People often do a google search on Chiropractic and their (disease or condition), and quickly notice that it seems that chiropractic can cure people of just about anything. It seems that chiropractic’s role in health is endless. While it may SEEM like chiropractic adjustments are curing all these people of all these conditions, what chiropractors are actually doing has nothing to do with treating the condition itself.
I bet now you’re now all confused. You may be thinking “Then why go to the chiropractor if they don’t treat my condition”.
I want you to think about this. If you have high blood pressure and take a pill to lower it. Your blood pressure was 150/100 and after the pill it’s 120/80. Did the pill cure you of the condition? We are trained to think yes just as long as I take the pill my blood pressure is “normal”. We think in terms of symptoms. If we have symptoms we have problems, and if we don’t have symptoms we are ok.
We think we are ok, until a doctor diagnoses us with a disease and then we manage that disease with drugs or surgery. Our whole healthcare system is setup with this model of symptom or disease management.
You may be thinking “Healthcare companies have to pay for wellness checks?” What does the wellness check consist of? A wellness check is a checkup that is looking for undiagnosed problems in your body. Yes the wellness check may find symptoms of disease early, but the disease was allowed to START! If you received a wellness check the year before and all signs pointed to being ok. How was the disease allowed to form? The issue with our healthcare system is that we place little importance on the maintenance of health.
I am trained to think in terms of health and how to keep someone alive and what causes a person to lose or improve health. A medical doctor is trained in disease and how to keep someone from dying using drugs and surgery.
Chiropractic care doesn’t need a diagnosis or disease to help you. The disease or problem you come in with IS NOT the issue. It is a SYMPTOM, of your body malfunctioning causing that problem. My job is to look at why is your body malfunctioning!!! I don’t need to know what the medical diagnosis is. All I need is to apply my training and years of experience to find a cause of malfunction. The malfunction can cause hundreds or thousands named diseases or symptoms.
What are the major issues that people suffer with today? Allergies, acid reflux, digestive issues, sleep issues. Just look at the top nine conditions that this website lists. It says 45% of Americans suffer from at least 1 of these 9. What I ask is – “what do these issues have in common” and what I see that that many of these conditions are FUNCTIONAL issues.
If many of these conditions and “diseases” are functional in nature, you can either take a drug to change how your body functions, like taking a drug to lower blood pressure, or come into my office and look at the health and function of the ONE SYSTEM THAT CONTROLS ALL FUNCTION within your body!!
The Cleveland Clinic says this about the nervous system. “Your nervous system is your body’s command center. Originating from your brain, it controls your movements, thoughts and automatic responses to the world around you. It also controls other body systems and processes, such as digestion, breathing and sexual development (puberty). Diseases, accidents, toxins and the natural aging process can damage your nervous system.”
Your nervous system is comprised basically of your brain, spinal cord and miles of nervous that connect every cell, tissue, organ and glands. Your brain needs to send messages to all parts of your body and your body needs to send messages back to the brain. Your brain is the supercomputer that process and controls all this function within your body.
We never think, what happens if the messages that are supposed to get to the brain, either don’t get there or are distorted. If your bladder is telling the brain it’s full but the message never gets to the brain, what symptom can occur. (symptom or disease = bedwetting). What happens if your brain is telling the valve on the top of your stomach to close but the message gets to valve garbled. The valve may not close tightly which can cause a symptom or disease = reflux. What can happen after a nerve in your low back gets pressure, it can cause a symptom called sciatica and cause pain and or your foot to drop and not work correctly.
I use all my training and years of experience as a chiropractor to look at the health and function of your nervous system. Since 1895 when the first chiropractic adjustment that restored a man’s hearing, chiropractors have been studying the relationship between the nervous system and how your body functions. We have discovered that the spine has an optimal alignment and range of motion. When the spine is aligned optimally and has the optimal range of motion, the nerves that exit the spine are not stressed.
I am looking for the loss of optimal spinal alignment and or the loss of range of motion of the spine. When the spine loses its optimal alignment or loss of range of motion, it stresses the spinal nerves. The stress on the spinal nerves causes disruption in the communication from the brain to body and/or body to brain. This causes interference in communication from the brain to the body. Chiropractic calls this a “subluxation”. What is important to understand that depending on the severity and length of time you have a subluxation if can present itself as a severe condition/disease to you may not even knowing you have a subluxation!!
For instance, you can have an accident that severs a nerve in your neck, and the nerve interference is so great and so severe parts of your body like your arm may totally lose function. But you can also have nerve interference that is gradual and over time that affects your body. I want you think of a dimmer and a light bulb. Think of a subluxation as the dimmer switch. Electricity comes from the power plant (your brain) and goes to the light bulb (your body). The dimmer switch controls the severity of subluxation. You can have a major subluxation that allows next to no electricity through to the bulb and the bulb appears so dim you may think it is turned off, or you can have a subluxation that reduces the bulb 5-10%. This 5-10% reduction can happen slowly over time so that you don’t even notice. Now imagine you are used to the bulb being 90% because the dimmer is reducing the electricity, and you have a guest over. The guest walks into the room and flicks the dimmer to 100%. You are used to the bulb at 90% but now you are like WOW what a big difference. A minute before the guest turned it up to 100% you would have said the light was fine or functioning without any issues…
Chiropractic works in a similar fashion. I look to the spine for signs of misalignment or lack of movement of individual segments in relation to the ones above or below. I know that when a spinal segment is not aligned correctly or is not moving correctly, there is a high likelihood that there is disruption in the communication between the brain and the body. I don’t have to wait until this causes destruction or decay causing symptoms or disease. My goal is to keep the spine in its optimal condition maximizing the communication between the brain and the body.
I began this talking about you doing a google search on Chiropractic and your (disease or condition), and quickly notice that it seems that chiropractic can cure people of just about anything. It seems that chiropractic’s role in health is endless. While it may SEEM like chiropractic adjustments are curing all these people of all these conditions, what chiropractors are actually doing has nothing to do with treating the condition itself.
You may see now that why is SEEMS like chiropractic adjustments cure people of just about anything. It is because when the spine is adjusted, and the nervous system is not under as much stress, it can function closer to optimal. When the nervous system is functioning better, the nervous system can recognize that your body was not functioning optimally and begin the process of healing. People call this healing very often as a “miracle”. They say “I went to all these doctors and they couldn’t find anything or they just wanted to give my a drug from my (condition). I went to the chiropractic and miraculously my problem improved.”
When people discover that chiropractic care may help, they think in terms of a chiropractor treating “THEIR CONDITION”. But if you understand this blog post, you will see that your condition may be because the system (your nervous system) that controls everything may be malfunctioning. When people come into my office they realize, during the exam, that they are subluxated. They want the subluxation(s) removed to the best degree possible. We begin to understand that a body free of subluxation has a better chance of healing vs. one that has subluxation. We never tell anyone that we are treating their condition, but when the condition improves, they make the youtube video saying chiropractic healed their condition. What I did was remove the subluxation allowing their body to function better and that allowed their body to heal.
It is my hope that you understand after reading this, that while many times conditions do get better under chiropractic care, you are ALWAYS better off if you don’t have any subluxations!! If you haven’t tried a chiropractic, then you haven’t tried everything. Don’t wait until after you’ve been poked, biopsied, drugged, and passed from doctor to doctor to discover chiropractic. Go to the chiropractor early and often, to keep your nervous system functioning to the best degree you can, and if you do have a condition or disease, go get it checked out by your M.D., but do all that while getting checked for subluxation.