What is a herniated disc, in plain words?
Between each pair of bones in your spine sits a soft cushion with a tough outer ring and a jelly-like center. When that cushion weakens and shifts out of place, the center can bulge against the ring or push all the way through it. That's a herniation.
Why would a problem in your back show up in your leg? Nerves leave the spine right beside those discs. When a herniation irritates one of them you can get sciatica, a sharp and often shooting pain from the buttock down the back of one leg, sometimes with numbness, tingling or weakness riding along.
A bulge isn't quite the same thing. Our bulging disc treatment page sorts out the difference.
How a herniated disc tends to feel
Treat this as a sketch, not a diagnosis. These are the patterns Mecham Chiropractic says tend to point toward a disc:
- Pain that's worse when you sit or drive.
- Pain that travels below the knee.
- Trouble bending forward, or getting up out of a chair.
- Flare-ups that calm down for a while and then come back.
Numbness or pins-and-needles in the leg fits the picture. So can weakness, and weakness is the one symptom here that shouldn't wait for a convenient appointment (more on that below).
Why decompression gets considered for a herniated disc
Decompression is powered traction. You lie on the DRX9000 with a harness around your pelvis while a computer ramps a pull up and back down in cycles instead of holding it steady. That cycling is deliberate: a constant pull makes the muscles along the spine guard and brace, which defeats the point.
Excite Medical, which now owns the design, describes the table for low back pain and sciatica associated with herniated discs. The FDA cleared it in 2006 as powered traction equipment. Cleared, not approved, and that one word gets its own explanation on our page about the DRX9000 table.
Does decompression work for a herniated disc? What the research says
Start with the fact that surprises people. In 2020, Wang and colleagues pooled 38 studies covering 2,219 people whose herniations were treated without surgery, and the herniated material had regressed in 63% of them (95% CI, 49% to 77%). Earlier research they cite points somewhere odd: the more dramatic the herniation, the more often it shrank, with sequestered fragments regressing 96% of the time, extrusions 70% and protrusions 41%.
Good news for your disc. Awkward news for anyone selling treatment, us included.
If most herniations settle with time, then almost anything tried during those weeks will look like it worked. That's the trouble with the study clinics quote most. Christian Apfel's team followed 30 DRX9000 patients through 22 sessions over 6 weeks and saw average low back pain drop from 6.2 to 1.6 on a 0–10 scale, while disc height on CT rose from 7.5 mm to 8.8 mm. There was no control group, which the authors flag themselves, and the work was sponsored on behalf of Axiom Worldwide, the table's original maker.
Stronger evidence points the other way. A Cochrane review by Wegner and colleagues in 2013 pulled together 32 randomized trials and 2,762 people and found that traction, alone or added to other care, had little or no effect on pain, function or return to work, with or without sciatica. An older review by Macario and Pergolizzi landed in a similar spot, since 6 of the 7 randomized trials they examined found no difference with motorized decompression.
So where does that leave a herniated disc? Here's our honest read. Decompression hasn't been shown to beat time and simpler care, the evidence for that conclusion is only low to moderate in quality, and uncontrolled studies like Apfel's keep reporting improvement, which is exactly why Mecham Chiropractic builds a stop point into the plan instead of asking you to take it on faith. The full back-and-forth lives on our page on whether spinal decompression works.
Who shouldn't have decompression, and when to skip us entirely
Some people get screened out before they touch the table. Mecham Chiropractic won't use decompression if you have:
- a broken vertebra, or a spine that's unstable
- screws, rods or cages from a fusion
- cancer that's currently involving the spine
- osteoporosis severe enough to make traction unsafe
- a pregnancy
- an aneurysm of the aorta
If you aren't a candidate, you'll hear that plainly. It's the reason the exam comes first.
Go to an emergency room, not a chiropractor, if you lose control of your bladder or bowels. Alongside a herniated disc, that can mean cauda equina syndrome, and it's a medical emergency. Leg weakness that keeps getting worse needs a physician promptly too, and decompression isn't the answer to either one.
What herniated disc care looks like at Mecham Chiropractic
It starts with talking, not traction. Dr. Cody Mecham takes your history, runs an orthopedic exam and reviews whatever imaging is relevant to the question.
If the exam says disc and nothing on the screening list rules you out, a typical plan means 20 to 30 visits spread across 8 to 12 weeks, each one about 20 to 30 minutes on the table. Most of the discs the clinic treats this way sit low, at L4–L5 or L5–S1. It's never the whole plan, either: chiropractic care and guidance on positions and movement come with it.
Then the checkpoint. If treatments 8 to 12 come and go without real progress, the plan gets reconsidered rather than finished out of habit. Mild soreness the day after an early session isn't unusual, but real pain during a session means stopping to reassess, and what to expect from each decompression session walks through the rest.
The driveway will still be there in February.
Cost and insurance, in two sentences
Plan on paying out of pocket, because Medicare doesn't cover vertebral axial decompression and both Aetna and University of Utah Health Plans call it investigational. A 2020 FairWarning investigation reported a full DRX9000 course costing about $3,500, and that isn't a Mecham price.
Our spinal decompression cost guide for Salt Lake City and the Utah insurance coverage page have the details. If the leg hurts more than the back, read the sciatica treatment page next.