What is Scoliosis?

Scoliosis is a progressive, sideways curvature of the spine, and if left untreated, could cause many health issues.

Find It Early
Fix It Early

Most people think of scoliosis as just cosmetic distortion of the spine affecting how someone looks. As terrible as the postural distortions can “look”, the danger is the distortion of the body’s organs, ligaments, muscles, tendons, and nerves. The effects of scoliosis include poor posture, lack of mobility, shoulder humping, muscle weakness, and all types of pain and degenerative issues. In many cases, scoliosis can affect normal body functions such as digestion, heart, lung, and breathing just to name a few.

Scoliosis in Children

Scoliosis is commonly first seen in children between the ages of 10 and 15. However, it can occur in younger children aged 3 to 10 years (juvenile scoliosis) and in babies (infantile scoliosis). It is imperative to get kids checked before the curvature has too much time to progress. Girls should be checked by 10 and boys by 12 years of age before the onset of puberty.

Adult Scoliosis (Denovo Scoliosis)

Denovo scoliosis is associated with coronal plane deformity in older patients that is of a progressive nature expediting the degeneration of the spinal column. Over the course of our lives we experience an enormous amount of trauma to our spines and our bodies. Whether it’s through athletic endeavors, sports, daily trauma of sitting at a desk, car accidents, falls and injury. This can lead to the spine compensation from those injuries or poor posture habits and cause improper curvatures to form. Regardless of how the scoliosis came to be, it is imperative to the long term health of your spine to take care of it. The symptoms of this can include postural collapsing and distoritions, leg length inequality, low back pain, mid back pain, numbness and tingling in the extremities, disc bulges and herniations, sciatica, just to name a few.