Chiropractic care is often associated with middle aged males who “throw their back out”. One of the biggest misconceptions is to why people seek Chiropractic care. Stress. Stress has become such an ingrained part of our vocabulary and daily existence that it is difficult to believe that our current use of the term originated only a little over 50 years ago, when it was essentially “coined” by Hans Selye. Pre Hans Selye and the development of the word “stress” Chiropractors used the term “Auto-Suggestions” to describe our thought process. Chiropractors understood and still to this day preach that stress is an emotional reaction to life events.
It would be easy to say “stop stressing,” yet this holds no merit as we often have to react to external stressors that impact our life. Stress often comes about in two different manners – dealing with chance events and feeling out of control with events. Stress is a very expensive epidemic due to the fact that it aggravates every other form of dis-ease in our body.
How does Chiropractic enter into this equation? The simplest notion is that when your brain has a negative thought your spinal cord is a direct extension off of the brain and will encounter the same response you are creating. To add a little science, when you experience stress, your pituitary gland (in the brain) responds by increasing a hormone called adrenocorticotropic (ACTH). ACTH sets off an alarm system in the brain that travels down the spinal cord to activate the adrenal glands to release a flood of stress hormones including cortisol and adrenaline.
When your body is constantly bombarded with negative thoughts you enter into a chemical cascade of events called fight or flight. The tiny intricate muscles of the spinal column that are responsible for proper spinal alignment will “go to sleep” or not function correctly due to the fact that we activate BIG muscles when are body is in a chronic state of fight or flight. Seeing that it is impossible to medicate our way out of any symptom and stress is an emotional response not a biochemical condition (which means drugs have a limited effect on stress) like diabetes it is defiantly safe to say that natural healing through specific spinal adjustments is the course of action. Your health is our top concern.
