Can a Herniated Disc Heal Without Surgery? (Spinal Decompression)

If you did MRIs, of all people over 50, something like 40% of them will have bulging discs. Yet the vast majority of them will have no symptoms.

The biggest misconception is that once you have it, you have it. It's true you do. Once you have a herniated disc, you will always have a herniated disc. But a disc is a very dynamic structure. It has the ability to retract back if you give it the right environment.

When somebody's having the desire to live a longer life, you want your stuff to be intact, you want your spine to be healthy. So you might see somebody like yourself well in advance.

The body gives you small signals, tiny signals that you can totally live with and you can, no big deal, ignore it. But if it gives you a signal, you should not ignore it.

I'm Dr. Charles Mok and I want to introduce Dr. Rosenberg from California, where I'm here in Michigan where it's freezing and you're in sunny Los Angeles area and want to kind of describe your practice and we're going to talk about this kind of from an anti aging and longevity framework.

Yes. So thanks for having me. I have been in practice for 30 years. I am a chiropractor by trade. But in the last decade I've been very strongly involved in treating patients with severe condition like bulging and herniated disc. And the key difference to my practice is that we don't do traditional chiropractic. We utilize very advanced technologies to treat those conditions and to allow the patient to have an option to not have surgery. So in the conservative care world, we offer treatment that are extremely effective. And if they tried physical therapy, they tried regular chiropractic, they tried medication, they tried whatever it is that they tried and it didn't work. We created, I created and curated a treatment plan that's called advanced spinal restoration. And it will allow the patient to get full relief and result from their severe disc condition in a very safe and effective way. So I'm extremely passionate about that.

So let's dig in that a little bit. So, you know, from a surgical side, we know that particularly back surgeries have a don't have the best outcome for most disc disease where it does perhaps in say, stenosis of the cervical spine. But a lot of conventional thinking is that once you have a bulging disc, it just is what it is. But kind of describe what you see over time with some interventions, energy inventions, what kind of happens to these tissues over time.

So the biggest misconception is that once you have it, you have It. It's true, you do. Once you have a herniated disc, you will always have a herniated disc. But a disc is a very dynamic structure that sits between the two vertebras in our spine. And it's dynamic because it has the ability to. So it's like a sponge full of water, or I call it like a donut full of jelly. But it has the ability to retract back if you give it the right environment. It's a mechanical. When you have a herniated disc of the spine, it's a mechanical. And so you need to fix it and address it mechanically. You can do physical therapy and stretch and strengthen. You can do injection to just reduce the inflammation and the pain. But if you mechanically do not give the disc the space to come back to its normal space, to its normal parameters, then you're not gonna cure it. But if you do, then you have a much greater chance of curing it to a certain extent, almost completely, because it does have the ability to heal itself. And that will reduce the symptomology and basically allow the patient to continue with their activity with daily living with no limitation. The other forms of a mechanical treatment is when they do surgery because they actually go in and they cut it off. They cut off the bulge or hernia that presses on the nerve. Many patients have herniated and bulging, and they're asymptomatic. So, you know, you don't kind of fix what's not broken, but that's how you're able to fix that tissue because it is dynamic and it can be fixed if you create that mechanism, mechanical environment for it to go back.

I remember reading that if you did MRIs, of all people over 50, something like 40% of them will have bulging discs, yet the vast majority of them will have no symptoms. And by the same token, people have had bulging discs with symptoms because we can't tell by MRI whether or not you're having pain. You can get them to get functional improvement and go on with their life. And also, I think as you get older, let's say 30 or 40, is a common age that people have onset of symptoms. But isn't it case where as you get older, that disc sort of dries up a little bit anyways and more Disease doesn't really accelerate because of the disease, because of the disc itself, maybe more because of entrapment of bones and stenosis and that sort of thing.

So, yeah, as you get older, the degeneration is just like when you have wrinkles in the Face, as you get older, you're going to have it. It's just part of aging and losing elastin and collagen and all of that. But a disc can rehydrate if you decompress it. So one of the elements that we're using in our advanced spinal restoration treatment that I created is called non surgical spinal decompression. It is a computer generated technology. It's a system, it's a table. And we actually program the progression regression and the pool of the disc. And by creating that kind of a pumping mechanism, the body sends back fluid and nutrients into the disc and you can basically rehydrate that. So the way we explain is think about a sponge that you have in the sink that is just getting dehydrated and it's dry, and so it shrinks, but when you put water on it, it starts expanding. And so the same thing happens to the disc when you decompress it, it expands. And the nutrients and water that's being sent naturally by the body by that kind of a dynamic motion, it's what brings the disc space and the disc material back, you know, the nutrients back into the disc, which expands the disc space. So, yes, you know, certain things in degenerations you can control, but if treated the right way, you can stop the progression from getting worse, and that will alleviate a lot of the symptoms that the patient has.

Okay. And if we talk to the public about chiropractic, they're thinking about getting their back cracked, maybe some stretching and stuff. But you talk about using different energy modalities, such as shockwave therapy and electromagnetic stimulation. Can I go over what are the things people should maybe be thinking about besides just either surgery or even physical therapy or standard kind of backtracking chiropractic?

Right. So we, you know, back cracking, or adjustments, as we call it in a technical term. It's only one facet of what chiropractors can do. And of course, we're trained in doing that. All of us, some of us have different techniques. There are a lot more conservative techniques, a little bit more active techniques. There's many different things, many different ways of doing it. But, you know, with the advancements of medical technology and utilizing all these different modalities, we can achieve a lot greater things than just cracking the spine and adjusting. Because patients that come into my office, and if they have what we call a hot disc and extremely inflamed disc, we're not going to adjust them because we're going to make them worse. And they're going to be in a lot more pain. So you got to address it in a lot more of a conservative way. And we use laser therapy, which is Class 4 laser, which really helps with inflammation and stimulates blood flow. We use softwave therapy, which is a form of a shockwave, but it's a lot less aggressive. It's acoustic wave and it's kind of like a tissue regeneration technology. We use electrical stimulation that's more of an electrical analgesia. It's a pain management device. Also it's a nerve stimulator. So it reduces the nerve, the pain that you get from nerve being irritated. Of course, we use the non surgical spinal decompression. You know, we have emsculpt and Emsculpt Neo, which are brand new devices that have been recently FDA cleared for rebuilding muscle. And all of these things help a lot if you put them all together in a very specific pattern, specific way, and use it in the right frequency, the right cadence, you know, when you kind of stack them, it compounds and the patients feel much better. So these are very, very important treatments and elements that help us achieve the result without adjusting, without even, as we call it, cracking the bone.

Going forward in this discussion with longevity, I like to think about the conditions that shorten your lifespan and they're largely tied into your physical abilities. And if we look at predictors of longevity, there's certainly your genetics, certainly your chronologic age, but there's also your ability to carry out exercise, something we call VO2 max, which is how much oxygen you extract when you're working out or how much strength you have relative to your weight. But back pain does definitely cause people have decreased mobility. Taking pain pills is obviously the wrong course because people get addicted to them and it doesn't really solve the problem. And I think that it goes well beyond back pain in chiropractic and traditional medicine and physical therapy, Hip pain, knee pain, all the different degeneration of the body can use some of those modalities for other maladies. Besides the back that we talked about, acoustic wave photobiomodulation, which is laser electrical stimulation, electromechanical stimulation, the emsculpt. Can we review some of those?

Sure. So one of the biggest thing that you just talked about, which is the longevity piece, which, you know, it's a big topic right now in healthcare, which I love, I think it's so amazing how everything is kind of shifting, right? It's, it's, the whole thing is shifting. But the biggest thing to know and understand is that the actual biggest organ in the body that that is the big precursor for longevity is muscle. If you don't have a strong muscle, then you're going to become very weak. And that would be a very determined factor for anybody's longevity. When you have back pain and you cannot function, you cannot walk, you cannot do certain things, or if you have nerve damage as a result of a herniated disc that causes back pain, you will develop what we call muscle atrophy. Muscle atrophy is one of the biggest thing that will affect your longevity. And so it doesn't matter what kind of drug you're going to take, if you're not going to work on the muscle and strengthen yourself, it's not gonna work. You know, I don't know if you've heard, but I'm sure there's a lot of talk about the new drug of choice that people are, the doctors are prescribing now, which is the gabapentin, because now they cannot prescribe all the opioids and the narcotics that they're prescribing the gabapentin, which is a nerve, you know, a nerve drug. And those patients are walking like zombies. And the sad thing is that they gave them, okay, if it doesn't work, take a higher dose and if it doesn't work, triple the dose. And kind of, that's what they're doing. But that masks the symptoms and makes the patient much weake, weaker and weaker. And so when I see patients in my practice and we're talking about longevity and we talk about lifespan versus health span and all of those topics. For example, the Emsculpt Neo, which is a device that we recently added to our scope of work, it includes this particular device works with radio frequency and high intensity electromagnetic stimulation. It's the only device in the market that actually reduces fat and builds muscle. Now, initially it was used for aesthetic purposes because everybody wants to be sculpted and have the six pack. But the reality of things, when your muscles become extremely weak and becomes atrophied, you start having what we call fat proliferation. And you can develop a condition called sarcoidosis, which is basically muscle wasting. And you need to build those muscles. And it's very directly affect, very directly correlated to back pain. Because when you have back pain, you can't function, you can't walk, so you become very weak. If you have nerve damage, your muscles, the leg muscles become extremely weak. The core is very weak, the glutes. So if you don't strengthen that, if you don't strengthen Those muscles, you know, you can't rehabilitate. We can fix the disc, but if we're not going to strengthen you, how are you going to have a better lifespan? So utilizing something like Emsculpt Neo, utilizing another device that we currently add called Emsella which is for pelvic floor to stimulate all these muscles in the pelvic floor. These are all the same kinetic chain.

So.

So when you apply the softwave to reduce inflammation, you apply the laser to reduce inflammation, you apply the neuromed to reduce nerve pain, you strengthen the muscle and you fix the disc. We get 90% results from all these therapies and it's amazing, people feel so much better.

You know it's interesting is my background is in the cosmetic space in addition to longevity space and yours is a musculoskeletal. I own much of the same equipment. So we've got a couple of the Emsculpt devices, we've got an emcell like device, we've got three of the devices that are like softwave there with the percursor called Storch Dactor that we use for breast capsule contractures and different healing issues we have. One of the other things you mentioned was the photobiomodulation. We use that as well for tissue healing and wound healing after surgeries. Yeah, and I'm thinking about the emsculpt is that, you know, we use it for helping people get a flatter stomach. But just mechanically you're using the same paddles, using the abdomen, strapping them on the back.

Yeah, we use. So the Emsculpt Neo just received FDA clarification just like about, I want to say 10 months ago for sciatic pain, it's incredible. And then maybe about a month and a half ago for back pain and neuropathies. So we basically use them directly, the same way as you use them for aesthetics, but they have different setting for functional wellness. So you can use them on the abdomen to strengthen the core, you can use them on the glute because you know, listen, people that have, imagine people that have back pain, they're not going to be able to do 20,000 sit ups or 20,000 squats. They're not going to just, there's no way, it doesn't matter who you are. And so they cannot even perform all those treatments that are, or all those exercises that are being prescribed under physical therapy. But if they get that done before and they strengthen their core and muscles before, then they can go into physical therapy and then they can fully rehabilitate themselves. So that's how we use it. It's really amazing. And we can put it directly on the spine, but we have a certain setup, the machine has a certain setting that can be used on the spine.

Okay, I'm actually looking into that now because we've had this technology since 19 and I'm reading about that, but I haven't used practical application. But it is basically the same technology. And we don't have the Emsella brand, but we have this Restora chair that does the same thing as for women with pelvic floor weakness and urinary incontinence. That's been a been a big hit. We do a lot of regenerative medicine, which is usually stem cells or platelet rich plasma. And we'll do acoustic wave or shockwave therapy in the knees before or after it activates stem cells. We'll do photobiomodulation, same concept, get better uptake. And I haven't really been applying the Emsculpt to those patients, but something we'll look into.

Do you do those modalities before the injection or after the injection?

They can be done either way. So they've even shown that if you take a bag of fat that you're going to prepare stem cells from and irradiate it with photobiomodulation or use acoustic wave, you actually activate more stem cells even out of the body. But typically we can do it right before we do the injection and you can even do it as a standalone. So I did a genetic testing back 10 years ago and I said I'd be at risk for knee arthritis and my mom had her knees replaced at about my age now. And I did imaging studies and looked at the space in my joints and I did acoustic wave therapy every two months for two years and I did PRP injections to my knees every four years. And here it is 10 years later and they actually looked younger than my knees did 10 years earlier. They weren't a problem then. And I think this is where we're getting into. You know, you're dealing with people already having pain and I'm thinking about before you're having pain, genetically testing for issues and getting at it then and really turn the clock way back. So if you get some sciatica, it's either in your peripheral nervous system or in your back. Having somebody diagnose where that's coming from and then getting on that really fast and hard so that you can get it to settle down and keep your activities up. Yeah, sciatic nerve pain can lead to decreased walking in certain activities. And we look at like you talked a lot about how activity is a kind of a predictor of longevity. So is balance and strength. And I think those are key issues tied into having back or hip or knee pain is your balance is off and your ability to recover from a fall is also worsened because you can't do those if you're falling. You have two things. One is the balance to not fall, but then that explosive movement to recover from a fall. And both those are impaired when you have some joint disease 100%.

Also a lot of our patients, when they have back issues, herniated disc, bulging disc and some nerve damage, they will develop neuropathy. And you know, neuropathies when you have already extensive nerve damage and that will affect the balance significantly. So it's like you gotta kind of work backwards. You can stimulate the nerves and the feet with all the photobiomodulation. The electrical stimulation, the one that we have, which is specifically has the 40 different functions, one of which is for neuropathy. You can even apply the emsculpt Neo, which is the radio frequency. So you almost need to work backwards. And then you can also, you have to address the nerve root which is in the lumbar spine where the disc is pressing. So if you start addressing all of those elements, then you can start reducing the neuropathy sensation, which causes the balance issue, which will end up really causing a bad fall. And then, you know, the sequence of events after that, it's like, it's like, it's like a snowball, snowball effect. So you have to address those things today. And just taking medication is not the solution to this problem at all.

Yeah, so then we have groups of patients or groups of people who are doing things that once they have disease. And I also think about it preventatively, chiropractic care, physical therapy, stretching. And we're kind of incurring more and more people that are not having full confidence in the health care system, which really is a disease care system. I mean, they're not badmouthing it that way, but it was designed to pay for diseases when they occur. And not until the Affordable Health Care act, so called Obamacare act, was any preventative screening even covered insurance. So a mammogram would not have to be covered prior to 2010 of the Affordable Health Care act because that was not considered medically necessary. And we look at things that you could predict years in advance and we're not screening for those things. Examples would be cancer. We Usually wait until you get it. Even with the cancer screening we have, we can only theoretically pick up about one out of four cancers. But there's ways people can screen for that with a full body MRI and may some blood testing. Cardiovascular disease, that's the big one. If you don't have chest pain and your cholesterol is normal, we're not looking at this, but we can either do a CAT scan or an ultrasound and see if you have blockages in your arteries, I mean, predict heart disease well in advance. And neurocognitive decline. We can measure that with an MRI and measure basically the mass to liquid ratios and predict when you're going to get dementia or Alzheimer's. Thing about when somebody's having the desire to live a longer life, you want your stuff to be intact, so you want your eyes to be healthy. Make sure you don't have glaucoma. Check it years in advance, because once you get it, you're blind, it's too late. Macular degeneration. You want to know that way in advance. You want your teeth to be healthy? I want my teeth to be nice and young. I have a dentist that uses ozone and other things. You want your spine to be healthy, so you might see somebody like yourself well in advance. Want your joints to be healthy, you want your heart and your lungs to be healthy, liver to be healthy. And we can check those things now. And how might somebody who just, for example, I go to the stretch zone that we have these places called stretch zones here, I go there like once a week and get stretched. And I just found that as I'm getting older, you know, things are getting a little tighter. I do work out pretty aggressively, so that's helpful. I see a physical therapist once a month who measures my mechanics and helps me adjust stuff. But when might somebody seek out somebody like yourself or in chiropractic care, if they're not really having symptoms yet, but they want to optimize their health and longevity.

So the thing is, it all depends on the activities that they're performing. So a lot of patients that I see, they love pickleball or they love golfing, or they love tennis. And so here and there, they will always have a little aches and pains. I mean, our body is so dynamic. We're not sedentary. I mean, we're not like robots. We move around even though we're, you know, whatever it is that we're doing, whether it's sports or, you know, you just have to get in and out of the car. You need to lift a bag of groceries. If you're a mom, you need to carry a baby. I mean there's always something. So I think that the body gives you signals and it doesn't always have to give you a bad signal. It doesn't have to be like oh my God, I cannot walk, I have a full blown on sciatica. It gives you a little signal and I think the key is to recognize those signals that the body is giving you and address them. Just like you said, you work out, but you, you went to do stretching because maybe sometimes here and there you feel a little tight. But you're a healthy guy, take care of yourself. Same thing with everything else. You know, in my family cardiovascular disease is common. So I need to go and just do the genetic testing and check it out and kind of make sure I eat healthy, exercise and do whatever I need to do to, to prevent those things. So you don't have to wait until you cannot walk. I always tell my patients it never goes from 0 to 100 unless you have a major trauma. The body gives you small signals, tiny signals that you can totally live with and you can, yeah, no big deal, ignore it. But if it gives you a signal, you should not ignore it. You should, you should take care of it, you should go check it out, you should see what is it you need to do in order to avoid going from that 0 to 10 to finally getting to 100 where you cannot walk because you do not get. I always tell the patients, you come here and you're telling me that you have the problem for 30 years. Well, it's going to be difficult to fix a 30 year old problem in 2, 3 visit. It's going to take a little bit of time, but for the sake of our conversation and longevity, if you start noticing decline in different activities, if you start noticing a little aches and pains with different things that you do, then you need to address it. You want to take it, you want to take care of it, you want to check it out, see what is there. Maybe it's just a little bulge. You know, a hernia doesn't become a hernia, it has to turn. It starts from a bulge and it becomes into a hernia, then becomes into, you know, protrusion. And it kind of goes that those routes. So always listen to your body and muscular skeletal is not just a genetic thing because it gives you physical manifestation if something is wrong with you.

And I think about the other conditions I talked about, there really is no warning sign. So my brother in law Is in his young 50s, he's got young children, married later in life, and he got a. Just asked for a out of pocket paid screening test of his heart and it turns out he's got his artery called the widowmaker blocked at 80%, no symptoms whatsoever. He's mountain bike riding and stuff. So now he's getting that managed aggressively, obviously. And I encounter this occasionally. And then if we look at, I had a guy that worked with me, he's in the 60s, his mother had Alzheimer's and he was concerned about getting Alzheimer's, but he had no symptoms whatsoever. So we measured his brain, he was actually in the lower 13 percentile, which means he's probably get Alzheimer's in the next eight years. We're able to reverse that through certain mechanisms. Same thing with screening for cancer. So I guess what I'm wondering about is that you got me intrigued is I want to have a badass back when I'm 90. What should I be doing now because I have no symptoms in my back. What should I be doing now to strengthen my back and prevent or mitigate future problems?

Well, clearly you're doing already because first of all, you need to exercise, which you are stretching, which you're already doing and very important to again, you know, strengthening. So you want to strengthen the core, strengthen the glutes, strengthen the legs, those strong muscles, pelvic floor, which is a new thing that everybody's talking about. It's been around forever. But now we have a lot more awareness around that because when you strengthen this whole kinetic chain, then the spine is going to be much healthier. But you know, you can have an MRI to see if something is wrong with you, but the idea is that it's not necessary. What's necessary is to keep you healthy from a muscular skeletal perspective. Regular chiropractic adjustments if you need to, massage therapy, stretching, strengthening, those will keep the spine healthy.

Yeah, like I say, the MRI is not going to tell you anything. If you, if we MRI everybody, we're going to see disease. Right? Now you can get a full body MRI, right, for around $2,000. And it's a lower quality MRI, but it's designed to pick up tumors the size of a peanut, let's say. But they can look at the spine or you can do a more detailed one of the spine. You're going to see disease. If you're in your 50s and 60s, it's just that or you see anomalies. It doesn't mean it's a disease. But then we should think about slowing those things down and reversing it. So go with your, you mentioned your technology, your trademark technology. Again, let's just kind of summarize how you approach people different than regular chiropractic and how people might get ahold of you.

Well, you know, if you have back pain, if you were told you need surgery, if you had epidural injection for back pain and it didn't work for you, or even if you had surgery and it failed, no matter where you are in that spectrum of back pain as a result of herniated, bulging disc, pinched nerve, spinal stenosis, all of these common conditions that are spine related and you want to get another opinion and be educated on what's available out there for you, then I encourage you to at least check it out. And you know, I always say, you know, you're the patient, you're going to make a decision. But my job and my mission is to educate you on the options that are available to, to you. Because when you know what the options are available to you, you can make a better decision and not just go with whatever someone tells you. Of course, if you go to a surgeon, the first thing they're going to tell you to do surgery because that's what they're trained in. And I, I don't badmouth anybody. I think those surgeons are all great and they're very well trained and educated and they know what they're doing. But this is an extremely sensitive anatomy and you just don't know how your body will react to it. So if you're facing any of those problems, if you have limitations with any activities and if it's affecting your lifestyle, then I think you should definitely look into what we're doing or what other people are doing around you. I'll be more than happy to, no matter where you are in the country, to do a consultation that's complimentary because I have really a passion of educating people of what's available to them and maybe find someone next to them that have the same technology that can offer them relief. But they can find me on social media, spinatomycenters.com and that's spelled like spinatomy S P I N A T O M Y Or they can directly email me, which is Dr. Rosenberg spinatomycenters.com and I'll be happy to answer questions and give you advice and direct you maybe to someone in your area that has similar technologies that we do. Or you can come visit us in la. We can take care of you. That too.

I might stop by next time I'm there. I was in Beverly Hills a couple weeks ago and, you know, I hear about the traffic and all the different negatives about la, but I'm like, this weather is awesome. I didn't see a cloud for a week. And I was right at the top of the Beverly Hills. I could see the ocean and the Hollywood sign in downtown. Oh, my gosh, it was just amazing. So if you or somebody you know could benefit from this information, please share it with them and we'll connect you with Dr. Rosenberg's information in the notes. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Sam.