Chiropractors remove subluxations. Nothing more, nothing less. Why is this important? Glad you asked. Imagine what your spine looks like. The spine is a stack of bones with nerves passing in between them at every level. These nerves branch off the spinal cord, which is in the center, traveling from the base of the brain to the bottom of the spine.
The brain and the nervous system is the most important part of your body. It is in charge of every single function and structure, right down to every single one of your 700 trillion cells. Imagine every cell in your body with a telephone line to the brain. Not a single one of those cells would know what to do if its telephone line to the brain would get severed. As a matter of fact, if that line is severed that cell dies.
Fortunately, severed nerves don’t happen very often. But what does happen is that because of pressure placed on nerves, signals from the brain become garbled. Because of this, cells that are supplied by these nerves begin to deteriorate, eventually leading to cell death.
A real good analogy would be a rock on the stem of a plant. As you can imagine, that rock will choke off the life of the plant and it will eventually die.
The human body replaces its cells at the rate of 50 million cells per second. 50 million cells die and are replaced by 50 million new cells every single second. This is another one of those incredibly amazing things our body does.
Cells rely on signals from the brain to reproduce correctly. If those signals are missing or garbled, cells reproduce incorrectly. When enough of these sick cells have accumulated, disease and symptoms appear.
Here’s something I really want you to understand. We are built to be healthy. Everything about us causes our body to move towards health. Genes do not cause us to become unhealthy in any way; quite the contrary, our genes are designed to enable us to adapt to our environment, both short term and long term.
When we break a bone, the fracture doesn’t get worse; it immediately starts to heal. If we cut ourselves, the cut doesn’t get bigger; the body immediately starts to heal.
We are constantly moving about in a sea of germs; viruses, bacteria, parasites, molds and fungi, not to mention dog dander, cat dander, pollen, dust and all kinds of other environmental pollutants.
Germs are everywhere, we can’t escape them. To think that germs cause disease merely by their presence is difficult to prove. I know this is heresy, but hear me out. We say that cold viruses cause colds, but you have been around thousands of people in your lifetime that have coughed on you, near you or very close to you and you didn’t get sick. Why? The same goes for your family, friends and co-workers. Not to mention the flu and other diseases.
As a society, we are becoming germ-a-phobic. Manufacturer’s want us to sanitize often touched surfaces with antiseptic wipes. Stores have those antiseptic soap dispensers at every door with signs that say “Our Clean Store Starts Here.” Watch; does every one do this? Most don’t. So now we go to the do-it-yourself salad bar, grab the spoons and salad tongs and put a salad together. How many people touched those utensils that did not clean their hands with the antiseptic soap? How about our grocery store items that travel down the cash register conveyer belt? Aren’t they coming into contact with germs that were transferred there by other people’s grocery items? If I wanted, I could give you a hundred examples of ways germs move about. You could probably come up with a number of examples yourself. And that’s just germs going from surface to surface. What about the germs that are simply floating in the air?
Now let’s talk about all that stuff that’s floating in the air that is supposed to cause allergies. When was the last time you saw sunlight streaming through a window full of dust particles? That stuff is there all the time, not just when sunlight happens to be in the right place at the right time. We’re breathing in dust, pet dander, pollens and molds all of the time.
Here’s the question; why aren’t we all sick all of the time?
The simplest way to answer that question is to say that our bodies are working correctly; doing the job they were designed to do.
My objective with this article is to discuss the value of chiropractic regarding these situations. But before I do, let me ask you one of my favorite questions. If you are healthy, can you get sick? This sounds like a trick question doesn’t it? But I hope you answered “no.” If you are healthy, you can not get sick!
In order to understand this answer, let’s discuss the meaning of the word “health.” According to the dictionaries, health is “having all of your parts, functioning perfectly well, all the time.”
Some of those parts include the organs of the immune system; which includes your spleen and thymus. If these organs are functioning the way they are supposed to, then they easily detect any pathogenic organism that enters the body and properly disposes of it, every time, without exception.
Actually, this is what’s happening most of the time anyways. We only become concerned when there is a malfunction and the organs of immunity don’t do their job.
Enter chiropractic. Chiropractors adjust or remove subluxations; bones out of their normal alignment; that pinch or irritate nerves. If those nerves happen to go to the spleen or thymus or some other organ in the immune system, then the cells that make up that organ start to deteriorate. Remember the rock on the stem of the plant? Deteriorating organs are not healthy and therefore are not able to do the job they were designed to do.
The age group that shows the most significant improvement under chiropractic care is children. The simple reason for this is that subluxations in children simply haven’t been present long enough to cause serious deterioration.
There are many ways a child can become subluxated. The birth process itself can be quite traumatic. Then as the child grows and develops, they can encounter all kinds of bumps, falls, twists and turns that can negatively impact their fragile and developing spines and skeletal systems.
Because of the fact that chiropractors are focused solely on the improvement in function of the nervous system, which in turn causes the rest of the body to function at a higher level; results can be amazing. Here are a couple of published case studies.
If you have any questions about chiropractic, subluxation, children and, yes, adults, please contact me, I’d love to hear from you!