It’s breaking news articles like this one that I’m attaching in a link at the bottom, that makes me realize that there is not a whole lot new under the sun. While this not astonishing at all news article broke on August 3rd, 2023, Chiropractors have known this since around 1920. If you don’t want to read the article it is basically saying that fear is a contributor to chronic low back pain.
Chiropractors have for many generations referred to the 5 spokes on a wheel theory of health. Modern Medicine sees being healthy as making sure that you have taken plenty of drugs. That is their one major spoke. Chiropractic philosophy has always maintained that in order to be truly healthy we need to think of ourselves as a wheel and each spoke provides balance and strength to the others.
The 5 spokes are Physical, Emotional, Social, Spiritual, and Environmental. Environmental is another way of saying you are what you eat. Of course more recently than 1920 it also includes trying to avoid all of the things in our environment that are not safe to eat. That list has grown to over a hundred thousand chemicals we’ve released on the earth.
Since the article is about fear, let’s discuss our emotions and how chiropractic effects the biggest one, our fight or flight reflexes. Stress is what triggers our endocrine system to produce cortisol, which is the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t matter if it is a boss, spouse, neighbor, etc. that is stressing you out. The result is an increase in cortisol. Research has shown after getting a good chiropractic adjustment your stress hormone cortisol, can go down by 30 units. Medical experts will allow you to go to a chiropractor if you have low back pain with none of it radiating into your legs. Even though they know that about 90% of low back pain patients don’t require surgery for that pain that is radiating into their legs.
So while we’re fighting that battle, no one would ever think to go to a chiropractor to relieve stress. In the article from Johns Hopkins and the Lancet they discuss rewiring the brain. After receiving my diplomate in Neurology in 1995, I’ve explained low back pain differently than the first 14 years of my career. The muscles that are often involved in acute and chronic low back pain are not like the muscles in your arms and legs. Those muscles you can control because they receive signals from your conscious part of the brain known as the primary motor cortex. The postural muscles that you can’t control, that are often the cause of severe low back pain are innervated from subconscious parts of your brain, which include the cerebellum and vestibular spinal tracts. You can’t move one vertebra to the left and the one below it to the right. The multifidi muscles do that and most radiologists don’t seem to know about that muscle because they never report on it’s condition on an MRI.
I tell the victims of this type of syndrome that we have to re-educate the brain (or rewire it as the article refers to) in order to fix their low back pain. In turn they usually look at me with that, yeah sure doc stare. While the article talks about the psychological process involved in rehabilitating chronic low back pain patients, I prefer to get into the brain a lot quicker and more efficiently. 90% of all of the information coming into your brain is from the spinal joints. We only get about 10% from our eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The spinal joints are innervated with the most powerful, fastest, and largest nerves in the body. Whether you are hearing a nice story in church or one from a psychologist, the information is received in the brain as ones and zero’s. More precisely the nerve is working when it is above threshold, which is analogous to a one or it is not working when below threshold which is a zero.
What I’m saying is you could spend years in therapy, church, or a meditation retreat, or you could jump start the whole system a lot quicker with a chiropractic adjustment. Keep in mind those 5 spokes. Three of particular interest for this story is Emotional, Social, and Spiritual. So it is very important to have a good mental attitude, which you can get in a house of worship. Just as important is a good social support system aka friends and family. To be optimized, you want to have all 5 spokes in balance. This is not new rocket science or medical science, but I suspect that somehow they’ll try and sell all of this in a pill.
People that live to be over 100 and healthy are studied in areas known as Blue Zones. The people in these different areas all over the world have the 5 spokes in common. They have strong emotional ties to their community so that improves the social spoke on the wheel. They eat real food, not stuff that can be found on a grocery store shelf decades after it was manufactured. They don’t suffer as much from chronic low back pain because they use their bodies for work. They are not sitting in front of computer screens all day.
In conclusion, I want to thank the authors of this study for once again validating Chiropractic. Many medical studies validate Chiropractic, but you might not ever know that because the people reading a teleprompter on the news don’t have the ability to understand what it is they are reporting and most of what they are reporting is what their drug company sponsors tell them to report, which is you can be healthy if you just take a pill, but first ask your doctor for it.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/health/fear-a-surprising-contributor-to-chronic-low-back-pain-5383243?utm_source=Health&src_src=Health&utm_campaign=health-2023-08-05&src_cmp=health-2023-08-05&utm_medium=email&est=%2BSGbRJVmvrWZkB6bifrHIhQD%2FoH6hHKvvMeAnjxsHOdJWTZK4NpCaS%2Bko07P64lBuA%3D%3D
