Another reason for wanting a chiropractic adjustment. If you read through these next 4 or 5 installments, you will understand health and disease better than most doctors that I have conversed with.
Antibiotics provide you with an autoimmune disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and allergies. Chiropractic came to the world in 1895 although when they dug up the Paris Subway System they discovered cave drawings of cave men walking on each others backs so even back then they knew you needed some help in keeping your back working. We’ll get to the significance of that later. In the meantime, it wasn’t until 1987, over a hundred years later that science validated what Chiropractors always knew, that our Central Nervous System controls and coordinates the immune system. But now 32 years later, we know a lot more about how that happens.
Chiropractors were mocked for believing in innate intelligence. The intelligence that we all have that was handed down to us through eons of knowledge stored in our DNA that runs our bodies. Now science is talking about the innate immune response. Our main immune response is through macrophages, which are large phagocytic celsl found in stationary form in the tissues or as a mobile white blood cell, especially at sites of infection. Phagocytic means they engulf and swallow the invaders. The quality of the innate immune response is controlled by the central nervous system. The nervous system tells the macrophage what do, who to go get. One way it does this is through the vagus nerve, which is communicating with it. The vagus nerve is a very long nerve that goes directly from the brain to the gut and back. It innervates the gut, but goes back up to the Nucleus Tractus Solitarius (NTS) in the medulla. The medulla is where the vital centers of our prehistoric brain are located. If something goes wrong in that part of the brain, chances are you are not going to live to tell about it. Chiropractors work with the largest most powerful nerves of the body, the 1A’s and 1B’s. The mechanoreceptors in the spinal joints are in that category of 1A’s. 124 years after chiropractic was discovered, science has figured out that it is the Nucleus Tractus Solitarius that is helping to modulate your inborn immune response to disease and it is chiropractors that are helping to supercharge your Nucleus Tractus Solitarius. But there are other vital centers in our Medulla and chances are really good, I’d say 100% that chiropractors are charging up all those areas. What that means for you is much better health, not just a back rub to get rid of your aches and pain. After all, there is more to life and health than not just having a boo boo.
So I just made a lot of very bold statements and now a little dive into the weeds of science to convince you that I’m just not making this stuff up. Science today proves what chiropractors said 124 years ago. Keep in mind that when the theory of chiropractic was first proposed in 1895, nerves were not first seen under a microscope until around 1932. We guessed right, but for the wrong reasons back then, and the political powers that control our health care system have never stopped attacking us even though all of their literature validates Chiropractic. Here we go, let’s have some fun with this.
What do we not want to do? Get Old. Aging is now being understood by people researching longevity as essentially a gradual process of glycation of all tissues, including the brain. Glucose is what ages us. In case you are pretending not to know what glucose is, it is sugar, the junk food that you crave because food scientists have you addicted to it. The catalyst for glycation, which is attaching sugar to protein molecules is inflammation. The chemical compound Prostaglandin E2 is Inflammation. We now know that the inflammatory process when prolonged is what wreaks havoc with our health. Since I’m a chiropractor let’s discuss one form of it.
Stay tuned for part 2 of many.
Discs degenerate because they glycate. The disc can no longer deal with mechanical forces. Again, Glycation is an abnormal bond between a sugar and a protein. The crappy Carbs that we all enjoy hook up with proteins of all tissues. When they hook up with skin proteins it gives us wrinkles. This happens within our arteries, our brains, anything that makes us human and/or is important to our health. What is scary is that once the sugar attaches to the protein you can never get it off. It is their for the duration of the life of that protein.
While the experts in the diabetic industry that are dedicated to helping you get diabetes will state that sugar is sugar, people that are not profiting off of your bad health know that High Fructose Corn Syrups glycates our tissues at a rate of 10 times more than any other sugar. Regular fructose is not good either. You can eat an orange and be O.K. because it has bioflavonoids, which is real vitamin C, not the junk they sell in most stores as Ascorbic Acid. Orange juice does not have much vitamin C, it is mostly sugar and you will accelerate your rate of glycation. When you glycate it increases the production of AGE’s, Advanced Glycation End Products. That means you are increasing free radicals in your poor body at a rate of 50 times more than if you weren’t creating free radicals.
This in turn damages your ability to make and maintain Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) and that is needed for synaptogenesis/ Neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is what has to occur for us to be able to learn and just general humaness. As we get older it becomes more difficult to learn. You might be having difficulty absorbing this, but do not fret, this is not easy material and you probably don’t have dementia, yet.
Again, the catalyst for glycation is inflammation. Why do some intervertebral discs degenerate when others in the same spine do not? It is due to glycation. However, damaged cartilage is a magnet for sugar molecules in our bloodstream so that is one reason why injuries become arthritic years later. But it is not just injuries that cause arthritis, we see discs breaking down in areas of the spine where injuries were less probable to occur.
I used the standard picture of a subluxation from the 1950’s to explain to patients what we were doing when I came out of school. A subluxation is the only thing a chiropractor really treats . That photograph was a picture of compressive neuropathology. It is very rare in kids and even rare in adults. Maybe 1% of people seeking care would have such a thing. 99% of patients have a different kind of nerve interference. Compressive neuropathology is a consequence of severe disc disease called spondylosis. Thankfully modern science came along and proved that we can have nerve interference before there is spondylosis. End of Part 2
Some medical history and champions for Chiropractic even though they were not exactly fans of chiropractic are as follows: The term Homeostasis is credited to Walter Bradford Cannon, MA, MD 1871-1945. He spent his entire career at Harvard’s Medical School. This is a big deal. Homeostasis is exactly the force of life that chiropractors work with. Until he came along there were some very strange ideas. But a good idea came before his from Claude Bernard. He was the guy that made Louis Pasteur very angry. Today, Bernard is known as the father of modern physiology. Back then, Pasteur was the father of Germ Theory and still is. He came up with the idea that if we were to kill all of the germs with heat, we would not get sick. You see his name on every Milk carton sold today, Pasteurization, which is to heat the milk up until everything in it is dead, including all the good stuff. Bernard would argue with Pasteur and noted that he was missing a very vital variable, something known as host health.
Bernard died in 1878. Pasteur died the year chiropractic was discovered. When DD Palmer delivered the first chiropractic adjustment to his janitor Harvey Lillard, the principles of Claude Bernard became very real. What does host health have to do with a janitor getting back his hearing? When your body is in a state of homeostasis, it will work as intended. Harvey’s deafness was not caused by a spike right through his head. (Wishing Mick Jaeger a speedy recovery) What sane health practitioners are stating or should be stating is, if you are a healthy host you can handle exposures to nasty germs without getting ill.
A study in the New England Journal of Medicine had 394 human volunteers that had viruses dumped down their noses. Everyone got the exact same amount of exposure to the pathogens. Not everyone came down with a viral infection. They discovered that the people that came down with illness had an increased sustained sympathetic tone. Thinking back to that big bad subluxation picture of a degenerated disc and a hard bone on a puny sick nerve would not explain this increased sympathetic nervous system output. With nerve root compression, the sympathetic tone would decrease.
However, there is another kind of nerve interference where the sympathetic tone increases. That is the kind of nerve interference that chiropractors are dealing with most of their careers. An increase in sympathetic output is immunosuppressive. It makes us prone to illness. Having an increase of sympathetic stress hormones known as Catecholamines is the actual hormones of stress. We’re told that stress kills, but it also makes us sick first. What also made us sick is that history chose the wrong hero, they championed Louis Pasteur because it was easily just to heat things up, I guess?
But after Claude Bernard came the father of Chiropractic, DD Palmer. He only made it to 1913. It was around this time that the previously mentioned Walter B Cannon is going places. He started researching homeostasis, whole body health, and allostasis, which is the process of how the body responds to stressors in order to regain homeostasis. He said all of this was controlled by the autonomic nervous system, that thing that chiropractors work with, that thing that controls are vital life force that we are all born with.
You’re not going to believe this, but one of the main relays to the parasympathetic nervous system is the Nucleus Tractus Solitarius that part of your brain that is modulated by spinal joints. I know what you’re thinking, if only M.D.’s read their own books. One guy who wrote their books was Cannon and the book was called the Supersensitivity of enervated structures. Or as I think it should have been called, Hey, this is Chiropractic. This is what chiropractors are working with. A nerve that is subtlety sick, that is not compressed, fire off more, not less. That means that every chiropractor that still believes in the 1895 theory of a hard bone on a soft nerve needs to read these books as well. You are not getting sick because of a pinched nerve is decreasing your life signals to your organs. You are getting sick because of the consequences of having too many signals overloading the system. It doesn’t matter which one you believe in, the end result is the same. End of Part 3. Stay tuned for Part 4.
The goal of the clinician should be to reestablish inhibitory control. Whether the chiropractor understands this or not doesn’t matter, because their treatment does exactly that. We lower catecholamines, stress hormones with an adjustment. Sadly, Walter B Cannon dies and the next scientist to promote chiropractic without knowing it is C.Chan Gunn. He wrote the treatment of chronic pain- intramuscular stimulation for myofascial pain of radiculopathic origin. O.K., not a best seller, but really good if you are a chiropractor looking to convince people that you are not crazy.
Here he is, a medical doctor describing chiropractic nerve interference. I can’t tell you how many brutal arguments I’ve had with medical doctors over the past 35 years with them insisting that there is no such thing as a subluxation, nerve interference. It turns out that you can have nerve interference without spondylosis,(severe degeneration) and the real doctors, the R.D.’s call it supersensitivity. Pain is determined by the nervous system firing up too much. More nervous system tone produces more pain, more spasm, more sympathetic tone, more production of catecholamines. This is all bad. The number two thing that will shorten your life is stress, which is increased sympathetic tone. The number one thing is a lack of oxygen due to faulty chest wall mechanics, which medical science has discovered that chiropractors fix in humans all day long.
When the spine is stiff, not degenerated full strength kind of stiff, the sympathetics become disinhibited, meaning you get increased sympathetic tone, increased stress. The Windsor study in 1977 studied the autopsies on 50 humans. If there was compressive neuropathology there was no associated visceral disease. That is the opposite of the hard bone on the nerve theory that we were taught in school. But and a very big but, there was visceral disease. He documented 139 diseased visceral organs in 50 humans. He traced the nerves back from the diseased organs to the sympathetics. His conclusion was that the sympathetics have increased tone when regions of the spine become stiff. The spinal segments don’t have to break down completely and fall on top of the nerve.
If you are a patient of a chiropractor when he explained to you what he found on your X-rays, what you should have heard, taken away from that conversation was something very simple, don’t let your spines get stiff because old age and pathology will follow. Not so fast you physical education enthusiasts. You can’t stop your spine from getting stiff by going to the gym everyday. While chiropractic offices are full of iron pumping people, their spines were locking up and might have been the reason they showed up in the first place, but more likely than not, they were just feeling your average amount of pain, even though they took care of themselves. But the real reason their workouts are not helping completely is because the segmental movers of the spine are not under voluntary control. That means you can’t move one vertebrae to the right and the one below it to the left. The nerves that control those spinal intrinsic muscles do not go to your volitional center of your brain, the frontal lobe. Those nerves are powered by the subconscious part of your brain, the cerebellum. If not, you would lose your mind trying to figure out how to stand up against gravity. Those spinal segments need help. They always needed help. Think back to those cavemen drawings of them walking on each other’s backs I mentioned above. Is there any science that could possibly back me up on this?
Manohar Panjabi, a brilliant researcher discusses positive feedback loops. He hates Chiropractic and has nothing positive to say about us, but he describes how we function in gravity, the function of our mechanoreceptors, which is a chiropractic speciality. Humans don’t want to have positive feedback because that will kill you. For example if we were bleeding badly, a positive feedback system would allow us to continue to bleed. Luckily we work on negative feedback loops, so when that blood is not returning to the heart, our body tries to figure out why it is not getting it’s normal amount of return blood flow and it starts to do things to remedy that situation. If we weren’t getting some negative feedback, we’d just keep pumping until there was nothing left to pump.
If spinal mechanoreceptors are not working right, then all kinds of downstream neurological consequences occur including visceral dysfunction and disease. When the spinal mechanoreceptors are not working they send out spasm signals, which keeps the spinal joints from moving correctly, which creates more spasm. This is a positive feedback loops and you need a chiropractor to break up that not so nice reflex. In neurophysiology there is something called the Law of denervation supersensitivity and it is not exactly common sense, but let’s make some sense out of it anyway.
What is not well known is that when a nerve is below average and is not functioning properly, it becomes supersensitive and will behave erratically. This principle is fundamental and universal, yet is not at all well known. This is known as Cannons and Rosenblueth’s Law of denervation supersensitivity. This is chiropractic nerve interference being described by scientists not realizing that they are describing chiropractic nerve interference. When you lose mechanical integrity one of the most noted things that happens is that you open up pain gates. That means you get more pain. Improved mechanical integrity closes the pain gates. This became a more popular idea when it was republished in 1965 by Melzack and Wall. The gate theory of pain is still accepted to this day, so for the people that hate chiropractors for no particular reason, just get over it.
End of Part 4 Stay tuned for Part 5
The best study that has ever been done for chiropractic efficacy with regard to treating low back pain was done by Kilkaldy Willis. The subjects in this study did not have compressive neuropathy, but they had something that was bothering them and were not getting better no matter what they tried. 81% of them got better from chiropractic thrusts. I stated it that way because quite often in the rigged scientific studies designed to discredit chiropractic, mobilization by physical therapists is what was performed in the study when they say chiropractic doesn’t work. But in this study where it did work with the study being about chiropractic treatment, the spinal manipulation performed was by actual chiropractors. No chiropractors or patients were harmed during the making of that study.
These patients were seriously chronically disabled and even failed previous chiropractic care. What made the difference in success this time? Why did this group of chiropractors succeed where previous chiropractors had failed? These chiropractors were not any different than other chiropractors but they had the advantage of being in a research study. That means they did not have to worry about their patients calling them crooks for wanting to see them a lot. How much did these guys want to see these chronically disabled, on the scrap heap of history want to see these patients. What made these guys work the miracles on so many of these very bad cases was that the patient was seen every day for three weeks. Not for nothing, but when I came out of school and insurance companies would pay for the patient’s care, I got a little nervous, as in shaking in my boots, telling a patient that they needed to come 3 times a week for 4 weeks. I didn’t know any of this back then, because it wasn’t available yet, but the old time chiropractors down the block from me got better results than I did and they didn’t have a problem telling people to come in daily for weeks. They didn’t know this research either, they just had a stronger commitment to chiropractic principles than I had. So while as a society we all worship the God of Science, a lot of people suffered needlessly because even chiropractors did not have enough faith in what they were doing. Side note, to this day, if someone argues with me I let them win, which means they will suffer needlessly.
Back to the science. Mechanoreceptors are in the disc, spinal ligaments, muscle spindles, and when they get injured a feedback loop is created that locks up the joint. We need to break that feedback loop and chiropractors are these loop breakers. When we do this we not only break up the feedback loop but we decrease the sympathetic tone. That means we are helping the patient not suffer from the number 2 cause of disease, stress. The cortisol levels in test subjects dropped 30 units just from a chiropractic adjustment. Without the use of drugs that have wild side effects.
The ratio of your Pro and anti-inflammatory chemicals is also being affected by these physical adhesions of the spinal joints. Again, right now, the common denominator for most diseases is inflammation. Cytokines interleukin cells are involved in the inflammatory response. When we are constantly inflamed, our bodies get really angry at us and decide to eat itself alive, also known as an autoimmune disease. Autoimmune disease is at epidemic levels as I type.
This is a quote from my previous article about why you should want a chiropractic adjustment and I forget where I got it from. It is now time to think about your brain and a concept called proprioception-the deceptively simple notion that you have to know where different parts of your body are at all times. Your body is aware of exactly where each limb is in space every second, because each muscle, tendon, ligament and joint sends thousands of nerve fibers back to the brain through the spinal cord. Those fibers signal every nuance gradation of contraction, stress, muscular tone, orientation, position and movement at every moment of the day. Your brain keeps careful track of the location of every muscle and joint in your body every second, all day, every day, waiting for you to need the information.
A subluxation takes that neurological information of proprioception out of the system which has deleterious global effects. It is critical to have this information and if we have a subluxation you are robbing the brain. It’s not nice to rob your brain because that is what keeps you healthy. Chiropractors add to your brain. Medicine subtracts from it.
When I went to school we were taught that the disc does not have a nerve. In 1992 spine magazine had a diagram of the intervertebral disc. The job of the nerves is to inform the central nervous system of change in spinal alignment, spinal position, and spinal motion.
Irvin M. Korr, PH.D. physiologist out of Princeton wrote about proprioceptive and somatic dysfunction. That is the basis of chiropractic. He came up with the idea a 120 years after Chiropractors, but was able to prove it that the spinal cord is the organizer of disease processes. He discovered scientifically that hyperactivity of sympathetic innovation was a common factor in disease. Chiropractors calm down sympathetic tone by improving mechanical reception in spinal joints. We improve mechanical integrity in the way we live and function in gravity. We call this nerve interference a subluxation.
Now how much would you pay? Don’t answer yet. There is a study titled, cerebral metabolic changes in men after chiropractic spinal manipulation for neck pain. It is known as the Ogura study and it was to test what Korr was saying. It demonstrates that chiropractic is good for other things than just pain. Mrs. Jones wouldn’t you want your brain to function at a healthier, a higher level. Oh I understand, you just want me to rub some tiger balm on your boo boo.
When we improve mechanical reception we are not just inhibiting sympathetic tone and the firing of pain. We are not just lowering catecholamines, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. Having high levels of these stress hormones alters epigenetic methylation, shortens telomeres, and causes vasoconstriction. It reduces ATP. Reduces healing. Reduces sodium and glutamate pumps. Left to it’s own, the body creates immunosuppressive reactions from that stress. It increases oxidative stress. Sympathetic nerves are an integrative interface between two super systems, the brain and the immune system. Sympathetic’s control immunity, which is about where we started off with this story.
