What is chiropractic?
Chiropractic is a treatment system that looks at the cause of a problem, not the effect or symptoms of a problem. It recognizes the important relationship between structure (primarily the spine and its related tissue) and function (primarily the nervous system as it controls everything else). The basic essence of the brain and nervous system is to receive information, process it, then send out information for action.
One of the biggest and busiest information inputs into the nervous system is the proprioceptive system — a big word for knowing where the body’s parts are in space. Try touching your finger to your nose with your eyes closed, even with your head moving at the same time. No problem. Now try touching someone else’s moving nose with your eyes closed. Major problems. Being able to control your movements is essential for survival. The proprioceptive system gets its information from mechanoreceptors (specialized nerve endings) in joints and surrounding tissues.
If certain joints or tissues are injured and heal improperly, the biomechanics are distorted, causing the nerve receptors to send out distorted and conflicting information to the nervous system.
Another example: if you stand with your feet together and put one arm straight out to the side — no big deal. Do the same thing to a clothing-store mannequin and it falls over. When you put your arm out you don’t just move the muscles that lift your arm. You make thousands of changes to shift your balance just the right amount, stabilize the spine, shoulder girdle, and head, signal blood supply to increase, raise the heart rate, and maybe breathe harder and start to sweat. The nervous system is amazingly complex.
If you distort some of that information going to the brain, you make the brain make mistakes. These mistakes not only concern the area where the distortion came from; they can cause mistakes in the heart, lungs, digestive tract, and all the other organs.
The most important tissues that cause the biggest problems after being injured are those around the vertebrae of the spine, because the spine has to constantly adapt to every little change of body position and ground surface. Spinal joints have many more nerve endings around them than the extremity joints because the body knows they are more important.
This is why chiropractic care often has dramatic results with colic and other digestive problems, cardiovascular, respiratory, metabolic and other problems, including attitude problems — not just the musculoskeletal system. These complaints may not be mechanically related, so check with your veterinarian first to rule out disease processes or medical conditions.
Origins
D.D. Palmer discovered chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, on September 18, 1895. Reverend Samuel H. Weed named chiropractic using two Greek words — cheir, hand, and praktos, done — commonly referred to as “done by hand.”
Chiropractic Philosophy is the study of the successive intellectual and physical processes through which life is expressed, and especially the application of chiropractic thereto.
Chiropractic is the philosophy, science and art of things natural; a system of adjusting the articulations of the spinal column by hand only for the elimination of the physical representation of the cause of disease.
Dis-ease: literally the lack of ease — a pathological condition of the body which sets the condition apart from a normal state. The disease and its location depend on the degree, duration and location of the pinched nerve.
Pinched nerve (vertebral subluxation): a partial or incomplete dislocation.
D.D. Palmer
A vertebra displaced or subluxated in varying degrees and directions can press on a number of varying combinations of filaments in the spinal nerve, producing a multitude of different diseases and degrees of disease (a spinal nerve in a human has an estimated 300,000 individual nerve fibers; humans have 31 pairs of spinal nerves). I know of no other portion of the body aside from the spinal column where the nerves (soft substances) are surrounded entirely by hard substances (bone). Chiropractors recognize that those with pinched spinal nerves have lowered vital resistance. Adjusting subluxated vertebrae back to their normal position takes pressure off nerves and builds vital resistance, or health.
The chiropractic adjustment restores the misaligned bone to its normal location. The purpose of an adjustment is not to depress, nor to stimulate, but to remove interference with transmission — pressure — from the affected nerve, thus restoring normal nerve supply.
The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will look well to the spine for the cause of the disease.
Hippocrates, 5th century B.C.
The garden hose theory
You are watering your flowers and you drag the garden hose to the next flower and the water ceases to flow.
- Should you cut the end of the garden hose off and replace it with a new end?
- Or go back fifty feet and remove the kink in the hose to restore normal water flow? (i.e., pinched nerve, subluxation, slipped disc, herniated disc, etc.)
Find the problem, accept it where you find it, correct it, and leave it alone.