How To Get Taller,

Chiropractic May Be Able To Help.

Not everyone has the genetics to be seven feet tall. It’s important to eat healthy and make sure you’re well-nourished while you’re growing. This provides you the best opportunity to reach your optimal height potential. In the United States, we often consider ourselves to have the best of a lot of things when compared to the rest of the
world. The reality is that that is not the case when it comes to our health. There is certainly a vast majority of the country that is overfed and under-nourished. Despite this fact, we still have access to enough healthy food to avoid creating nutritional deficiencies that prevent us from growing as tall as our genetics will allow.

More commonly, people in the U.S. struggle maintaining their height.

This is not just a problem for the old, or even middle-aged. Poor posture and spinal stability often result in decreased spinal height.  Examples of this include thoracic hyperkyphosis commonly referred to as “hunchback” or “granny-back”. This type of spinal pathology is not exclusive to the elderly. It often starts at a very young age prior to becoming an adult.

It’s also important to understand that having a hunchback is not caused by a disease in the traditional sense. A hunchback is certainly a spinal pathology but not one that is always caused by a bacteria or virus or auto-immune disease. The most common reason for this has more to do with bad posture or spinal injuries that were never properly treated by a chiropractor. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE ON WHAT CAUSES BAD POSTURE.) Don’t think of it as a disease so much as abnormal spinal shapes that lead to altered biomechanics that causes premature degeneration of the spine.

These abnormal spinal shapes like hunch back or goose neck are just that, abnormal spines.

These abnormal spines will prevent you from being taller that you would be with them. If your neck is not able to have the proper forward facing curving but instead protrudes forward instead of resting over your thoracic spine and shoulders, then you will be shorter. You still have all the parts and pieced to stand up straight but you will not be capable of doing so. If you want to be as tall as your body and genetics allow you must have normal posture. Without a normal posture, you literally can’t stand up straight.

It’s funny how people will tell their children to stand up straight but not their parents. For some reason, we understand that the elderly are incapable of doing this because of the degenerative spines we assume they have. The reality is that their spines are hunched over like that CAUSING the acceleration spinal degeneration, disc degeneration, spinal stenosis, spinal arthritis, degenerative joint disease, etc. These processes don’t cause poor posture, poor posture causes them. Certainly, there are some exceptions to this rule. There is no exception to the rule that poor posture, regardless of causes, will cause and accelerate degeneration of you discs, vertebra, and spine.  This is because of a law of physiology called Wolff’s law that states that anytime there is mechanical stress on a bone, more bone is produced in that area.

Wolff’s Law

Wolff’s law is very helpful in a person with proper posture because it helps build stronger bones when necessary in situations that it is needed. I.e. if you build stronger muscles, they will put more force on the bones and the bones will need to be stronger. However, if you are putting more stress on your spine because your spinal shapes or structure is abnormal (like your car’s front end is misaligned leading to uneven tire wear) then your discs will wear out because they have uneven stresses being placed on them. This change in your center of gravity and spinal shape causes reduced spinal motion, leading to decreased disc height and increased stress on the vertebra, leading to spinal arthritis in the way of bone spurs (osteophytes) and degenerative disc disease or even disc bulging or disc herniation.

Structurally focused chiropractic care and prevent or even correct (depending on the severity of progression) these abnormal spinal changes. When this happens you are capable of normal and optimal posture to not only prevent, slow or even stop the progression of this spinal degenerative disease but improve your current height! This happens for a couple of reasons:

• First is primarily because the shape of your spine can be in a state that is shorter when it is abnormal. I.e. too much curve in your midback means you’ll be hunched over and unable to stand as tall. No curve or a reversed curve in means your head will protrude forward instead of over your shoulders limiting your ability to stand as tall.
  • Many people also have scoliosis or similar non-scoliotic but still abnormal curves or shifts in their spine from side to side. Your spine should be straight when looking at from the front or back. When it’s curved or shifted to the side you will have less overall height. Your spine is essentially one specific height but when it moves side to side in shifts or curves (scoliosis) you head will sit lower than if your spine was perfectly straight looking at it from the front or back.
• The second issue is that these abnormal postures that cause disc degeneration as previously discussed, reduced the height of the discs between your vertebras. If some or even many of your discs are degenerating they lose water which is what makes it capable of being compressed without losing its height. As a result, the height of your spine will be less than if it was in a normal posture.

Is it really possible to get taller?

It is not uncommon for patients under structurally focused chiropractic care to regain height that they have lost. Some are not aware of this height loss and some chiropractic patients didn’t even realize their full height potential because they thought that their abnormal posture was normal. This is why it’s important to be evaluated by a structurally focused chiropractor who is trained to properly identify and treat these spinal abnormalities. Medical doctors are only capable of treating symptoms with drugs and surgery. Both of these treatments are unable to correct spinal and posture abnormalities. They will never be able to improve spinal function and posture and thusly increase your height. Even many traditional chiropractors who focus on treating symptoms instead of correcting spinal structure are unable to improve a patients’ spinal structure and height.

Not all patients who are treated by a structural chiropractor have the potential to improve their height and get taller. Some patients are limited because their spine has degenerated too severely to regain any of their original height. They can often still be helped by chiropractic. The human body has limitations and the progression may be too far along to make much change in their height due to degeneration. Other limitations may be that the patient’s overall spinal posture has significant deformities. While structural chiropractic care may be necessary, the end result will not lead to a change in height.

If you want to find out if structurally focused chiropractic care at Corrective Chiropractic can help call 252-758-7583 and set up a consultation today.