A patient left us a 1-star review recently. Not because their pain didn’t improve. Not because they had a bad experience with the team. They gave us one star because we took x-rays on their first visit, and they didn’t like the radiation or the cost that came with it.
I’ll be honest, that one stuck with me. Not because I think we did anything wrong, but because it tells me we didn’t do a good enough job explaining why we do this before they walked in the door. So let me do that now.
The short version: we don’t guess
If you walked into your dentist with a toothache and they started drilling before taking a single image, you’d walk right back out. Same idea here. Your spine is a stack of 24 moving bones sitting on top of your pelvis, protecting your spinal cord and every nerve that runs to the rest of your body. I’m not going to start adjusting it based on where you point and say “it hurts here.”
X-rays let me see the actual structure. Are the discs holding their height or collapsing? Is there degeneration nobody warned you about? Has an old car accident from fifteen years ago left a curve that’s been quietly getting worse? Is there something that means I should not adjust a certain way, or shouldn’t adjust at all and instead send you straight to an MD? I can’t answer any of that by feel. Neither can anyone else, no matter how many years they’ve been practicing.
At our Greenway Plaza and Memorial City offices, most of the people we see are corporate professionals in their 30s, 40s and 50s who’ve been sitting at a desk for twenty years. What I find on their films is almost never what they expected. That picture changes how I treat them, and it usually changes it for the better.
Now let’s talk about the radiation
This is the part that scared our reviewer, and I get it. “Radiation” is a heavy word. So let’s use real numbers instead of feelings.
We measure radiation dose in units called millisieverts, or mSv. You’re exposed to radiation every single day just by existing on this planet. It comes from the sun, from the ground, from the food you eat, from the granite countertop in your kitchen. The average person in the United States absorbs about 3 mSv a year from this background radiation, and nobody thinks twice about it.
A full set of spinal x-rays runs somewhere around 1.5 mSv, and often less depending on which views we need. That’s roughly the same amount of natural background radiation you’d pick up over about six months of ordinary life in Houston. A single cross-country flight exposes you to a fraction of a millisievert because you’re closer to the sun at altitude. A chest CT scan, by comparison, is around 7 mSv, several times more than what we take.
So when someone tells me they’re worried about the radiation from their spinal films, my honest answer is that the risk is extremely small and it buys us a level of clarity that protects you far more than that tiny dose could ever hurt you. We’re not taking pictures for fun. We take the views we need, and we don’t repeat them without a reason.
And the cost
The second half of that review was about money, so let’s not dodge it. X-rays cost something. We’re upfront about that before we take them, and if a patient tells us it’s a hard no, we have that conversation.
Here’s how I think about it. The imaging is a one-time investment at the start of care that shapes everything after it. It’s the difference between me building a plan around your actual spine and me building a plan around a guess. A guess is cheaper on day one and far more expensive over the months you’d spend not getting better. I’ve seen too many people bounce between practitioners for years, spending thousands, because nobody ever looked at the structure underneath the pain.
We built our whole approach around getting you results faster, and precision x-ray analysis is the foundation of that. Skipping it to save a little on the first visit is the kind of savings that costs you later.
So what would I say to that reviewer?
I’d say thank you, actually. Not for the star rating, but for showing me a gap. You clearly didn’t understand why we do this before you sat in the chair, and that’s on us to explain better.
We’re not going to stop taking x-rays. It’s core to how nine chiropractors across our three Houston offices practice safe, precise care instead of guesswork. But if you’ve got questions about the radiation, the cost, or why any of it matters for your specific situation, ask us. Ask before we take a single film. We would rather spend ten minutes answering your questions than have you leave confused.
If you’re dealing with back pain, neck pain, or sciatica and you want a real look at what’s going on instead of a guess, that’s exactly what we do. Come see us at Galleria, Greenway Plaza, or Memorial City and we’ll show you what your spine actually looks like.