Once again, a new study is revealing what Chiropractors have known since before it was possible to have known it, which was around 1895. We didn’t have the research tools to prove it, and were mocked horrendously for that, but for people like me that were raised on chiropractic care since I was two years old, we just forged forward with ideas that have been proven by medical science decades later.
The newest all the rage study from the Annals of Neurology discusses people with chronic back pain rating ordinary aversive sounds as dramatically more distressing than pain free people did. They explained in impressive detail how this is occurring in the central nervous system. They also state that it is similar to how fibromyalgia patients experience the world.
The article went on to discuss psychological treatment based upon the premise that chronic back pain signals are generated by the brain rather than by real tissue damage. It seems talking about how you interpret those pain signals was helpful.
I’m going to make this simple to understand and useful. We learn by having nerve cells connect to other nerve cells. When we first try to hit piano keys, it is not going well. But eventually with practice, we can hear the right notes and tempo, our muscles have connected to our ears and brain and voila, it becomes music. What I have been telling my patients for the past 46 years, (old news) is that they have learned a new song called pain and it is just like one of those awful songs you can’t get out of your head.
There is more than one way to skin a cat and chiropractors use a lot of modalities to effectively rehabilitate people’s brains. One of them is what the new scientists discovered, which is talking about it. You don’t have to be a doctor of psychology to talk.
Considering that 20% of the brain is in your spine it doesn’t hurt to use the very power neuronal pathways of the spinal cord to also talk to your brain in a language that it enjoys more than English or whatever language you speak. Like a computer it communicates with ones and zeroes only in the nerve cell, the one is the resting potential of the cell membrane to be above threshold and a zero is below the threshold. If your cells are collectively below threshold, your brain is not working optimally. What is the best way to get those brain cells above threshold?
According to medical textbooks on neurology, used by all medical schools, they state that when a chiropractor adjusts your spine it is the most powerful stimulus to the central nervous system known to medical science. The medical profession calls what we do a fast stretch cavitation of a zygapophyseal joint. You know it as cracking your back. The nerves surrounding the spinal joints are the largest, most powerful, and fastest nerves in our nervous system. This well understood physiology by the scientific community has worked out quite well for chiropractic patients.
