What is ABC™
Advanced Biostructural Correction™, or ABC™, is a spinal manipulation method relatively new to the UK, although it has been more widely used by practitioners in the US and Australia. Even though it is most commonly used by chiropractors, ABC™ is technically not a chiropractic technique. It differs significantly from traditional chiropractic manipulation and is also utilized by sports therapists, osteopaths, physiotherapists, and even a few medical doctors and dentists. Instead of the high velocity, short lever adjustments common to chiropractic, ABC™ involves slower, longer lever manipulations to correct bone alignment in a very specific way. Patients are often positioned standing up during the procedure, rather than lying on their back, side or front.
How Does ABC™ Work?
Using a technique called Advanced Biostructural Correction ™, certified ABC™ practitioners correct bones in your spine and a few other key places that have shifted forward (or into a poor mechanical direction) over time, or suddenly moved forward due to an accident or fall.
How Bones Shift
You have muscles in your body pulling forward and to the side that over time, through normal everyday life activities such as bending, lifting, sitting, looking down at a desk or phone, will tend to shift bones forward in the spine.
When bones go forward they twist and tilt, which then causes other bones to go forward and/or twist and tilt to compensate.
Over time your spine then changes from a nice elongated S shape, to a different one altogether.
Get Started TodayHow Your Posture Changes
As a result, your posture changes: shoulders become rounded, your head goes forward and the curves in the spine either increase too much or reduce too much and can even start curving in the wrong direction.
When this gets very severe, you can start to develop a ‘dowager’s hump’ at the base of your neck, and other problems like scoliosis.
As we get older, our necks seem to “disappear” into our body and get shorter.
Pain, stiffness and injury soon develops.
Get Started Today
Correcting Out-of-Place Bones
Once these bones have gone forward, you cannot correct them yourself, nor can your body do it automatically. Your body does not have muscles that can physically pull a bone straight backward into place.
So, we start correcting those bones out of place that your body can’t correct itself.
Get Started Get Started TodaySpine 101: Understanding Why You’re In Pain
The Benefits of Unwinding & Restoring Your Posture
The beauty of this is that when we correct those bones, the ones that twisted and tilted to compensate can now untwist and un-tilt back into place, because those compensations are no longer needed, and you have muscles that can do that.
Your spine untwists back through all those changes in shape, and if you do this for long enough, it’s possible to return to your nice, even elongated ‘s’ shape that you once had, and your body works much better.
The other benefit of this treatment is that as soon as your spine starts to unwind and change shape, the stresses and strains that were causing you to be in pain start to ease. Your pain often starts to ease quite quickly, even as early as the first session.
What’s the difference between what we do vs. traditional chiropractors?
Chiropractors treat the bones that have twisted and tilted to compensate for the bones going forward. Because they are treating an effect of and not the cause of the mechanical problem, it never really resolves even though the person may feel better temporarily after treatment. Most chiropractors don’t know about the bones going forward because we don’t get taught about that in Chiropractic college. I know because I used that kind of treatment for a few years before I discovered this much more advanced technique.