It depends on which phase of care you are in. Most care plans here start at three visits a week and space out as your spine starts holding its new position. After that, maintenance runs about once a month, or only when something flares. Your doctor tells you when each phase ends.
Dr. Brandon Siegmund, one of the nine doctors at CORE Chiropractic, walks through how we set that schedule in the video below.
Why do chiropractic visits start close together?
Because the muscles around a stuck segment have adapted to it. The side that shortened keeps pulling the vertebra back toward where it was. Frequent visits early on hold the correction long enough for those muscles to adapt to the new position, the same way strength only changes with regular sessions at the gym.
One visit a week in that early phase is a lot like one workout a week. It is better than nothing, but the pull back to the old position usually wins in between. We wrote a longer post on why a chiropractor asks for 3 times a week at the start, if you want the full reasoning.
If you work in Greenway Plaza, our Richmond Avenue office is a few minutes from most of the towers, which makes the early weeks easier to fit around a workday. The same goes for the Galleria office on Saint James Place if you are near Post Oak.
When do chiropractic visits space out?
When your spine starts holding its position between visits. We can feel it: the segment that was stuck on your first visit moves freely when you come back. Once that holds, the gaps between visits get longer. You should never have to guess where you are in the plan. Ask, and your doctor will tell you.
Every visit gives us a reading on that. Your x-ray notes come up before each adjustment, and we check by hand the same day, which is how chiropractors know where to adjust and whether the last adjustment held. When the answer keeps coming back yes, the schedule opens up.
How quickly that happens depends on the person and how long the problem has been there. We wrote about how long it takes for chiropractic to work in a separate post, so this one can stay on the schedule itself.
How often should you see a chiropractor for maintenance?
For most people, about once a month once the corrective phase is done. Some prefer a little more often. Maintenance is for keeping a spine where it is, so it only works after the problem has been corrected. If you are already in pain, a monthly visit is not maintenance. It is too little care for the problem you have.
What wears on a stable spine does not stop. Nobody is about to quit sitting at a desk all day or stop driving the Katy Freeway to get to work, and that kind of load adds up. A monthly visit catches the drift before it turns into the next episode. There is more on what chiropractic maintenance care involves in our longer post on it.
Do you have to keep going to the chiropractor forever?
No. The corrective phase has an end, and you should be told when you reach it. What happens after that is your choice. Some people come in on a monthly schedule. Others come back only when something flares, and we might not see them for two years.
The fear of being locked into care forever is one of the most common reasons people never start. That fear costs more than the visits would. People who wait on a back or neck problem usually wait years, and what is possible at year two is smaller than what was possible at month two.
When should you see a chiropractor in the first place?
When back or neck pain keeps coming back, or when it has started changing how you sleep or how long you can sit. The earlier we measure it, the more options there are. We start with an exam and x-rays before anyone adjusts anything.
If something on the exam or the x-ray points to a problem outside what we treat, we tell you and refer you to the right physician. Sorting that out on the first visit is part of the job.
Visit frequency is something we set with you, not for you, and it changes as you do. You can schedule online at any of our three Houston offices, and if you want to know what your first chiropractor appointment looks like before you book, we laid that out too.