Life in the city between the canyons
The nickname is official: "City between the canyons." At the city's east edge the valley narrows into Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons, reached by SR-190 and SR-210, and Big Cottonwood is where the Brighton and Solitude resorts are.
A ski day asks a lot of a back, and not all of it on the slope. Carrying skis across a parking lot. Bending to buckle boots. Then the drive down, folded into a car seat with everything still tight, which never feels like the injury until Monday's desk chair makes the point.
That sequence, where sitting or driving is what really hurts, is one we treat as a hint the pain may be coming from a disc. So is pain that runs below the knee.
Plenty of life here happens off the mountain, of course. Cottonwood Heights only incorporated on January 14, 2005, after a referendum in May 2004, and its commercial areas cluster along Fort Union Boulevard and around the Old Mill in the northeast corner, where the Deseret News built the Cottonwood Paper Mill in 1883.
Van Winkle Expressway, nearly door to door
From City Hall on Bengal Boulevard, go north on Highland Drive, then pick up Van Winkle Expressway (SR-152) and follow it northwest about 2.6 miles. It ends at 900 East. The clinic's plaza is just north of that intersection, on the west side.
That's about 4.9 miles all told. Already on I-215 along the city's northern border? Exit 8 is the 2000 East/SR-152 interchange, the same highway that ends beside the clinic, so it's an easy one to remember.
(Just north across I-215, Holladay has an even shorter trip. Sandy, to the south, comes up SR-71 instead.)
What you'd actually be signing up for
Nothing, at first. The opening visit is an exam: Dr. Cody Mecham takes a history, runs an orthopedic exam and reviews relevant imaging, and only if the pain behaves like a disc problem does the DRX9000 come up.
A plan then runs 20 to 30 sessions over about 8 to 12 weeks. The first 8 to 12 act as a checkpoint, and with no meaningful improvement by then the plan gets rethought, which is a fair protection against weeks of something that isn't helping. Session details are on what to expect, session by session.
Who's turned away? Anyone pregnant, and anyone with an aortic aneurysm, screws or rods from a fusion, a broken or unstable spine, or cancer that's active in the spine.
We won't oversell it. Richard Deyo, a professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University, told FairWarning in 2020 that "the best evidence suggests there's not much of an advantage of these things," which is a fair summary of the controlled trials, and how well spinal decompression works walks through the studies on both sides.
For the whole picture of spinal decompression in Salt Lake City, the home page is the place to start. Ready to talk? Schedule an appointment, or dial (801) 590-8615.