It changes the pressure inside the disc
Day to day, sitting, standing, going about normal life, gravity keeps your discs under constant positive pressure. They are always being squeezed.
Not simply less pressure. The opposite of pressure: the disc goes from squashed to gently drawn open.
Neurosurgeons measured this directly in 1994, using a pressure sensor inside a patient's disc while they lay on a decompression table. They weren't measuring clinical outcomes, only verifying and confirming the machine physically does what it claims.
Disc herniations got smaller on MRI
A 2022 trial randomly gave people either real spinal decompression or a dummy version, and scanned them before and after. In the group that had the actual treatment:
In the control group, not one herniation shrank by half.
