One of the first things I learned in Chiropractic College was that structure determines function, but I actually learned it first in undergraduate physics class. As sure as a hinge on a door is going to determine which direction that door will swing, which is it’s function, our posture is going to determine how well we function, which is also known as how healthy we are.
We were all told to stand up straight, but we were never told that 20% of our brain is in our back. While Martians from outer space don’t look at our Western Hemisphere and say, oh look there is North America and there is South America, our medical doctors are trained to think that way. They know for certain that the brain is in our heads, but don’t appreciate that 20% of that brain is in our backs. I’ve had Ph.D anatomy professors argue with me that the nerves in the spine cannot effect the brain. So thanks to that professor, I’ve decided to share some wisdom with you.
Whenever I discuss this with a patient, the first thing they do is try to stand up straight. They are not aware that our postural muscles, the deep ones attached directly to our spinal bones are not muscles that can be controlled by volitional thought. For example, you cannot move one spinal bone to the left and the one above or below it to the right. That motion is controlled by deep postural muscles that receive their information about muscle tone and movement from the subconscious part of your brain known as the cerebellum. I call it your automatic pilot to combat gravity. Since it is your subconscious you have no control over it like you do the muscles that you can control. You can control those muscles because the motor strip portion of your brain that sends signals to those muscles is under your conscious realm.
The harder part for patients to understand is the connection between your health and how well your spine is doing. People just don’t associate something like asthma, or colitis, or high blood pressure, etc. with their spine aka 20% of their brain aka central nervous system. In all fairness, few medical doctors appreciate that association as well.
The brain needs constant stimulation and there is only one on earth. It is called gravity. Gravity is what recharges our brain. It is accomplished by the largest, fastest, most powerful nerves in our body and many of them are in our spinal joints. These nerves have the ability to transduce the force of gravity into electricity. When your spinal joints are not working properly you are receiving disinformation and your manager/brain responds accordingly. So a fixated joint in your spine could be sending signals that get misinterpreted by your brain.
Your brain makes decisions about how to control and regulate your organ systems based upon what information it is taking in concerning your environment. In my case as a two year old, my brain was getting information that I was too cold and it gave me a 106 recurring fever. 107 and you’re dead. After many trips to the E.R. they had given up on me because they could not find any bacteria creating the fever. They told my parents I should die at home. Instead of going home, my parents took me to our neighbor, a chiropractor. He adjusted my neck and the fever went away and never came back. That is one example of what I’m trying to explain. Many people are sick with problems that they will never associate with having a so called bad back. These spinal joints need to move correctly in order for our brains to better understand what is happening in the outside world.
While 20% of our brain is in our back, 90% of what is going into our brain is coming through the spine. Only 10% is coming into your head from your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The largest nerve to leave the brain is the Vagal. It innervates all of our organs. It was long thought to be only a motor nerve, in other words, it could only send signals to our organs to secrete things, digest things, etc.
It turns out that trust your gut feeling we heard about is that vagal nerve receiving signals as well. Many of those signals from our gut are from our bacteria. So if our microbiome, the bacteria in our gut are in a bad state of health, it affects how we think and feel. Sadly, most everything in America is designed to damage those good bacteria.
When a chiropractor adjusts a spinal joint the medical profession is quick to say, it is impossible for those nerves to affect the vagal nerve since one is located in your head and one is in your back. They don’t really think about the complex neuroanatomy and how nerves that fire in your spine eventually wind up communicating with nerves up above that they don’t physically directly connect to. What makes us human is all of the interconnections of individual nerve cells. The term neuroplasticity is becoming popular and more heard of these days and it was chiropractors that made practical use of it way before 1932 which was when scientists were first able to see connecting nerve cells under a microscope due to better staining methods of the slides.
There are a lot of intermediary connections along the way from your gut to your brain. Since you most likely are not a neuroanatomist, I’ll leave it at that, but it is quite complicated. When a chiropractor is adjusting your neck, the very thing that most doctors warn you to never ever allow to happen, those nerves around your neck joints, which are the strongest, fastest, most powerful in your body are going to fire upon many different parts of your brain all having many different functions. By some wild coincidence, there are 250 times more of those special nerves in your upper neck than anywhere else. That gives us a 250 times better probability of success, even though we’re told by the real experts never ever ever fix those joints.
Some of those nerves do end up through complicated pathways, firing upon the hypothalamus which is the beginning of your autonomic nervous system. That little tiny part of the brain, technically called the diencephalon, has great control over every aspect of your health. That could be one reason why chiropractors, that don’t treat any kind of disease at all, have seen people with many different diseases get better in spite of the fact that we more likely than not, are not even aware you have that problem.
Most of my patients casually mention months later that such and such went away. I even had a few infertile women get pregnant and that is not because I treat infertility, but because the endocrine system has to be working quite well to organize a pregnancy and it turns out that the hypothalamus mentioned above, is regulating the endocrine system. As hard as it is to believe, your spinal joints have a much greater effect on your brain and endocrine system than a show like Gray’s anatomy is going to let you know more about. Again, chiropractors are not allowed to treat disease and we don’t. Our treatment does however, affect what makes you, you. And that is your brain. Luckily for humanity, our brains do have many mechanisms built in for self healing. According to television commercials that is an absolute impossible event to occur, but we all know that we can get better without drugs. For most people if they cut themselves, they don’t bleed to death. We form a clot and problem solved. No hospital visit that day.
Chiropractors change the structure of your spine and that affects your function. And you were thinking I’d never turn this around to the title.
