Turning Life Off Is Not Turning Life On

If you suddenly had a painful splinter in your finger there are a number of options available for you.  You could do nothing, let it fester, and allow your immune system to gradually decompose it through phagocytosis.  You will heal eventually.  It may take some time.   That’s what our bodies do; they heal one way or another.  However, if you decide to do something about your splinter, there are several more options.  One, you could take enough pain medicine until you can’t feel the discomfort  anymore, or you could sever the nerve going to your finger and this would keep you from feeling  the pain any more.  You could just cut your finger off and the stump will heal eventually, leaving you with four fingers.  Or, you could pull the splinter out and let your immune system quickly heal the tissues now that they are not being interfered with by a foreign object.  This option leaves you with all five fingers in working order and is the most rapid route to returning to normal function.  I know this sounds a bit silly, but we are confronted with this decision all the time in other areas of health care. 

The medicines that are trumpeted every day from all manner of media generally act in a way that is similar to cutting the nerve to the finger.  They are suppressive and palliative.  Pain is a messenger that something is wrong.  ‘Killing’ the messenger will diminish your pain but it doesn’t do anything to solve the actual problem.  You just live life in ‘blissful ignorance’.  This is actually true for most cardiac medications among many others.  The ‘heart’ pills do not just go to the cells of the heart and cardiovascular system where you want them to go.  They go to every cell in your body and change functions at that level where ever they go.  These changes can and do cause problems and these are known as ‘side effects’.

We are comprised of trillions of cells.  They combine together to form tissues and organs.  All of these structures work must together in harmony for us to be healthy.  At any moment, our bodies are doing the very best they can with what they have to work with.  Medications (drugs) generally interfere with metabolic pathways inside cells.  They shut down certain functions.  They can shut down communications between cells.  This is the opposite of removing interference and allowing the vital force of life inside you to function without constraint.  Turning life off is not turning life on. 

Sometimes, it is the best we can do.  Being numb may be preferable to living a life in pain.  But what if we listened to the message and understood it?  What if we have more power inside us than we have been told?  What if you didn’t have to constantly control your symptoms with toxic drugs but could actually free the life that struggles to express itself inside you? 

This is the incredible reality of upper cervical chiropractic.  If you have been under upper cervical care for a while you already have experienced this truth.  The adjustment works not because of what it ‘does’, but because of what it ‘un-does’!  Freeing the power of life to communicate freely with all the cells of the body allows the body to work in the optimal and coordinated manner that it was made.  Diminishing function, decreasing communication also lessens the ability of life to find a way back to health. 

You know what the adjustment has done for you.  Many of you say you don’t know what you would do without it now!  No one wants to live with life turned down once they have lived life in adjustment!  Imagine if the whole world had access to this amazing healthcare.  Imagine if everyone felt well and healthy. Imagine the kinds of decisions we would all make if all of our nervous systems were working properly.  Keep imagining and spread the word!

Michael Thomas, RN, BS, DC

Happy New Year

“What is to give light must endure burning.”

Viktor Frankl

The winter solstice signals the yearly extreme of the darkness of night as well as the minimum of day.  From this point in the calendar, the light of day will now grow with each revolution of the Earth, incrementally shortening the night, gradually increasing the length of solar illumination each day. This occurs because the spin of the earth is not perpendicular to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun.  This makes the whole Earth wobble, and it takes a whole year to wobble north to south and back to north.

The celebration of the end of one year and the beginning of another, offers us a moment to consider the rhythms of our own life.  Circles within circles.  Circles have neither beginning nor end, but we do.  The rhythms of our lives begin in the womb and end with our last expiring breath.  The cycle of our life is a truncation (shortened version) of the endless cycles around us.  For instance, there is a cycle of atoms and molecules that continuously move into and out of us, exchanging themselves with other atoms and molecules in our planet’s air, water and earth.  Where we begin and end may be more fluid than we usually consider.  The Moon pulls on the liquids within our blood just as it tugs on the water in the oceans producing the tides.  We have relationships with others that we see and talk with as we go through our weeks and months and years.

The gravity that binds us to this Earth causes us to wobble too.  We always move in rhythmic fashion in little micro-orbits around the line of gravity formed by our mass.  The center of our wobbling (our center of gravity), generally resides in our pelvis.  When we stand up on our two legs, our center of gravity is several feet off the ground.  Our incredible nervous systems continually adapt and compensate in order to optimize our positions to best match up with whatever we are doing at any moment in time.  Equipoise, we call it.

While our bodies dance with gravity, we are usually busy finding balance in other ways.  We don’t want to be too hungry or too full.  We try to get the right amount of sleep so we can be alert in the other parts of the day.  We want to be sensitive to others and yet maintain the boundaries necessary for our own emotional and mental health.  We must be active enough to be healthy but not work so hard we begin to break down.   There is no magic action or thought or feeling that always works in every situation.   It is in the balance of all the aspects that life happens.  The relationship between the ‘pieces’ turns out to be more important than the pieces themselves.

This idea is called a systems approach and is increasingly being seen in science as the next step after many decades of reductionism.  In any structure, it is the way the ‘pieces’ are arranged that produces the utility.  Until recently in biology, when we wanted to study cells we would take them and blend them up.  We would then put them into a centrifuge and spin the contents around until distinct layers revealed themselves.  Each layer was then analyzed chemically and in a microscope and we thought we understood a lot about cells.  It turns out that the structure inside cells is essential to their function.  Destroying their structure destroyed our ability to understand them.  It took several decades to figure this out.  It is in the relationship of all the parts that creates the functionality of life.  We are more like verbs than we think.  Even molecules act from their edges. The push and pull of charge and repulsion, tension and compression, light and dark, playing out over time creates the circles of cycles that comprise our lives and all of Life.

What meaning is there in a circle?  In our society we spend a lot of time trying to get somewhere.  A circle always ends up where it started.  This question is one that each of us must answer for ourselves, but the stories of our lives play out in the rhythm of the cycles we encounter.  We can be carried away by the extremes.  We can be bored by the moderate times.  We can suffer through lack.  Our perception, the way we assign value to what comes through our senses, creates the meaning.  Perception is a choice.  We think it is hard wired, we have even been taught that it is hard wired.  It is not.  Disciplined intent changes our perceptions all the time.  (Oh, and so does undisciplined intent!) Our minds are meant to be our servants not our oppressors.

In this moment of moving from darkness to light, we can acknowledge our own cycles of light and dark.  We are not narrowly defined by either our darkness or our light, but rather by how we navigate the between the two in the living of our lives.  One doesn’t exist without the other and neither do we.  As we understand the polarities within ourselves, so we also heal the rifts between us all.  If we can make space in our hearts for our own extremes, perhaps we can find the room to better understand the extremes of others.

Don’t believe all the naysayers.  Don’t let the news steal your peace.  Changing yourself does change the world.  It’s the only way it will change.  You are the balanced center of many forces.  Acknowledge your center and be that balance in your own life and in your actions out in the world.  Make it a happy new year for us all.

Michael Thomas, D.C.

Another Unreasonable Request for Christmas

Michael D. Thomas, D.C.

It is the Holiday time of year.  The weather is cooling off, even down here, and there is an air of festivities and perhaps a hint of goodwill in the air.  Challenging times demand more of us just to stay where we are.  It is perhaps, more important than ever to find the spirit of this time of year and examine the past year in anticipation of the coming one.  To begin, we might examine what we are thankful for.  If this last year was as tough for you as it was for me, you might think there is little to be grateful for, but you would be wrong.

A bit of perspective goes a long way.  There are now seven billion of us on our planet Earth.  80% of us live in poverty.  That means most of us can’t take care of our basic needs.  70% are illiterate.  That means that the vast databases and the accumulated knowledge that lives in the written word is unavailable to us and our lives.  Half of us suffer from hunger and malnutrition every day.  500 million of us are in prison, being tortured or close to dying from starvation.  3 billion of us cannot go to our house of worship without risking assault or death.  If you have a full refrigerator, clothes to wear, a roof over your head and a place to sleep you are wealthier than 75% of us on this planet.  If you have money in the bank and also some in your wallet, you are among the 8% of people who do.  One percent of people on the Earth own a computer.  One percent has a college degree.  6% of us own 59% of the wealth and statistically they all come from the USA.  Here in Marion county 27% of our children live in poverty.  The state average is 18%.  If you fall on the fortunate side of these numbers you can certainly be grateful.  If not, you don’t need me to tell you about it.

Gratitude isn’t about how much you have, it’s about your perspective.  Being grateful connects you to something much bigger than yourself.  It changes the way you see everything that unfolds in front of you.  We are all interconnected.  What we do, the choices we make, the things we buy, the food we eat, the people we associate with, all make a difference in the world.  Being grateful is a willful act of perspective.  We can be irritated that things aren’t going the way we planned or we can be grateful that we simply woke up this morning.  Our arms and legs worked (If they did.  If not, we are grateful for the ones that do!)  Our brains work.  We can see and hear.  We can move about.  We may have others who care about us.  We may have family that pulls together every day.  We may have a job that allows us to pay our bills and to live the life we choose.  We may have love in our life.  We certainly have the love that we can give.  Love’s origin is inside each of us.  And given the reciprocal nature of love, if you give love out daily it returns in spades.  This is one time that the more you give the more you receive.  This is Love’s secret.

I know from my own journey that living in fear, constantly worrying about survival, struggling to take and hold onto what you want is a lonely and unsatisfying life.  Fear and creativity are mutually incompatible.  Even if you have others around you, survival consciousness is a lonely prison.  Everything that occurs is registered as either more or less for and about you.  “What’s in it for me” is the mantra of greed that has made this planet so inequitable.  On the other hand, there is another perspective.  This perspective comes from an appreciation of the ‘pattern that connects’.  You may be religious, you may not.  This isn’t about theology but it does have a central spiritual component.  We are not just ‘meat machines’.  We are not just selfish clots of desires.  We are not actually independent at all.  We may imagine that we are self-sufficient, but no one is.  We are part of an unimaginable pattern bigger than anything our brains can come up with.  Our lives are connected to everything around us from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat to the people we interact with.  More than this realization of connection is the realization that we can trust Life.  In the chiropractic work I do it is called the ‘non-interference paradigm’.  It means that we can trust the life inside of us and that our best medicine is removing any interference to it and trusting that the life that created you, that made what would one day become you grow into a cell and from there into trillions of cells (that you are now!).  The life that built and grew your tissues and bones and the nervous system that connects you to all of life will manifest in the optimal way, if it can.  There is always enough.  There is even abundance.

You won’t read this much in the medical literature.  It doesn’t get airplay on the news.  There is no profit in self-sustainability.  There is nothing to buy.   Our health is our greatest treasure.  Without it, nothing much matters.  With it, everything is possible.  Health isn’t achieved by turning life off with drugs.  Surgery can give you some time but it doesn’t generally heal you by itself.  The surgeon can cut but it is the force of life within you that mends the tissues.  The real true and only healer is inside each one of us.  We are not here by accident.  In fact incredible things had to occur for you to be walking the planet at this time.  We have somehow come to see the world as cold and cruel and indifferent but it is us who have those qualities, not life.

Once gratitude has washed its way through our hearts and lives, we find the end of the year to be a moment when we ponder what comes next?  We generally move in the direction we are headed.  What is our direction?  How can we be better people?  As we serve our communities, we ourselves are served in a manifold of ways that we could never predict.  As we are generous with others, generosity is unleashed in our own lives.  As we reject fear and worry, it is replaced by the peace of a kind word, a selfless act, an unlikely courtesy.  And with these sweet moments comes the health we have despaired over.  The friends we wished we had, perhaps even the money we desperately need to keep afloat.  Not because we took it from others who don’t have enough for themselves, but because we allowed it to occur.  We can’t see the big picture.  This is what faith means.

It is in the present moment that this gift comes, and only in the present moment.  If we are lost lamenting the past or agonizing over an imagined future, we miss the possibility that is engendered in the moment.  Each moment that we miss is lost forever.  But the good news is that a new one occurs in the present that is equally pregnant with possibilities and hope and power and satisfaction.  This universe appears to be a well of ever-new creativity.  To drink from this well we must be present now.  We can’t drink the water of yesterday or tomorrow.

Two thousand years ago, a man named Jesus of Nazareth postulated a doctrine of love.  In a most unreasonable fashion, he told those who listened to him that they had no need to fear the future or be tortured by the past.  He said that if one is met with violence that one should return love.  All these centuries later we still can’t quite get our heads around that one.  We come from many millennia of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’.  Gandhi, who many centuries after Jesus, noted that this idea, carried out to the logical conclusion would leave the world blind and edentulous.  He met violence with non-violence as did King and many others who have talked of returning love for hate, but the idea didn’t die with them.  It never dies because it springs full formed over and over in each of our hearts.  What we do with this gift is up to each one of us.  We make this choice every moment of our lives.

As useful as our rational mind is, it cannot conceive of the infinite possibilities that await us each moment.  This mind can only compare our memories of what happened in the past and then give us a ‘best guess’.  This guess is laden with our neuroses and our feelings and of course our ‘rationalizations’.  Our memories are often inaccurate and substantially incomplete.  In this way we are blind to our present because of the baggage from the past.  Healing is always about changing our consciousness.  In upper cervical chiropractic we remove neurological interference at the junction between the head and neck and find that when this Life within us can flow without impediment it sings a much happier song!  In the same way that this work can transform our physical lives, gratitude and love can transform our inner and outer lives.  We are not made to be victims of our mind.  Our minds are instruments we use in this life.  We must be present in the moment to use and not be used by our minds.  Our choices make our lives, one moment at a time.

I will end this essay with a story that I found a few days ago about a man who made a most unreasonable decision.  I give you all a most unreasonable season’s greetings.

A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

March 28, 2008

StoryCorps

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, “like what’s going on here?” Diaz says. “He asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’”

Diaz replied: “If you’re willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me … hey, you’re more than welcome.

“You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help,” Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

“The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi,” Diaz says. “The kid was like, ‘You know everybody here. Do you own this place?’”

“No, I just eat here a lot,” Diaz says he told the teen. “He says, ‘But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’”

Diaz replied, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”

“Yea, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way,” the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. “He just had almost a sad face,” Diaz says.

The teen couldn’t answer Diaz — or he didn’t want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, “Look, I guess you’re going to have to pay for this bill ’cause you have my money and I can’t pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I’ll gladly treat you.”

The teen “didn’t even think about it” and returned the wallet, Diaz says. “I gave him $20 … I figure maybe it’ll help him. I don’t know.”

Diaz says he asked for something in return — the teen’s knife — “and he gave it to me.”

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, “You’re the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch.”

“I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world.”

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo.

The Big Idea

Michael Thomas, D.C.

What I wanted to write about today is an idea.  In Chiropractic we have called it “The Big Idea”!  This big idea is present not only in Chiropractic, but we have certainly based our work upon it.  The idea is that life is sufficient unto itself.  Most often, it does not need any help.  What it needs is the freedom to express itself.  The life inside of us is connected to all of Life.  While this has always been a spiritual concept, it is now also becoming a scientific one.  We are not separate little clots moving about on a dot of dirt in an empty universe.  The picture of us, the Earth and the whole Universe is looking much more like aspects of one immense integrated whole. 

The same mathematical equations that can chart fluctuations in the stock market, map out the path of blood vessels in our tissues, and describe the shape of snowflakes, can also chart the distribution of stars in the galaxy.   We are learning that there is communication between molecules, cells, tissues, and within the whole person we had never dreamed existed.  It extends out beyond us to others and perhaps to the farthest reaches of the universe.  Electromagnetic fields extend to infinity.  The matter of this reality seem to be composed of standing waveforms of immense numbers of frequencies all coordinated together.  The better we can look at matter as our microscopes and methods become more sophisticated show that what we thought was solid is not.  It is vibrations that maintain themselves!  Immense amounts of information can be (and are!) contained within the frequencies that create the matter of our interconnected universe.  There are possibilities for our lives and for all of us that we haven’t even begun to dream about yet. 

Within this new understanding is Chiropractic which has claimed for more than a hundred years that this is true.  How we take care of our infirmities is dependent upon how we see ourselves.  In medicine we have based our understanding from a study of what goes wrong.  All of medicine is based in impeding or stopping the process of dis-ease.  To use a big word, it is a pathogenic orientation.  Chiropractic is based in the opposite approach.  To use another big word, it is a salutogenic approach.  By this we mean what creates health?  How can we support Life?  What sustains and improves our health?  In Chiropractic we find that removing the interference to the power of Life will allow optimal health to return.  We really can trust Life.  One approach chooses to stifle, to palliate, to suppress the symptoms of dis-ease.  The other removes interference and trusts life to find its own way, to unfold as it has for untold millennia. 

At this point I want to note that when events occur that cause significant disruption of our health, medicine can be an incredible lifesaver.  When symptoms are going to kill us, suppression or palliation of symptoms is welcomed by everyone.  This is where medicine shines, in the acute care of critically ill people.  This suppressive treatment can save lives and give the innate power of life within each of us the time to rally.  However, as a lifestyle, it leaves much to be desired.  Turning off the symptoms with toxic drugs simply leaves the body with fewer possibilities.  Killing the ‘messenger’ (the symptoms) doesn’t change the reality it just means you are now unaware of it.  Most cardiac medications are suppressive and palliative.  They actually do very little to help any of us regain health.  They just shut the message off.  This isn’t a hopeless statement.  It is a statement that this path does not lead where most people would choose to go if they had a choice.  What choices do we have? 

First, we have to choose to be the driver of our own lives.  How many people just passively accept the pills and procedures medicine (and our doctors) demand?  How many of us ask questions?  How many of us do the due diligence to investigate the possibilities for ourselves?  Do you really think that a five minute visit with a doctor is enough for him/her to understand the complexities of how life is breaking down for you?  If we take on the responsibility for our own lives and have sought out answers on our own, then we are in a vastly better position to ask the right questions and make informed choices about our lives and our healthcare.  We have to make the choice to be present in our own lives.  What is more important? 

Yes, this means you must make efforts.  It means you must be willing make changes in the way you live your life.  It means you must be patient as the changes you make remake you.  It means you must pay attention to your own life.  Your healthcare should be a partnership between you and your doctors.  I will reiterate, you are the one in charge.  If you are asleep at the wheel then no one is driving the bus.  If you don’t take on this primary responsibility then you can’t complain when life leaves you broken down on the side of the road. 

What is the goal of your healthcare?  Do you just want the symptoms to go away?  That is one choice.  It does lead to certain consequences.  In the example of cardiac (heart ) problems, lifestyle, nutritional and stress management can completely turn your health around.  You can regain your health.  Turning life off is not the answer to turning life on. 

The upper cervical chiropractic care you receive in this office is based on removing interference at the base of the brain.  This area is filled with centers that control every aspect of your life.  Restoring normal, balanced function to your brain and nervous system is one magnificent and powerful way to restore health and the life you live.  This is much more than just turning off the pain of sciatica or headaches.  Relief is great but there is more to life than being numb.  This world needs every one of us operating at full capacity.  You have chosen a road less traveled by coming here for care.  I believe that the balance created by the upper cervical adjustment is primary health care.  This is the Big Idea. 

Spread the word.

What Happens When I Go Out of Adjustment?

We are pretty amazing creatures. We begin inside our mothers, too tiny to even see with the naked eye. After we are born, we stick around, most of us, for many decades. We end up with 70-100 trillion cells inside our bodies. This conglomeration of separate little cells comes together and becomes us! How do we stay in balance, coordinating all those trillions of cells? It is the communication system that makes all of this work and it is critical to the coordination of function in our bodies and our lives. The nervous system is our communication system. A vast network of messages flow constantly from our senses into our brains. Our brains tell our bodies how to respond to the information that comes in from our eyes and ears and nose and skin. All of this changing information is monitored and an ongoing picture of our outside world as well as our inside world is constantly being generated in our nervous systems. What we know about ourselves and our world is a constantly updated picture that is literally created by our nervous systems and brain. We take in light and sound and vibration and touch and heat and cold and other aspects of our world that come into our senses and we ‘make sense’ of the world. It is actually a ‘story’ we tell about ourselves and the world. The better our senses work, and the better the integration of all this input that occurs in our nervous systems, the more coordinated we are in our actions in life.

 One big constant in our lives is gravity. Gravity is so familiar that we hardly even think about it, like water to a fish. We maneuver through our lives and our conscious minds never thinking much about the effects of gravity unless things go wrong. Our bodies however, are always thinking about gravity. We have an amazing number of receptors that monitor gravity in our bodies. They are now called ‘graviceptors’! Our bodies must constantly be aware of gravity so we can maneuver about in our world.

 The way we check to see if your body is responding in the most efficient way to gravity is to stand you up on the Anatometer. Gravity can be thought of as a vertical line that bisects you when you are standing upright, from the top of your head down through your spine and pelvis, continuing to the ground between your feet. When we are properly aligned with gravity, we have an ease at rest or in action. The Anatometer measures how closely we are matching gravity with our posture. When our pelvis is level and untwisted, when our spine stands straight up over our pelvis and our heads are in proper position on top of our spines, we are in the most minimal stress and minimal energy expenditure position possible. It indicates that the messages from our senses are working properly and we are well coordinated with gravity and the rest of the world around us.

 When we stand up on the Anatometer and we can measure that the pelvis is unlevel and twisted, that our upper body is leaning on one direction or the other and our head and neck is askew, we realize that was are out of upper cervical adjustment. The centers in the brainstem that coordinate our function in the world and within ourselves become impaired. We are doing research that is currently indicating that upper cervical misalignment of the vertebrae in your neck cause the blood flow patterns through your brain to change. We are finding that venous outflow from the head is changed and slowed. This means more new oxygenated blood cannot get into the brain as fast as it needs to give the nutrition and oxygen to these hungry tissues. A change in the structure of the neck changes the function of all the centers that are affected and this affects the whole body, your whole life. We measure the posture as an indicator of balance in the nervous system because it is easy for us to do so. We cannot measure the changes in function of the other centers (nuclei) in the brainstem that help to control virtually every system in the body. The brainstem is the part of the brain that controls the automatic or ‘autonomic’ aspects of our body functions. This means it controls things like heart rate, respiratory drive (desire to take a breath!) blood pressure, being awake or asleep, and of course posture, among others. The brainstem acts to ‘tune’ the basic life processes so we can go about and live our lives without ever thinking about how much acid we need in our stomachs to digest the apple, how much insulin is required to get sugar into the cells, or a host of other activities that are controlled at the autonomic level. This is real health. It is the balance over the long course of our lives that creates the health we enjoy, or wish we had!

 So although many people think of muscles and bones when they think of upper cervical chiropractic, it really involves your whole life. It is life affirming medicine! I don’t know of many other things in life that remove interference to the power of life in the way that this procedure does. I truly believe it is primary care. Many of you do too, because you will stop by the office to get an adjustment before you go over to the medical side and start getting sent to specialist after specialist. Often we have found over the years that the problem is functional and caused by being out of adjustment. Once you are back in adjustment, problems often fade away and it is not necessary to ingest toxic drugs to shut down the messaging system so you don’t feel the pain or the dizziness or whatever symptom is occurring because the body has gone out of balance.

 When someone has gone out of adjustment, perhaps due to an injury, the body will still go ahead and heal. It just heals out of adjustment. This means the posture is chronically misaligned and you heal that way. Muscles do the best they can by attempting to hold you up against the twist forces that begin when the body begins to react to being out of adjustment. Essentially, when you are out of adjustment the body tends to compress downward in a twisting almost spiral pattern. (Like tightening up a screw-top on a pop bottle.) When the weight of the body moves off center, the muscles must pull hard on one side to keep you from falling over. If they stay tight for a long time, they become fibrotic, toughening and thickening up to try an do the job it has to do.

 All the organs in the body are twisted too and their function is impaired to some degree. This means that if your body is a bit twisted, you can’t take as deep a breath and over time your oxygen levels change. All of the organs are dependant on normal blood and nerve flow. When these change, the function of the organ changes. Small changes can be cumulative over time. People who are out of adjustment often remark on ‘brain fog’. This is altered neural function affecting the brain itself. Small changes can make big differences over time. Look at how rain carved out the Grand Canyon!

 This is why the upper cervical adjustment can work like a miracle at times. Many of you have come back into the office or called us on the phone to tell of the amazing turnaround that occurred after the adjustment. As great as it is for us to hear this, and it is! -even more powerful are the long term effects of staying in upper cervical adjustment. The quick description is: HEALTH! Our bodies are made to work properly. Interference keeps our health from being at its optimum level. Chronic function at less than optimal levels is chronic disease. Medicine’s answer is all too often suppression or palliation (turn off the signal or make you numb). Life doesn’t have to be turned down or turned off! This is the miracle of real chiropractic. Life can be fully lived. This is the care we are so proud to offer you in this office!