Why Everyone Needs a Chiropractor
If I gave you a choice of either removing your spine or your teeth, which would you choose? The answer should be simple. You can live without your teeth. But you would die instantly if I removed your spine. That’s because your spine houses and protects your spinal cord. And your spinal cord, along with your brain and nerves, controls and coordinates every single function in your body. And while most people will brush their teeth daily and have preventative dental checkups twice per year, most people are not even aware that they need to take care of their spine in much the same way. Similar to your teeth, your spine can suffer irreversible degenerative damage if not properly maintained.
Subluxation…the culprit. An optimally functioning spine and nerve system is essential for optimum health. And there is a condition, known as Vertebral Subluxation which will prevent you from experiencing optimal health. A vertebral subluxation is a misalignment of your spine that can create an endangering stress on your nervous system and lead to early arthritic changes and decay in the spine. How your body works is your brain is in constant communication with all of your tissues, organs, and organ systems. Those systems are always talking back to the brain, and all of that communication takes place across your spinal cord. It’s that exchange of information that keeps you functioning properly, and also, how all healing happens. If there is ever any breakdown in that communication, you simply move away from health. That’s called subluxation. Now, if that exists in your body, and goes unnoticed or uncorrected, eventually you become symptomatic. So symptoms occur at the end of the problem - not at the beginning of the problem.
OK How do you get a subluxation? Some of the obvious causes of subluxation are things like sports traumas, motor vehicle accidents, slips and falls. But what we find much more commonly is that subluxation will result from the cumulative effects of our bad habits. Things like poor posture, poor sleep positions, and poor positions in the workplace. I am specifically talking about sitting in front of the computer, checking our phones for emails and text messages, and sitting in the car or on the train for our commute to and from work. These things tend to stack up over time, until either something breaks down, or we get sick or have pain.
It starts when we are young… If you spend any time in our office you’ll notice that we see a lot of children here. Some of our newer patients ask, “why would a kid need to see a chiropractor”. Well, the most current research shows us that many of our problems started way back when we were little ones; while learning to walk, falls that we took, and sports that we played. That’s why in our office we make it our highest priority to check each member of the family so that we can create a written record for the early detection of subluxation. That way these little ones have the best opportunity to grow up healthy and develop optimally as opposed to waiting for a crisis.
Why you should get adjusted regularly. Subluxation is caused by trauma. It can be macro trauma such as a sporting injury or slip or fall or from micro trauma, the accumulation of our bad habits, siting in front of a computer, texting on a phone. This leads to an imbalance in the spine, causing more pressure on one part of the spine than the other. The part with increased pressure will degenerate or wear out over time, like tires on a car with a misaligned front end. Subluxation will also lead to stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the fight or flight system. Which means when it is activated digestion slows down, your immune system is suppressed, and your body is not in a healing state. If this condition persists for long enough you end up with a lowered state of health. Eventually you could develop neck pain, back pain, headaches, gastric reflux, frequent colds, chronic fatigue, arthritis, among others. Since we cannot escape the occasional slip or fall and we will continue to work and sit and drive, regular visits to a corrective chiropractic office can detect and correct subluxation before it adversely affects your health.