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!

Happiness is a Choice

Michael D. Thomas, D.C.

Recently, I was standing in line at a local store when an older woman walked in, saw several of us standing near the cashier and looked uncertain as to what she should do.  I told her she was fifth in line.  She sighed, and I said that maybe it would move quickly.  She gave me an ironic look and called me an “optimist”.  I laughed.  There was only one clerk and most of the people were buying phones and activating them so the process wasn’t a short one.

About 45 minutes later, I was done with my business and passed by her as I was walking out of the store.  I smiled and said that considering everything going on in the world these days that I have decided to uncouple my happiness from what was going on around me.  I said that considering the news, I would never be happy if I didn’t ignore most of it.  She smiled back and said I must be getting older and wiser. 

In turbulent times, which we are surely in, it is vitally important to maintain our own center of balance.  I am usually discussing physical balance and the adjustment in these pages, and I have no doubt that being in upper cervical balance is critical to my own ease of mind and emotions, as well as those of the folks who come in for care -but here, I am writing about that place of balance and peace inside us that no one else can touch… at least not without our permission. 

We give our peace away in so many ways.  We give our attention to naysayers and angry voices on the radio and on the television.  We read about angry opinions in the newspaper.  We talk to our friends and neighbors so many of whom are angry and or scared.  We feel the pain and fears of others. 

Once upon a time, we thought that the mental and emotional parts of our lives were separate from the physical parts.  We didn’t understand that that our thoughts and emotions have a profound effect on our overall health including the physical parts.

“Fear has destroyed more people than the plague. 

You have no other enemy to fear

than your fears.”

Ralph W. Emerson

Fear and anger activate the sympathetic nervous system.  Living this way means your body is responding as if a tiger is nipping at your heels!  Your blood flow is shunted to your skeletal muscles so you can be strong and run fast.  Your ‘reptile’ brainstem grabs control and actually shuts down parts of your cerebral cortex.  It shuts down cellular repairs, wound healing, digestion, and much more.  It sends strong hormones throughout your body that are supposed to only be present in large amounts when you are in a critical moment in your life, not as a lifestyle!  Fear, anger and the chronic anxiety that accompanies this emotional pattern eats away at your happiness, your health and your future. 

Chronic anxiety also robs us of our hopes.  Nobody can maintain this position forever.  One common fall-back position is apathy.  We sometimes just give up.  But as the Cheshire Cat said in his talk with Alice:

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice:  I don’t much care where.

The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.

from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

We are steering the boat of our own lives.  If we give up the controls, and let the winds of chance guide our life, then our boat will likely founder on the shoals of our apathy. 

Many of us might say, “Well, fine, which way do I go then?” 

That answer has never come from outside of us.  It is found in the small still voice that we hardly ever listen to, the one that has always guided us from within.  The outside storms are so loud and unrelenting.  Even the idea that we have access to this wisdom within our own hearts sounds at best quaint and out of date.  We are told in endless ways that we are broken and incomplete and require help from outside of ourselves.  Experts of all stripes pound this message of lack and personal weakness into us from every corner.  So what are we listening to?  Most of us would agree that it is not the still small voice at the center of us. 

It is time to remember the power inside of each one of us.  It is the power that made us in the first place.  It is the power that connects everything together.  It is the power that sustains every second of our lives.  Chiropractic has always called it Universal Intelligence.  And the same intelligence, guiding each one of us from within us, has always been termed ‘innate intelligence’.  We are quickly coming to see that the universe has a fractal design.  This has nothing to do with any particular theology although all the theologies understand this too.  Self-similarity at various levels of magnitude is a relatively recent scientific understanding that tells us that the center is everywhere.  We are not meaningless molecules existing on a tiny clod of dirt in the middle of nowhere.  We are one.  The center of you is the center of it all.  You can only access this power in the present time.  As Master Ooguay said in Kung Fu Panda (one of our favorite movies!):

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery.

Today is a gift.  That is why we call it the present!”

Staying in the present moment is the most powerful gift you can receive.  For the vast majority of moments in our lives, we are not at risk of being eaten by tigers.  We generally have a roof over our heads.  Most of us haven’t missed many meals.  We have no control over vast swaths of what goes on around us and we never have.  Giant emergencies generally do not occur in the vast majority of our lives.  If we are at peace we will make balanced decisions.  When troubles do occur in the present we will be able to respond appropriately.  If we are insane with worry and anger and fear we will make decisions born out of this same worry, anger and insanity. 

In Homeopathy (a 250 year old system of medicine) there is a law called ‘The Law of Similars’.  This law says that ‘like attracts like’.  If consciousness works according to this law too, and many people think it does, then worrying literally brings your worries into your sphere and makes them manifest in your life.  This doesn’t mean to be an ostrich keeping your head in the sand, but it means that our thoughts and feelings change the experience of our lives.  I know that we were taught that it was the other way around.  We thought our thoughts and feelings weren’t ‘real’.  Now we know that this material world isn’t even ‘real’ the way we thought it was.  We once thought atoms were like little billiard balls, being attracted to and repulsed by each other.  Now we think that the whole manifest universe is more like a dream too.  Nothing is ‘real’ in the way we thought a hundred years ago.  Quantum Mechanics and Relativity have fundamentally changed our understanding of reality.  It has taken a hundred years for this new understanding to filter into medicine. 

This was bit heavy for some of you, but others may know what I am writing about.  We cannot change the world around us much but we can change our response to it.  We can stop being reactive to events like the ball in a pinball machine which is moved mindlessly about by the flippers, and begin to respond in a conscious way to maintain our own balance and peace. 

One way to become conscious is to observe how our bodies are dealing with our thoughts and feelings.  When we become aware that we are anxious, angry or in fear, we can take a brief moment and assess our bodies.  Are your muscles relaxed or tight and spasmed?  We can change our response by changing our bodies.  We can relax our faces and our chests and our bellies and our buttocks when we realize they are reactively tightening up.  We can choose to breathe slowly and easily.  Breath holding is common in anxiety.  Tension is resistance.  Resisting the events around us is often futile.  Changing our response changes our actions and can ultimately change outcomes. 

Become conscious of your thoughts.  Become conscious of your emotions.  Become conscious of the tension in your body.  It is in your power to release your tension.  It is in your power to internally move away from your emotions and your thoughts.  You are the observer of all of this; you are not the victim.  It won’t probably happen overnight.  What I am suggesting amounts to a lifestyle change of great magnitude.  But what do you have to lose?  Well, actually your tensions, your anger and your worry.  If you find yourself becoming worried or angry or fearful or any other negative emotion, if you can’t stop obsessing about events in the past or the future, then forgive yourself first.  Be as gentle with yourself as you would be with any other human being.  Sometimes we must make the choice between being happy or ‘right’.   ‘Right” has its own rewards I suppose, but my vote is to be happy. 

I wish all of you happiness too.

Primary Care

Michael D. Thomas, D.C.

In Florida law, chiropractors are primary care, portal of entry physicians.  It’s a mouth full!  What it means is that you can come and see us directly by making an appointment.  You don’t have to see your medical doctor (who is also primary care, portal of entry) to get a referral.  Florida law places medical doctors, chiropractors, and acupuncturists on equal footing in this respect. 

Yesterday, one of my patients told me that she put me down as her primary physician on a form she filled out. I have had people call me up and tell me they have broken their arm.  They wanted to check with me before heading anywhere else.  I don’t set fractured arms or make casts, so I did, of course, send them on to a more appropriate setting.  No one does everything in this specialized world, but a real relationship of trust and confidence trumps technology and the rushed and all too often impersonal nature of most ‘medical’ visits. 

In our office, I think there are two critical factors that create the care you receive.  One is that we really do care about you as people, and often friends.  I have been in the same office for seventeen years now and I have watched little kids grow up and have kids themselves!  I have cared for people as they aged and grew old too.  The relationships we share are as important to me as they are to you.  It means we move a bit slower and perhaps make a bit less money, but as important as money is, it is not the most important part of life.  On my website, we refer to our office as ‘an oasis of peace in a challenging world’.  Each day we strive to make that true for those of you who find yourselves coming in the door.  And as life continues to shift and change, certainly becoming more challenging, the peace of the office feels ever more important.

The second critical factor in our office is the care itself.  Orthogonally based, upper cervical chiropractic (what you know as NUCCA care) offers the most powerful way I have yet found to remove interference to the nervous system and allow Life to unfold as it is meant to.  I became increasingly unhappy with medicine back in the days I worked at the bedside as a critical care nurse.  If there is however, a place that medicine shines, it is in emergency situations.  When the symptoms of the problem are overwhelming and life threatening, there is no better place to be than in a place where these symptoms can be controlled and reduced.  If symptoms are going to kill you, then it is time to stifle them!  This can give your body the time it needs to restore itself.  This is the great problem I have with medicine and the whole medical paradigm (way of seeing the world).  Medicine sees healthcare as a war.  Drugs are weapons designed to force the body to move in a specific direction.  Most drugs are toxic agents that shut down specific metabolic pathways.  Killing the messenger is not the same thing as being healthy.  Being numb is not the same thing as vitality.  Your blood pressure is normal on medication but at what ultimate cost to your body?  Your cholesterol can be made to reduce to a low level but at what ultimate cost to your brain and muscles? 

Our brains are made to respond to the greatest perceived threat we are aware of.  Medicine can be used to make the acute symptom lessen in a short time.  People certainly like this part.  To maintain this relief, the medicine must be taken repeatedly, usually multiple times every day and in problems that have become chronic, this can mean for the rest of your life.  Every day, you have to take pharmacological agents that interfere with the normal functioning of your body (yes, symptoms are a normal part of function- not one you enjoy, certainly) in order to maintain the relief from the symptom that will return if you stop the drug.  For some problems, this is the best we can do.  For many others, it is a sad shadow of what real healthcare can be. 

There are a couple of ideas that medicine is bound up within that cause them to see healthcare the way they do.  The first one is the idea that stopping the symptom has no other consequences.  Our bodies are incredibly complex systems.  The math (for example) that we have grown up with dealt with simple systems.  This means that if you have an equation, -for example: x+2=y, ‘y’ will always be 2 more than ‘x’ no matter what value you give to ‘x’.  This is how simple systems work.  It was only in the 1960’s (See Mandelbrot if you are interested) that we began to be able to use math to describe more complex systems.  I won’t dive into this topic because it has great depth and breadth, but what we found was that this assurance we had about what goes in being proportional to what comes out was dashed on the rocks of reality.  This became known as ‘The Butterfly Effect’.  The metaphor being that a butterfly fluttering its wings in in the Amazon could alter wind currents a tiny amount and that could feed into other factors in the vast and complex system that the weather on this planet encompasses, ultimately creating a hurricane in Japan.  We refer to this disproportional process in medicine as ‘side effects’. 

We have moved very quickly in the past century.  The scientific method has opened up vast new arenas for us to participate in.  Knowledge has opened up so fast that we haven’t been able to completely understand the effects of our actions.  Just one example would be the use of antibiotics.  Antibiotics changed the face of medicine in the Second World War.  We found a way to go to war with bacteria and win.  Infections that had often been overwhelming before were now treatable.  It is only now, decades later that we see the insidious harm that is coming from our actions.  The overwhelming majority of antibiotics now go into livestock which is then passed on to the environment in feces and directly to us in their meat.  In addition, people have often demanded antibiotics from their physicians for problems not requiring them.  Because doctors gave in to these demands (why else go to the doctor?) we now have a huge problem with resistant micro-organisms.  Many people know about MRSA (methicillin resistant staph aureus) which grew first in hospitals and now is spreading into our communities.  These new ‘super-bugs’ are the direct result of over-use of antibiotics.  These bacteria grow resistant precisely because of the success of the war strategy.  Most of the organisms are killed by the antibiotics at first.  It is the ones that are left that cause us to have this new calamity.  The bugs that are left are resistant to the antibiotic and they have a clear playing field to grow and reproduce.  All the other bugs are gone and there is no competition.  After generations of killing off the weak and susceptible bacteria we are now left with mutant bugs that laugh at the antibiotics.    It will be no laughing matter however when epidemics of antibiotic resistant bugs careen through our society and we may not be so far away from that now.  The effect of these antibiotics in our environment is a whole other matter. 

Remember, when you take a pill, you only use 5 % or less of it for the reason you took it.  The rest of it exits from your system in your urine and feces.  Down the toilet and back out into the environment it goes.  The aquifer below your feet (where you get all of your drinking water) has admittedly low levels of drugs (all of them –from Viagra to birth control pills, heart medications to chemotherapy drugs!) but at levels that seem to be biologically active already.  This means they can begin to affect us as we drink the water we need to live.  I am just getting started but it is already too depressing to go on. 

Medicine should not be a war.   Science has come to be used in a mostly reductive fashion.  This means we use the scientific method to break whole systems down into tiny chunks that can be better understood.  The implication is that if you understand all the tiny chunks, you understand the whole too.  This is not and never has been true.  Complex systems (human beings, the weather, plants,…basically every natural entity) are more than the sum of their parts.  You can take a car and separate all the pieces on the floor.  You can then put them all back together again and the car will start if you did your job correctly.  You can’t do that to Life.  Life is an expression that occurs in wholeness.  The wholeness doesn’t stop at the boundaries of our skin either.  We are intimately interwoven into the fabric of our world.  We are a part of it.  We can’t reject some parts and embrace others.  We are comprised of all the parts: the air that rushes into and out of our lungs many times each minute, the plants that we grow and eat, the people we live our lives with; and today that means almost seven billion of us.  The meanings of our lives directly affect us.  So many people hating their job, feeling a bit more deadened inside each day?  The media that we feel compelled to stare at and listen to.  I hope this doesn’t reflect your life, but there are many I listen to who speak this way.

Obviously I could go on and on but the point here is that we face tremendous challenges in our lives.  More than ever we must find ways to increase our resilience, our vitality.  More than ever it is important to recognize that there is a power of life inside us.  It doesn’t need to be suppressed (the great majority of the time).  It needs to be released!  Frankly, the medicine of our day is primarily suppressive and does not value the power of life.  In fact, this power of life is devalued to the point that it is called ’the placebo effect’.  This is the scientific name for that irritating ability of some people to heal even when they haven’t taken any of the pharmaceutical nostrums.  Sometimes we get better just because we believe we will get better. 

In chiropractic we say that the power that made us heals us.  Our profession has had a difficult and unfocused history.  There are more than two hundred different techniques operating under the rubric of chiropractic.  In some way this is our strength because there have been so many different ways to look at what is going on and how to make meaningful change.  People have been free for many decades to explore the relationships between our structure and our functionality.  The battle between those who want to turn off symptoms and those who want to remove interference to the power of life has been and still is being actively fought within the chiropractic profession.  As usual in these times, those who want to remove interference to the power of life are in the minority.  Upper cervical chiropractic is firmly in this camp.  Many would say it IS our camp. 

It is immeasurably easier to stay in the therapeutic camp.  Everyone likes pain to go away.  It is the interrelationship of all of our ‘parts’ though that can make the goal posts move.  An aspirin for a headache taken once in a great while will probably work to relieve the headache and do no other harm.  It will decrease platelet aggregation for a few hours and that can be a good thing.  Taken by the handful, frequently over a long time and you find 40,000 people who die every year in the US from gastrointestinal bleeding secondary to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory use.  It’s not that it won’t take the headache away but at what ultimate cost?  Now, obviously not everyone who takes aspirins on a routine basis die from GI bleeding.  This is the problem.  Our brains tend to stay focused on the acute issues around us.  Chronic problems tend to fade into the background.  It’s how we are made.  We can’t worry about everything although some of us try! 

The upper cervical adjustment will take away pains too.  Often those who come in for care find that their headaches resolve.   Their dizziness fades.  Their balance improves.  They can take a deep breath again.  Their gut begins to digest food properly again.  Their low back pain and sciatica fade away.  These acute reasons are why people come in to see us.  After twenty years of watching the effect of this care on thousands of people, I believe that it offers more than just relief from pains.  It is truly primary care.  By that I mean that we seem to be able to tune the autonomic nervous system in some profound ways.  Decades of clinical results have shown us that we can restore postural alignment with gravity.  This levels out pelvises and untwists spines.  The NUCCA work is the only technique in chiropractic that has shown the ability to restore normal blood pressure in people who couldn’t get there even on two different medications.  New studies are suggesting that a corrective NUCCA adjustment at the junction between the neck and head can greatly improve blood-flow through the brain.  If further studies validate this, it will be of great impact. 

Doctors who practice upper cervical work have long known more than they could prove.  This sounds facile until you have had the experience for yourself.  As with most things that are not even imagined by the great majority of people in our society, this works progresses one patient at a time and has for several decades now.  Pain often brings people to us.  It is the clarity of mind and ease of body that makes people return to maintain the health they have recovered.  I am confident that our research will finally open the door and allow us to reach to suffering people of the world who desperately need this work and don’t even know it exists. 

For those of you who understand the effect of the adjustment in your own lives, you may have come to see it as one of my patients who told me it is her ‘flu shot’.  I told her I hoped it was a lot more effective than the flu shot!  You may remember a recent blog in which I discussed the ineffectiveness of the flu shot.  According to a Cochoran meta-study, the effectiveness rate is about one percent!  After decades of frustration and inability to publish our work, we are now finding great success.  We are just at the beginning of this road, but we are definitely on our way.  What is self-evident to the person receiving a corrective adjustment will soon be communicated in a form that the world will be able to read.  That’s when it will get interesting!