We are designed to be perfectly healthy, functioning optimally. I believe you can heal from anything and regain that perfection. Do you?
Health and Homeostasis
The only way to produce homeostasis and health is to decrease the chronic stress response by reducing stressors with lifestyle changes, and by improving your adaptive abilities by healing your traumas and increasing the function of your body. In other words, when the body has lost homeostasis, it means you are either getting too much or too little of something.
“While other professions are concerned with changing the environment to suit the weakened body, chiropractic is concerned with strengthening the body to suit the environment.” -BJ Palmer
Bucket of Water Analogy
Think of your health (homeostasis) as a bucket of water. As long as the water is in the bucket, you are in balance. Now think of life’s stressors as rocks and throw those rocks in the bucket. At some point, if you continue to put rocks in the bucket, the water will overflow and you will lose homeostasis and begin to have symptoms.
Chiropractic will give you a bigger bucket, allowing your nervous system to better adapt to the stressors in your environment.
Lifestyle changes will remove the rocks from the bucket.
With a bigger bucket and less rocks, you will function better, adapt better, and thrive.
What do symptoms mean?
Symptoms are the brain’s attempt to tell you something is wrong, that there is dysfunction somewhere in the body, and that the brain and body have lost homeostasis.
“Symptoms represent the body’s best efforts to heal itself. By treating symptoms, you are suppressing the body’s natural response and inhibiting the healing process. Instead of treating symptoms, doctors should stimulate the body’s defenses to allow for completion of the healing process”
-Dr. Stephen Cummings
How does Chiropractic fit in?
Unlike other health professions, Chiropractors do not treat or cure any sickness, symptom, or disease.
Rather, Chiropractic care is about the importance of proper spinal and nervous system function to support your innate abilities to adapt to the environment and maintain and/or regain homeostasis and health.
“The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the behavior of all other cells”
-Dr. Bruce Lipton, PhD Biologist
The major focus of Chiropractic Care is to detect and correct vertebral subluxation (Stress to the nervous system) to restore the healthy function of the spine and nervous system.
A vertebral subluxation is the result of spinal bones with improper motion or position affecting nerve communications between your brain and your body.
What causes subluxation?
Subluxation is caused by forces that impact the body that it cannot fully integrate.
Too much of any of the following:
- Physical Stress
- Macrotrauma- injuries to soft tissues
- Birth trauma
- Falls and Accidents
- Sports Injuries
- Microtrauma- repetitive stress injuries
- Chronic bad posture
- Chronic sedentary lifestyle
- Overuse injuries
- Macrotrauma- injuries to soft tissues
- Chemical Stress: Toxins in our environment
- Food additives, Processed food, color dyes, etc
- Environmental toxins- air pollution, water pollution, etc
- Lack of Essential Nutrients- vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, amino acids, etc.
- Emotional Stress: Can cause chronic muscle tension, a chronic stress response, and decreased immune system function.
- Consciously thinking about a past stressful event.
- Anticipating a future stressful event.
Chronic stress changes the nervous system.
Physical, Chemical, and Emotional Stress can lead to neurological, biochemical, histological, and muscle changes that together lead to a deceased motion in the spinal joints and tissues.
Why Does That Matter?
Your nervous system controls every cell, tissue, organ and system of your body.
The spinal cord is the messenger from your brain to your body. At each spinal segment, nerves exit the spinal cord to send messages to every organ, muscle, and cell.
“The quality of healing is directly proportional to the functional capability of the central nervous system to send and receive nerve messages”
-Janson Edwards, MD, PhD
If you have a subluxation, information sent from the body to the brain changes, influencing how the brain perceives and responds to all other sensory information. In other words, dysfunction in the spine disrupts the brain’s ability to sense what is accurately happening in the rest of the body and in the environment.
What does a Chiropractic Adjustment do?
A chiropractic adjustment increases proper motion of the spinal joint, which improves communication between the spine and the brain. Proper movement gives the brain correct information about what is going on in and around your body. This leads to increased nervous system function, and increased health.
“No one could survive without precise signaling in cells. The body functions properly only because the cells constantly communicate with each other”
-Scientific America