WHAT  is  INFRARED  IMAGING ?

Infrared imaging is a heat photograph.  It is a diagnostic imaging procedure that is sometimes known as thermography.  The image is produced via an infrared scanner that photographs the heat being spontaneously emitted from the body’s surface, thus providing important data regarding the local chemical and autonomic nervous system control of body surface temperature.

High-resolution infrared imaging is the method that lends itself to strict control and reproducibility and is thus the only method considered acceptable by the American Chiropractic College of Infrared Imaging.  

Modern high-resolution infrared equipment measures real temperature referenced to an internal calibrated standard and utilizes sophisticated software for initial image display and extensive post-imaging analysis and reporting.

Infrared imaging has the advantage of providing physiological / functional information which may be of assistance in addition to, or instead of, the information provided by other imaging tests, which are often limited to providing anatomic information.   

Infrared imaging is particularly useful for evaluation of suspected autonomic disorders such as Complex Regional Pain Syndromes, formerly known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy and causalgia.  Other common uses germane to chiropractic practice include specific analysis of chronic myofascial pain syndromes and small caliber peripheral neuropathies. 

While infrared imaging is helpful in the evaluation of pain syndromes, it is important to realize that pain does not always cause hot patterns, nor does it always cause cold patterns.  Pain does, however, often cause thermal patterns that are different from normal patterns.  There may be a difference in the right-to-left symmetry that a normal body shows, or there may be a departure from the trunk-to-peripheral thermal gradients that are normal.

Infrared imaging is the only imaging method that passes NO energy into or through the body.   It is simply a heat photograph.  As such, it is risk-free and completely painless.  

Like all imaging tests, the need for infrared imaging must be based on historical and physical indicators, and its results must be correlated with those findings.