Most people think of Chiropractors as back doctors because we’re working on your back. They don’t think of us as brain doctors. In fact, they might not even think we’re doctors at all and don’t know that we had to pass the same National Board Examinations that the real medical doctors have to take.
Even though 20% of the central nervous system, which does include your brain being 80% of it but, that other 20% is in between your spinal bones. I’ll tell you the wonderful thing about that in a moment, but first, I’d like to ask a controversial question. When are we considered dead? When we’re brain dead. So life is coming out of our brain and telling every cell in our body what to do. How many cells are there in our body? There are about 36 trillion cells in our body with our DNA. However, the other 64 trillion cells within us are not our DNA, they are our microbiome, which is bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc. Our microbiome works to keep us alive. We can’t exist without it as hard as modern science figures out new ways to destroy it, such as with wipes, antibiotics, pesticides etc.
We have a lot of cells that need to work together in order for us to be human. It takes a lot of power to keep all those cells acting as you, instead of 100 trillion amoebas. I hear you, that would mean that we are a spontaneous reversal of the laws of thermodynamics. Indeed we are. In case, you were sleeping in physics class, thermodynamics states that the universe tends to naturally exist in a state of chaos. It takes energy placed into a system to keep the chaos away. So our brain is pumping out a lot of energy to keep those 100 trillion amoebas in line and acting like you instead of them, which is a little thing swimming around under the microscope.
The brain powers our entire body, but what powers our brain? I think you already know where this is going. Your spine powers your brain. How does that happen? I’m glad you asked.
The spinal joints are surrounded with huge amounts of special nerves called proprioceptors. They do more than cause pain in your back. In fact, those nerves don’t carry pain signals. Pain nerves are little puny ones that are hundreds of times slower than these big proprioceptor nerves.
It is important to know where we are in space and time and that is one function of a proprioceptor nerve. You don’t have to look to see where your finger is. That is why a policeman will ask you to touch your nose with your eyes closed. There is a big part of your brain, the cerebellum that does that stuff automatically and it is very susceptible to alcohol which you already know from the time you came home drunk and smashed your head on the toilet. You don’t want to think of the billions of calculations per second necessary to stand up against gravity, so before we had a conscious working brain, we had a subconscious brain known as the cerebellum. Fish had one so they could swim straight. Ours got much bigger and complex because it needed to when we came out of the ocean and decided to stand up to find food. But that part of the brain does not do a whole lot without input from the large proprioceptor nerves found in abundance in our spinal joints. Hence why we hear these days that sitting is the new smoking.
This is one reason why kids have more learning disabilities now. We have 3 canals in our ears for balance. One for the X axis, Y axis and Z axis. The 3 dimensions. Catching a baseball on a baseball field requires all 3 axis’s to be engaged. Playing baseball on a 2 dimensional computer screen robs your brain of vital information also known as stimulus.
Turns out our brains need constant stimulus to work and Tik Tok videos are not the kind of stimulus it wants. There is only one constant stimulus on earth and when I ask people what it is and not just lay people but even medical doctors I get some very interesting answers. Food, water, light, but almost no one has ever guessed correctly what it is that is vital to a humans survival. The constant stimulus is gravity. It gets dark at night, there is not always a Mozart concert playing, but we always have gravity and throughout the billions of years of us evolving into humans, our nervous systems specialized and made certain nerves that could transduce that energy/power of gravity into electricity that charges up our battery that I referred to earlier as our brain. Some old anatomy books will refer to these nerves as gravity receptors.
I know that is impossible for some people to grasp because they didn’t learn it in school, it wasn’t on Grey’s Anatomy but let’s think about what some of our facial organs do. Our eyes transduce light into ones and zero’s and we can see our world. Shine light in your ears and nothing happens. Yell inside a nose and nothing is going to happen except you might get punched for yelling into someone’s nose. Each specialized nerve likes a certain kind of stimulus. The maximum stimulus to our brain is gravity. Sure we could go into outer space and survive but we’d have to exercise quite vigorously for about 6 hours a day if we want to come back to earth and function. You don’t need to survive earth by exercising like that. You just need a spine that works well. How can I say such a thing?
When a chiropractor adjusts your spine or as you call it, cracking your back, it turns out that it is the number one stimulus to your central nervous system. Luck would have it that there are 250 times more of these special nerves in your upper neck joints than anywhere else. Most people have been warned not to let the chiropractor touch your neck. If you listen to that advice, you are missing out on a 250 times better chance of having your nervous system have a more positive outcome.
So you get adjusted once and are angry that you are told that you need to get more. Most chiropractors don’t even know why, we’re just told that you need more because we know more works better than less. Here is one reason why you need more than one. The synovial fluid that lubricates the spinal joints will become more like paste after about 30 days from your last adjustment. That means your joints are going to become stiff whether you can feel it or not. If they remain fixated for too long you could develop arthritis. Chiropractors perform wonders but they can’t un-boil a hardboiled egg. We’re not going to get rid of your arthritis, but we could slow it down from getting worse. But should your goal be to just not get arthritis?
Athletes at the Olympics are getting adjusted before the competition. They are not in pain. They are not arthritic, yet. They are in the best shape of their lives. But they want that extra added advantage that the back cracking gives their brain, the subconscious part of their brain that controls a lot of muscles that you cannot control with the conscious part of your brain. Those muscles in your spine are called shunt stabilizers, which protect the back from injury. Many people like to work their core by doing sit-ups, but you would benefit greatly by just balancing on one leg with your eyes closed because that would make your proprioceptor nerves fire lots of electrical signals to your cerebellum that would then send signals down the vestibulospinal tracts to strengthen up those involuntary spinal muscles that you have no conscious control over. You can’t turn one spinal bone to the left and the one above or below it to the right. It’s great to have good abs, but you also need good shunt stabilizing muscles to avoid severe back aches and again, those deep internal muscles of the spine are not controlled by your conscious part of your brain. They are controlled by the cerebellum, your subconscious, which just happens to be one of the main areas a chiropractor is working with when they adjust your spine.
But when we’re cracking your back and dare I say neck, we’re not just affecting your musculoskeletal system. We’re affecting every system in your body. Your immune system, cardiovascular system, lymphatic system, digestive system, etc. The electrical output from your joints that were just fired up by the chiropractor is going to connect with many different areas of your brain that control other areas of your body that you more likely than not, would not associate with your spine. Now how much would you pay?
I’ll answer that in my own special way. When I was 2 years old I was dying from reoccurring 106 fevers. 107 you’re gone. The emergency room doctors could never find any bacteria in my blood and had no idea why I was going to die, but they were sick of seeing my parents and they told them to not come back with me. So with no other choices on the menu in 1956, they took me to a chiropractor and he cracked my neck. The fever went away immediately and never came back.
If my parents had millions of dollars and went to the biggest 8 foot tall doctor in Manhattan, I’d still be dead. So when I adjust someone, I feel like I’m giving them a million dollar gift. Of course most people don’t know any of this stuff I just wrote so they’re wondering if it was worth whatever it was I did charge them, which is much less than what the E.R. is going to charge them and most of the time they just give you ibuprofen. As a side note, my mother went crazy after that experience and never would let me see a medical doctor again. I grew up with my neighbor next door, who happened to be that chiropractor.
I mentioned that because modern research reveals that people that have had long term chiropractic care, someone like myself, has more markers on their DNA that are for health than people that have not gone to a chiropractor all of their life whether there was something wrong or not.
Of course I could have just said, that chiropractors work with the power that created your body. Your mother’s gynecologist did not have to constantly yell down her throat, now make the arms and then the legs. That wonderful power that chiropractors work with is called our innate intelligence and you can call it whatever you want, but even as an atheist I have to admit that there is a power in the universe, gravity being an obvious one, but there are other things going on and we tap into that power that is literally at our hands.
Yet most people have more faith in some pills that are usually determined later to be very bad for our health. Of course I have to make a disclaimer now and state clearly if you have diabetes, you better not stop taking your insulin. That really means that some people are so compromised that they need their medications to survive. My goal for most of my career was to get people when they are younger so that they don’t wreck their trillion dollar machine, know as the human body. M.I.T. scientists say it is actually worth 7 trillion dollars. No one gets an owners manual for their 7 trillion dollar machine although they might read how to take care of their $50 toaster oven.
Because of this mentality I have switched my goal after 42 years in practice to appealing to people’s sense of urgency to get out of horrid pain. You could say I’m a pain remover, but so is an aspirin. However, the aspirin does not provide all those benefits mentioned above. Pain is very motivating to a potential patient and I made my life easier by addressing that concern. But a doctor means teacher and I took an oath to teach so I still like to try and convince people that there is a different way, a better way, and it’s called Chiropractic.
