Leg Length and Your Health

When you think about your health, seldom does the length of your legs come to mind. However, there are those of us roaming around town with one leg anatomically longer than the other. Believe it or not, it is not uncommon to have legs of different lengths.

What is not so well understood by those suffering from this anatomic discrepancy is the overall impact it can have on your health. Whether you are walking or participating in high impact, physical activity, discrepancy in leg length will cause your body to compensate for the lack of stability and balance this condition creates.

Your local chiropractor can give you insight into the implications this condition can have on your muscles, hips, spine, and overall wellness. The body will naturally try to create stability, sometimes sacrificing proper joint position, muscle flexibility, and spinal integrity to make up for the difference in leg length. This may be adding stress to parts of the body during normal day to day activities.

When the body begins to compensate for a condition such as varied leg length, subluxations in the spine can occur. A subluxation is a misalignment of one or more of the 24 bones in the spine, which most of the time are painless. A chiropractor is focused on the spinal column because it protects part of the nervous system. The nervous system is made up of your brain, spinal cord and 12 miles of nerves that are networked throughout your body. The nervous system is literally your body’s power plant. It controls every single organ, tissue and cell in the body. When a subluxation occurs in your spine, the misalignment of the bone is putting pressure on the nerves that carry these messages out to your body. This interferes with the brain’s ability to communicate with the body. When these important signals no longer make it to their destination, your health can be at risk.

This is where your chiropractor steps in to analyze and adjust subluxations, removing the interference within the nervous system. These adjustments ensure your nervous system can function at an optimal level and all electrical messages can make it to their destination. This is the basic philosophy behind chiropractic care.

In terms of your leg length, we can now see why compensation made within the spine to provide stability could in turn affect other areas in the body. Although leg length and overall health are not often considered to be related, the logic of chiropractic care would say otherwise.

By continuing to place stress on the body during daily activity, you can create subluxations without ever knowing it. Besides reduced nervous system function, these subluxations can lead to other degenerative illnesses within the bones and surrounding tissues. This is why it is ultimately important for someone with a condition such as varied leg length to have themselves checked by a chiropractor. Through analysis, adjustments, and other helpful tools like shoe lifts, your chiropractor can help your body function at its optimal potential.