Your Brain And Nervous System Make EVERYTHING Work!
Help Your Brain and System Work Well.
The term “Chiropractic” stems from Greek where ‘cheir’ means ‘hand’ and ‘praktos’ means ‘done’ therefore translating to “done by hand”. Healing methods that are manual in nature have been documented since 400 BCE1. The first recorded chiropractic manipulation was performed in 1895 by D.D. Palmer under the pretense of helping to restore hearing1. While a direct correlation was not found that day, a much more broad realization was made: by manipulating the bones, joints, and tissues, trained professionals could alter the processing power of your nervous system allowing for better communication pathways from organ to brain and brain to organ.
One of the first fetal formations of life is the central nervous system. Our ability to breathe, move, think, and exist all begins in your nervous system. The nervous system is a vast network of tiny strings that goes through your entire spine down the spinal cord, but also branches out to every organ of the body. Your ability to feel rough vs smooth, hot vs cold, pressure vs pain, to move smooth vs jerking all branches from the nervous system2.
When explaining to patients why they are experiencing a particular pain, I often ask them to think of what happens if you kink a garden hose; a small kink in the hose still allows for function, but at a limited capacity. As a Doctor of Chiropractic, it is my job to find these ‘hose kinks’ in your body. These can be in the form of a misalignment of a bone of the spine creating slowing of capacity directly from the nerve root near the spinal cord, it could be a tight muscle affecting the nerve somewhere down it’s pathway, or it could be another joint not specific to the bones of the spine (think shoulder, knee, fingers) where improper joint mobility is compromising overall communication flow.
Where, when, how, and why to adjust is always a specific answer to an individualized patient. This is why extensive examinations should be performed in order for the doctor to confidently have a treatment plan for your specific needs. Personally, I believe it is my job to educate patients to understand when and why they need a chiropractic manipulation or adjustment specific to them, but also to understand this nervous system concept: pain is a poor measure of your overall health. If we circle back the garden hose description, would a 5-20% reduction in function be obvious? Likely not. Within our nervous system, research is showing only about 10% of our nerves send painful stimuli signals3. This means we could have a massive lack of function without ever experiencing pain!
Chiropractic care is not a ‘one size fits all’ style of care. It is important that everyone get their nervous system checked, but it is between you, the individual patient, and your Chiropractic Physician to determine what kind of care and frequency of checks are appropriate for your individual needs.
1 Pettman, Erland. “A History of Manipulative Therapy.” Journal of Manual & Manipulative Therapy, vol. 15, no. 3, July 2007, pp. 165–174, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2565620/, https://doi.org/10.1179/106698107790819873.
2 Thau, Lauren, et al. “Anatomy, Central Nervous System.” PubMed, StatPearls Publishing, 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542179/.
3 Garland, Eric L. “Pain Processing in the Human Nervous System.” Primary Care: Clinics in Office Practice, vol. 39, no. 3, 24 July 2012, pp. 561–571, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3438523/, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pop.2012.06.013.