physical examination to see if he is qualified to receive spinal decompression. If his physician allows him to take the treatment, he must make sure that he takes it without interruptions or breaks in between. Today, computer guided spinal decompression is used. Although manual spinal decompression has been proven effective for centuries, technological advancements in medication are preferred by many. The equipments and machines used in computer guided spinal decompression are expensive; thus, costs for this treatment are relatively high. One must also be willing and capable of traveling to places where this treatment is available because computer guided spinal decompression is new. Accessibility and feasibility are very important.

Spinal decompression is a proven safe method and is effective when adminstered by a qualified professional but precautions must still be observed for one’s own personal safety.

Quite remarkably though, the patients whose only treatment option for back and neck pains is surgical spinal decompression often opt to live with their pain (maybe using coping aids like analgesics or physical therapies), rather than go for surgical spinal decompression. This begs the questions as to why surgical spinal decompression scares people so much.

To understand the reason as to why people are so scared of surgical spinal decompression, it is important to first understand the kind of conditions in which such surgical spinal decompression might be used as a treatment option and how they come about.

As it turns out, surgical spinal decompression can be employed in the treatment of the conditions where the vertebral disk gets ‘compressed,’ thereby forcing the disk material out of the disk and into space that accommodates nerves. This ultimately puts continual pressure on the affected nerves and results in chronic back and neck pains (depending on the disk under pressure) to the patient.

Now it should be noted that when we talk of vertebral disks, we are not talking of disks the size of compact disks, but rather very small and sensitive disks that nonetheless have a critical role in the body. And in a similar manner, when we talk about vertebral disk material, we are talking about what is often microscopic material – and which too performs very critical roles in the body.

So it follows that the main reason why many people are so scared of surgical spinal decompression is that the parts being operated here are very sensitive parts, and should anything go wrong during the surgery, the person in question would probably end up disabled for life. And since we are dealing with very small body parts here, it also follows that the risk of something indeed going wrong in the surgery is higher than for operations involving larger body parts, hence many people’s hesitation in undergoing surgical spinal decompression even when such surgery would relieve them of anguishing pain.

In terms of effectiveness, properly performed, both non surgical and surgical spinal decompression are equally effective in the treatment of back and neck pains resulting from the displacement of vertebral disk material into space that is occupied by nerves. Indeed, the only core difference between non surgical and surgical spinal decompression is the medium and method used to get the displacement vertebral disk material back into the disk; where in the non surgical case, subtle force application equipment backed by specialized software are used in getting the displaced material back into the disk, while in the surgical spinal decompression, the treatment involves surgically opening up the patient and performing procedures to get the displaced disk material back into the disk.

In terms of treatment times, it can be said that surgical spinal decompression is an ‘instant treatment’ (in that the patient leaves the operating table with the vertebral disk material that was causing trouble back in its rightful place), whereas non surgical spinal decompression is more of a gradual treatment process, requiring twenty sessions to get the displaced vertebral disk material back into the disk. But while surgical spinal decompression might be termed as an ‘instant treatment’ one need to keep in mind that they would need a considerable period of time to recuperate from the effects of the surgery, often ending up being grounded for longer than the three to four weeks it takes to go through non surgical spinal decompression.

In terms of cost, non surgical spinal decompression is often termed as a more cost-effective method for the treatment of the range of back and neck pains that can be treated through spinal decompression than surgical spinal decompression; although it should be noted that not non surgical spinal decompression is not a very cheap treatment either.

And in terms of risk, non surgical spinal decompression is termed as a less risky treatment method than the surgical spinal decompression – though it should also be noted that the non surgical spinal decompression is not absolutely risk free, and neither is it a treatment option of everyone, hence the need for extensive tests and physical examination, before one can be put through the non surgical spinal decompression.

The answer to the question about what could be causing the rise in the price of spinal decompression machines has tended to lie in the rising demand for the machines. It is an established principle in economics that when the demand for anything outpaces the supply, then price spikes are likely to be witnessed, and this seems to be indeed the case with spinal decompression machines.

So what could, in turn, be the reason behind the rise in demand for spinal decompression machines?

The rise in demand for spinal decompression machines can be largely attributed to increasing awareness on the benefits of spinal decompression therapy. And the most acknowledged benefit of spinal decompression therapy is that it provides people suffering from some forms of vertebra disk-related back and neck pain with relief from such pain without having to go for highly invasive surgery, which has for long been the only way to find lasting relief from this forms of pain before the arrival of spinal decompression therapy.

Now we are living in an age when information about new therapies and treatments spreads very fast, and within a few years of spinal decompression’s discovery, word about it has spread to pretty most of the world, so that even the people who are not using it are not doing so because of things like the cost-factor, rather than because of lack of awareness about its existence on their doctor’s parts.

As more and more people become aware of the benefits of spinal decompression therapy (forcing their hospitals to go looking for the spinal decompression machines), the makers of these machines find themselves with so much demand on their hands that they have to ‘discriminate’ the people asking for the machines through the pricing mechanism.

What usually happens in case where demand outstrips supply is that new entrants get into the market to meet the ‘over-supply’ driving the prices back to their normal levels. In the case of spinal decompression machines, however, this entry of new makers has not tended to be very easy, since these are rather sophisticated machines made using cutting edge medical engineering technology, and not everyone has that level of expertise.

Saying that spinal decompression is one of the most cost-effective ways for the treatment of these conditions is, of course, not the same as saying that it is a cheap therapy. In actual fact, a single session of spinal decompression therapy costs between a hundred and two hundred dollars. And given that it takes about twenty sessions of spinal decompression therapy for the patient to experience lasting relief (and for the therapy to be declared as complete), it follows that one needs between two thousand and four thousand dollars to get through spinal decompression therapy.

Of course, this two to four thousand dollars is the amount that goes directly into the therapy sessions, but it should be noted that before one gets into the actual therapy, some money has to be spent on the basic consultation with a orthopedic specialist (to establish where spinal decompression is indicated for the patient), follows by extensive X-rays and possibly even an MRI (to establish whether the patient could be having conditions that contra-indicate spinal decompression therapy).

A great portion of the money spent in spinal decompression therapy goes into paying for the equipment used in the therapy, as well as the compensation for the staff that make the therapy happen. It is worth noting in these regards that spinal decompression depends on advanced computer technology for its efficacy, and supporting this technology costs considerable sums of money.

The two to four thousand bucks that complete spinal decompression therapy costs is money that many people with good health insurance coverage are able to pay with too much of a problem.

And the two to four thousand bucks paid for spinal decompression therapy is often much lower than the amount of money that would be required to pay for surgery (which is the alternative to spinal decompression therapy in most cases). But even where the quoted costs of spinal decompression therapy appear higher than the costs of surgery for the same problems it addresses, many people would still opt for the spinal decompression therapy, rather than surgery which is obviously more costly – and whose use means that the patient will have to be grounded for some time in recuperation.

The workings of spinal decompression, as the name suggests are mechanical. But to understand how spinal decompression works, it is important to be first familiarized with the causes of disk problems that it addresses.

As it turns out, the core cause of these problems is the breaking of the material that is supposed to contained within the disk through the (external) layer of the disk which is meant to protect it, so that the exposed disk material now ends up literally touching a ‘raw nerve’ that is, get into a nerve’s way, thereby causing the excruciating pain that characterizes disk-related back problems treated with spinal decompression.

What spinal decompression therefore does is to try to get the material that is supposed to be contained in the disk (and which has fallen out the way) back into the disk. This is achieved by creating negative pressure inside the disk, thus forcing the material which had fallen out of way (and into conflict with a ‘raw nerve) back to where it is supposed to be; thereby relieving the patient of the pain that the conflict between the nerve and the out-of-place disk material was creating.

Spinal decompression does not come cheap. While a single spinal decompression session (at between a hundred and two hundred bucks) cannot be termed really expensive, it turns out that a person normally needs about twenty of such sessions to nudge the out-of-place disk material back to its place. And in monetary terms, such twenty spinal decompression sessions could call for anything between a couple of thousand bucks and four thousand bucks; certainly not loose change, but then again a small enough price to pay for relieve from the rather uncomfortable back pain that spinal decompression is meant to treat.

The main advantages of spinal decompression include the fact that it does away with the need to go for relatively risky – and typically much more expensive – surgery, while also doing away with the down time that back surgery would require for recuperation.

And spinal decompression is not for everyone. Among the major contra-indications for spinal decompression include severe obesity, pregnancy and bad cases of nerve damage. Patients suffering from osteoporosis too are not encouraged to undertake spinal decompression. To rule out these conditions, spinal decompression is usually preceded by a physical examination session, backed by an X-ray and MRI in some cases.