Many of our patient’s first encounters with a chiropractor are as a result of hearing that chiropractic helped someone with back pain or headaches. They usually tell the same old story that nothing else had seemed to work, and they were fed up with the side effects of the pain killers they were taking, so they tried chiropractic as a last resort.
Many times the patient has a great response to care with us and says things like “I wish I’d found you years ago”, or “Why didn’t my Doctor send me to you?”
The strange thing is though, chiropractic was never designed to be a treatment for simple back pain or neck pain etc, as effective as it seems to be for those conditions. Chiropractic was originally devised as a treatment for improving the function of the nervous system which is why chiropractors are so focussed on your spine. The main function of the spine is to protect the spinal cord and this is clearly a very important part of the nervous system as it connects your brain with all of the tissues and organs of your body. However it is also a very delicate part of your body and any slight disturbances can affect its function in numerous ways.
Your brain is constantly monitoring the status of your body, and makes millions of minor corrections every second to allow you to adapt to whatever situation you find yourself in. This could be something such as producing enough stomach acid to digest that meal you’ve just eaten, or increasing your heartbeat to allow you to run up a flight of stairs. It could also be something much more subtle such as altering the amount of a hormone produced in a cell, or healing a wound. To be able to do this, your brain needs to receive millions of accurate signals from your body, and then needs a way of getting those corrective signals back out to your body again. Obviously this is where your spinal cord and all your nerve tissue comes in. The tiny alterations that your brain is sending out need to get to the right location in your body in exactly the right form and at exactly the right time to ensure that your body is changed in exactly the right way. Otherwise things don’t quite work as they should!
The whole purpose of chiropractic care is to ensure that those signals that leave the brain get to the correct part of the body at the right time, in the same format and with the same intensity that was determined by your brain. Similarly, chiropractic aims to make sure that all the signals that go back up to the brain from your body arrive intact to make sure your brain has the best possible information to be able to keep making all of these corrections.
When your chiropractor checks your spine before deciding where you need an adjustment, they are looking for areas of the spine either not moving as they should, or out of alignment. These areas are called subluxations. Subluxations are thought to press on or stretch the nerves as they exit the spinal cord which then affects the critical signals going to and from the brain. What is going through your chiropractor’s mind when they then deliver those adjustments is not “This will help with the pain” as often the area they are adjusting doesn’t actually hurt yet. No, what they are thinking is “There is a subluxation here that is affecting the function of the nervous system and this adjustment will help improve that function”
It’s no coincidence that there can sometimes be some pain at the location of a subluxation, because pain is your body’s way of shouting at you to take some action! You could have had the problem for many years and been ignoring the early warning signs, before your body says “Enough is enough, I’m going to do something that will make you take notice!” It’s also no coincidence that when you do take some action and allow the chiropractor to adjust the areas that are subluxated your pain levels subside. But I hope you can see that this is just a side effect of your improved nervous system function because as you now know, chiropractic is not a treatment for pain!
