Chiropractic
Chiropractic is a natural form of health care that endeavours to provide physiologically compatible care in order to support the human being’s innate abilities to adapt to the environment and maintain and/or regain homeostasis and health.
Subluxations of your spine and poor health
Your nervous system has a great deal to do with the level of health you experience. Have you ever had the lights go out in your house during a storm? Why does this happen? If the circuit breaker did not do its job, the lightbulbs would explode and a fire could ignite. So, the circuit breaker is a safety mechanism. Our nervous system behaves somewhat similarly under stressful conditions – positive/eustress or negative/distress. In response to stress, our nervous system might short-circuit certain nervous to buy us time to get out of the stressful situation. Once the stress has passed, the nervous system should reset. However, just like in your house, sometimes the lights come back on; other times you need to reset the fuse panel – in your body – sometimes, your nervous system resets and sometimes it needs assistance to reset. If it does not reset, the result can be a state of dysafferentation (loss of proprioceptive nerve input) and this can lead to the development of subluxations. The unfortunate part is that you might not even be aware that part of your nervous system has not reset – just like if the lights were not on to begin with, you would not be aware that the circuit had experienced more stress than it could handle and it shorted – not until you went to use those lights. Subluxations are one of the reasons why we may not be as healthy as we could be or are designed to be and, unfortunately, they can exist without our awareness. Without proper tone of your nervous system and proper transmission of nerve impulses throughout that system, your body cannot optimally respond and/or adapt to its ever-changing environment and is more vulnerable to the effects of stress. Improper function of the spine due to subluxations can lead to the development of decreased function (dis-ease) and/or loss of health (disease).
Natural Health Care
Chiropractic is a natural form of health care that uses a variety of different techniques to address dysafferentation (loss of proprioception) and/or subluxation in order to restore proper function to the nervous system. Chiropractic adjustments can assist in recovery from injury, but also, and more importantly, assist you with the development of optimal health. Just as you “floss” your teeth, “flossing” your spinal segments increases the health of your nerves and every tissue and organ which they innervate. The chiropractic spinal adjustment (application of precise input to a specific part of a spinal segment) assists in restoring your health by permitting normal nerve transmission which moves your system toward homeostasis, growth and repair.
Chiropractic makes sense when you think of stress and the variety of sources with which we are faced in today’s society. As descendants of hunter-gatherer tribes, there now exists an extreme incongruency with what our genetic profile requires for the epigenetic expression of health and the society and environment in which we live. While we could certainly not survive without the stress response mechanism, what was designed to be helpful in an acute fight or flight situation is now being stimulated chronically for days, weeks, months, even years. Dissipation of the stress response biochemistry occurs through movement: fight or flight. This is another reason why chiropractic is able to assist so remarkably with health and recovery: movement of the spine – “adjustment” – stimulates proprioceptive input into the cerebellar vermis that in turn acts on the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus in what some have termed the movement-pleasure and movement-learning pathways (Jensen). In other words, movement (adjustment/proprioception), which is always abundantly present during fight or flight and in a non-sedentary, non-subluxated human being during normal daily life, is the innate way we have to return to homeostasis (naturally decreasing stress/anxiety and catabolic activities (stress hormonal cascade) and increasing pleasure, learning, and anabolic activities).
Jensen, E. Learning with the body in mind. 2000
Jensen, E. Brain-Based Learning. The Brain Store 1995 San Diego, CA
Jensen, E. Brain-Based Learning: The new science of teaching and training. 2000.
Why Chiropractic Works
