Lesions

What exactly is a spinal cord lesion?

Can a chiropractor identify if there’s a lesion on the spinal cord.

Thanks.

i believe you want an MRI for that definitive identification.

but for the patient, if the lesion is in the right place, you should prove positive for l’hermittes. i did. it was great!

Me too. Love my Lhermittes and my lead-like legs :slight_smile:

According to the chiropractor one of my lumbar vertebrae is mis-aligned which accounts for the weakness in one leg.

My concern is that the weakness is due to a lesion and the vertebrae may not be mis-aligned.

Or can a chiropracter following a spinal check identify if a vertebrae is out of position.

If he is good at his job, and assuming he is not a quack, he should be able to feel by manual manipulation if something is out of alignment. He would certainly not be able to feel a lesion.

Although I do think a skilled practitioner with reasonable knowledge of anatomy might be able to make an educated guess about whether symptoms are suggestive of neurological damage, even if it’s not their field.

Years and years ago (way before diagnosis) I went to a sports physio, who found my calf muscles “the shortest he had ever seen”, and asked if I’d been ill.

At that point, I’d not had any cause to suspect underlying illness (I’d gone about a troublesome recurring tendon injury), so I was quite shocked and even put out by any suggestion I’d been ill,

I said: “Why, could this be caused by illness, then?”, and he said: “Yes!”

Obviously, looking back, I can see that despite being a “lowly” sports physio, he probably realised or suspected I had MS, or something of the kind.

He didn’t go as far as advising me to see my GP. He was a private practitioner - not even part of the NHS. He may have felt that if I clearly didn’t know, it wasn’t his place to tell me, and he may already have said too much.

I’m not really sure what the professional ethics are if a private practitioner who’s not a doctor suspects something serious the patient is clearly not aware of. Should he have said: “I think you need to see your doctor?”

He didn’t, and I just quit the sessions thinking: “What a strange and upsetting thing to say.” :frowning:

Tina

thanks for the replies.

Having identified that I have a problems with my right leg the chiropractor is assuming it’s because the vertebrae are out of synch.

My concern is that the problem may be due to a spinal lesion and manipulation of the vertebrae may cause problems.

When my problems started, the Dx was Transverse Inflammatory Myelitis (TIM) changed to MS after a year.

I still have the MRI prints (before you could get a CD with them) and since it was done privately, they were given to me as a matter of course. These show an inflamed area, subsequently called a lesion, centred on the T6 vertebra, and just overlapping onto T4 and T6.

Visually, it is a slightly increased amount of grey shading inside these vertebrae (blink, and you have missed it) and there is no sign of misalignment at all. A (smaller) such area developed later, and was simply referred to as “another lesion”. My most obvious symptom is a loss of left leg function. If your problem is like mine, avoid manipulation until you have had an MRI and a neurologist’s opinion of the scans.

Geoff