A Chiropractic Adjustment is best recognized as an effective way of reducing back pain and headaches. What about benefits beyond pain relief?
Let’s take a look.
It is a scientific fact that your nerves control virtually every function of your body.
The brain acts like a central computer that creates and sends messages to your body telling it how to function.
It sends these messages down your spinal cord and out through nerves that branch off the spinal cord.
The brain also receives and processes messages coming into it from your body – via nerves – and decides what to do with them.
It ignores some.
It takes immediate action on others – think of touching a hot burner.
Your brain, spinal cord, and all your nerves collectively are called your nervous system.
With nerves, everything is happening very quickly with nerve signal speeds approaching 260 miles per hour.
Important Nerve Types
You probably think of nerves in the sense of a pinched nerve. And most adults know that if a nerve in the lower back gets ‘pinched,’ life becomes pretty rough because of the pain involved.
But… Not all nerves are for transmitting pain signals to the brain. As a matter of fact, experts estimate about 10-15% of nerves are for sensing pain.
The rest of the nerves are plugging into muscles to tell them how to function so that you can sit, stand, walk, write, throw and even speak!
Other nerves have an impact on some of your important organs as an integral part of telling them what to do as well as sending messages to the brain to let it know if that organ is having a problem.
How Chiropractic Care Impacts Your Nervous System
So what if the nerves that are taking messages from the brain and also taking them back to the brain get interfered with?
When this happens there can be pain associated with it but also a whole host of other health related issues.
In our practice, we have had patients report improvement in blood pressure, breathing, allergies, constipation issues and bladder function just to name a few.
How can we have an impact on these conditions?
The answer lies in our ability, through years of training, to identify something called a Subluxation (Sub-lux-ation).
Enter the Scary Subluxations (dun – dun – duuuun)
A subluxation is a loss in proper alignment and motion of one or more spinal bones resulting in the nerves that branch off the spinal cord becoming irritated.
If the nerve getting compressed or irritated transmits pain signals to the body, then you might have pain or even pain referring into the arms, legs or head.
If it is a nerve that plugs into your muscles, you might experience weakness in the muscles.
If the nerve helps govern the function of any number of non-vital organs in the body then you could have issues related to your ‘automated’ organ function.
Here’s the tricky part…
You could have some level of compromise of nerves that control your organ or muscle function and not even know it.
You may take medications to control symptoms associated with the effects of the organ not functioning correctly while not even realizing the actual problem is not the organ but the interference to the nerves controlling, or at the very least influencing, the organ.
You can have subluxated spinal bones adversely affecting your nerves, and thus your overall health, and never know it because there is not any pain associated with it.
The takeaway: An adjustment is not only restoring proper motion in spinal joints but also restoring the proper flow of nerve signals making your body function at a more optimal and healthier level.
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