When people enter my office, its generally because they have a problem. Sound familiar? But what am I looking for, what happens when we change things, and how can we protect you and your future health?
We, as a society, tend to measure how healthy and well we are by how we feel. If we feel good, or even ok, we think that we are healthy. What I am about to tell you could really challenge that idea.
By the time someone is in my office there is generally something wrong. There are many different reasons why people seek the help of a chiropractor, and I think that the most important one is prevention – did you know that 80% of people will experience back pain in their lives? Personally, I would love to flip that statistic – 80% of people will live a healthy and well life. That sounds much better. But how does chiropractic care cause health and wellbeing?
Chiropractors are specialised in assessing and correcting subluxations in your spine. Subluxations are parts of your spine that are stiff or not moving properly. This affects the ability of your nerves and nervous system to communicate with your brain. Subluxations impede how well your body talks to your brain. When your brain receives either less, patchy or no information from a part of your body, your brain can ignore the area completely. This slowly changes how your brain works – it reprograms your brain which results in your brain being unable to compensate, adapt and cope with the different stressors you put your body through. This breakdown over time causes you to become aware of a problem – eventually…
Most people just want to ‘feel’ better – as mentioned, this is most people’s perception of health. But this is like noticing the oil light on your car. To manage this problem, you could just top it up to avoid that warning light, that critical failure alarm. But would you be happy your loved one driving around in a car one step away from critical failure? Wouldn’t you rather the mechanic filled the oil up to an appropriate level, and maybe check the other vital systems of your cars engine? Then you would feel more comfortable with that loved one of yours driving this car. This is how chiropractic care translates to health and wellbeing. There is a time when your warning light and problem switch off and disappear, but this is your function being just better than critical.
To achieve true health and wellbeing, we assess your function using different functional guides to allow us to see where your oil levels are. Are you still close to critical levels? Or are you moving further away from that threshold into improved and sustained function? Being proactive with chiropractic care helps program how your brain understands your body, and therefore the speed, effectiveness and accuracy of adaption to lives stressors.
