From Chronic Pain to Healing: What Your Nashua Chiropractor Wants You to Know About Recent Discoveries

September 24, 2025

If you're dealing with chronic low back pain, you know how vexing it can be when treatments only provide temporary relief. While many questions remain unanswered, current research is making progress in explaining disc deterioration and exploring innovative approaches that may lead to more successful treatments. Moriarty Chiropractic is keeping close tabs on all of this to help our Nashua back pain patients best.

Understanding Your Disc Health: The Hydration Factor

Your spinal discs serve as padding between the bones of your spine, consisting primarily of water-containing molecules known as proteoglycans. When these discs lose their water content over time, they can't absorb shock as well, contributing to pain and further breakdown. While staying hydrated won't heal disc problems, it may assit your discs' natural function—though we still need more research to completely grasp how this works. We can talk more at your next Nashua chiropractic visit about ways to hydrate your discs.

Early Promise: Lab-Grown Disc Components

Chopra and his research group (1) have displayed progress in manufacturing "biomimetic proteoglycans"—synthetic copies of your disc's essential materials. In laboratory studies, these engineered molecules can simulate some properties of healthy disc tissue. However, these studies are just beginning, and it may take time to determine if this treatment will be both safe and effective for people|this research is still in early stages, and it will likely be some time before we know if this approach can safely and effectively help human patients like our Nashua back pain patients.

Why Decompression Techniques May Help

Your chiropractor may utilize decompression methods – like Cox® Technic Flexion Distraction Decompression which has much research demonstrating reduced intradiscal pressure and enlarged spinal canal area - or suggest specific positions to reduce spinal pressure. New research by Soubrier's team (2) suggests there may be scientific backing for these approaches: their studies revealed that reducing pressure on discs for short periods helped prevent some degenerative changes. While this was tested in laboratory conditions, it gives us encouraging support for therapeutic methods that give your spine periodic relief. Moriarty Chiropractic offers that our treatment with Cox® Technic is documented to decrease pressure!

Exploring Natural Pain Pathways

Some of the most preliminary research by Melrose and colleagues (3) is examining whether compounds from natural sources, like venoms (wow!), could be developed into targeted pain treatments. This research is in very early stages and focuses on understanding pain mechanisms rather than developing ready-to-use treatments. It may be many years before we see real-world applications, if any emerge at all. Fasincating!

What This Means for Your Current Treatment

While these research developments are hopeful, they don't alter your immediate treatment options. What they do suggest is:

Lifestyle factors like hydration and movement patterns may be more significant than we previously understood.
Current treatments your chiropractor uses may have stronger scientific support than before.
Future treatment options are being researched, though timeline and real-life applicabililty remain uncertain.
Managing expectations is important—innovative therapies need extensive time to create and verify their safety.

The reality is that back pain treatment is still challenging, and while research is advancing our understanding, most of these discoveries take time. Your best approach remains working with your Nashua chiropractor at Moriarty Chiropractic who understands current evidence-based treatments like Cox® Technic while staying up-to-date about emerging research.

CONTACT Moriarty Chiropractic

Listen to this PODCAST with Dr. James Cox, on The Back Doctors Podcast with Dr. Michael Johnson as he describes how The Cox® Technic System of Spinal Pain Management talks about disc degeneration and the back pain that comes with it.

Schedule your Nashua chiropractic appointment today.

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