WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRACTION, DISTRATCTION, AND DECOMPRESSION?
Obviously, traction has been around for thousands of years. It was always accepted that upright weight bearing produced a mechanical load that increased pressure somewhere. A traction pull is however not always beneficial. Scientific American, 1998, rated traction to be of little or no value in the examination of efficacious therapies for low back pain. This surprising finding is supported by many studies that report traction can often times signal a nociceptive splinting response and put the patient’s back muscles in spasm, resisting any attempts to effect a change on the disc proper. Distraction, a term used to describe a flexion distraction technique, attempts to reposition the spine from the offending lesion. This technique has been shown to be very effective, even though potentially damanging to the person performing the technique and largely dependent of the technician skills. Again, like traction, distraction procedures are limited in the ability to reduce the intra discal press
