I’m sure my colleagues are ready to jump down my throat with that title. It’s true, the world will never need chiropractic…but the world cannot exist without health. With that said, chiropractic is a vital component to helping people experience health. I say that being a chiropractor so you can take that as me being biased or not. I get adjusted regularly, I have checked my boys since birth, and my would tell you it’s a huge factor in her health success.
If you have been in the chiropractic world as a practitioner or as a patient, you will see the drastic approaches to our profession. I personally subscribe to the notion that chiropractic is a piece of a healthy lifestyle. I get adjusted regularly but I also follow my own Fit, Fuel, feel principles of a healthy lifestyle.
This is why I have coined what I do as ‘Functional Chiropractic.’ The body is a self-healing, self-regulating organism. Those capabilities are organized and coordinated through your nervous system. If there is an interference in the nervous system, then the self-healing, self-regulating capabilities diminish. You can assess and affect the nervous system through many realms, movement patterns, eating patterns, and thought/attitude patterns.
These can be examined through lab work, through history and listening, and through a physical exam with my personal favorites, Heart Rate Variability (HRV), EMG, and thermography. What can your heart, muscles, and skin tell you about the function of your nervous system? Many, many things. You cannot affect one system without affecting all of them. Like I said, every system is affected by how the nervous system is being coordinated and organized, not just the spine, and not just the spine on x-rays.
There are many offices, with good intentions, that rely on on x-ray findings to determine the functionality of the nervous system. Many of those same offices knowingly or unknowingly create an atmosphere of fear (perceived by the patient) that if you don’t get your degenerate spine taken care of based off the x-rays, you will live a worse shorter life, in the very near future.
From a practitioner view point, there may be some truth to what they are saying but your nervous system organizes and coordinates that fear mentality by moving you away from healing and growth. Have you ever met a healthy person who was a chronic worrier? You are getting feared into getting chiropractic because those offices feel the world needs chiropractic. What the world can’t live without is health.
You can take an x-ray of a live person and a dead person and it would be very hard to differentiate the live vs. dead person. For me, the mode of analysis of your nervous system based on x-rays is dying model. With HRV, EMG, and thermography, these only work if you’re alive and kicking. The beauty is that through a combo of chiropractic and lifestyle interventions, you will teach your nervous system to re-organize, which means you get healthy. Healthy people are happier. Healthy people are more fun. Healthy people are just plane nicer. Trust me, we start with a lot of unhealthy, mean people and turn them into happy and healthy people.
With ‘Functional Chiropractic,’ the spine isn’t the only cause nor the only cure to disease and ailment. Adjusting the spine is a piece to the building health puzzle but there have been some big name chiropractors that were well adjusted that died early in life with a nice looking spine that could have been avoided if they applied the Fit, Fuel, Feel principles.
It doesn’t matter if you are taking a medicine or getting adjusted, if you feel scared into that intervention, it may be time to step back and reassess. The intervention may be what you actually need but if your nervous system is trying to organize and coordinate fear when you take part in that intervention, it’s probably time to find a new practitioner. In healthcare, you’re the boss.