Very often when I work on a patient and get to their neck I have to ask them if they are trying to adjust it themselves and they say yes, why do you ask. Sadly, the answer is because I can feel that they have damaged their neck. What I’m feeling are the joints not moving the way I would expect them to move. After 42 years of doing this I know what a healthy neck should feel like when adjusting it and I do not require an MRI to know that people have been twisting their necks mercilessly in order to get that instant relief that is experienced when done correctly.
A vector is a force and an angle. No one can get the right vector when attempting to adjust their own neck. They may or may not get those feel good hormones such as serotonin, dopamine and endorphin that do get released from moving the special joints in your neck that are enervated with the largest, fastest, and most powerful nerves in your body. When those nerves are stimulated they will fire off into different parts of your brain that release the feel good hormones. But what they are sure to also get are damaged over stretched ligaments that stabilize the joints that are holding 20% of your brain which is your spinal cord, that passes through those joints.
Sure you can crack your knuckles but 20% of your brain is not hiding in there. Well at least for most people. Maybe that is where the term knuckle head came from, but don’t be a knuckle head and try and crack your own neck. I know how to do it and I can’t do my own. I have to go to a colleague. In this age of Tik Tok, people seem to be all consumed with hearing that crack. It is just gas being released from the lubricating fluid in the joint due to a change in pressure.
However, the neurological impact from getting adjusted properly is how chiropractors became famous for fixing the unfix-able. That means most patients go to a chiropractor after everything else failed. But you shouldn’t fail yourself by destabilizing part of your central nervous system. The medical term for when a chiropractor adjusts a neck or back is a fast stretch cavitation of a zygapophoseal joint. The neurology behind it is rarely understood by a medical doctor. It is quite complex. Said another way, you shouldn’t be jumping off the couch onto your friends back or stretching your neck to the point of spraining the ligaments.
When I feel someone’s neck that has been self adjusted long enough for me to notice that they’ve been doing something bad to themselves, I strongly suggest that they find another chiropractor because I don’t want to deal with it. It is going to require a lot of rehabilitation and at this point in my career I’m focusing more on emergency type situations.
