Folks come into the office for some particular reason. They have neck pain or low back pain, sciatica or dizziness. If they are new to the office, they have heard that chiropractors can help these problems, or that I helped someone they know with a similar problem. . Once adjusted, these acute symptoms frequently resolve pretty quickly. A few weeks into care, I often begin to hear that other issues, that weren’t boiling over and might not have even been mentioned before, have resolved or are beginning to resolve, too. Sometimes its musculo-skeletal issues like hip, knee, ankle, or foot pains that have dwindled or gone.

Other times it is very different. “I am digesting my food much better,” people often say. “I am sleeping better. “ “I am not depressed anymore.” “I can think more clearly.” “ I can take a deep breath now. “ Secondary complaints have dissolved slowly over a period of time as the adjustment and the effects of the adjustment settle more deeply into their balance of health. People often remark that they just simply feel better all the time.

Through decades of clinical experience and research, we are beginning to understand that misalignment of the bones in the upper neck, and conversely, the upper cervical adjustment, both cause profound changes in internal homeostasis (balance) as well as the way we stand and move. Recent studies are now revealing that not only are the affected tissues twisted and pulled, but metabolism is significantly changed too. Blood flow is altered, as is cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) flow. It is now our hypothesis that tractionization of tissues (particularly the dentate ligaments), alteration of venous drainage out of the head ,and interference with CSF flow change the balance of the nuclei (brain centers) in the brainstem just above the neck in the bottom of the head. This area of the brain acts to maintain a basic balance of health. This balance is ever changing as we receive information from around us (our environment) through our senses, and then use this information to drive our actions, our responses to the world around us.

Through decades of clinical experience and research, we are beginning to understand that misalignment of the bones in the upper neck, and conversely, the upper cervical adjustment, both cause profound changes in internal homeostasis as well as the way we stand and move.

We now understand health to be an on-going process. It is not something that is finally achieved but rather, something that is forever unfolding. Adapting to new information is very much a part of being healthy. Poor adaptation to new environmental input IS dis-ease. Mal-adaption leads to pathology, the point when internal changes cannot match the changes being sensed and they fall behind. The tissues are disturbed. It is the beginning of sickness. Internal balance becomes disordered. As within, so without. Our posture, the very way we greet this world begins to diminish in vitality, stability and strength. The natural flexibility and ease of give-and-take in health is increasingly replaced by compression and resistance. The healthy give and take, push and pull of life begins to polarize and we find ourselves resisting the natural flow, hardening our tissues in the process. This response/reaction diminishes our potential while salvaging as much of it as possible. With observation, we see our bodies change from optimally dealing with the effects of gravity in a unified way -standing tall and at ease, fully aligned and essentially symmetrical, to a segmented, cantilevered state of uneven, and generally twisting resistance.

Something happens, perhaps a physical trauma, (bump head, lift a refrigerator, push a car, trip and fall, etc.), perhaps a mental or emotional trauma (anger, disappointment, frustration, fear, getting fired, divorced, losing a loved one, etc.). Something happens that you cannot fully abide within yourself. We can handle a lot of things, but sometimes the force of life that comes at us is more than we can dissipate. Our defenses cannot fully shield us and we absorb more than we can accommodate. We begin to fall back, to break down. Life isn’t gone, it’s still present, just impeded, and it makes a valiant effort to stabilize albeit in a less unified way. We settle and list and twist -our mass now more cumbersome and ungainly. The forces don’t cancel each other out like they do when we are optimally aligned with gravity. Ease becomes burden. This configuration leaves discrete areas of too much and too little force within us. After a while we begin to feel these areas as hot or cold, muscle spasms, areas of pain and numbness and tingling. Joints feel locked up and we may not feel as steady on our feet.
At the same time that our posture and movement is affected, so is our internal balance of life. We learned in the 2007 study that we can directly affect the brainstem centers that maintain blood pressure through corrective upper cervical adjustment. Obviously, we don’t consciously control all the parameters of our internal environment. Most of us don’t give it much thought. The controls for our ‘inner balance’ are located in the brainstem and are significantly affected by the torsion, blood flow and CSF flow changes that occur when the structures of the upper neck become misaligned. We found that 60% of the people in the study (folks who were on two antihypertensive (blood pressure) medications and were, up to that point, unable to get their blood pressure into a normal range, went on and maintained normal blood pressures –off their meds!- for two months after being properly adjusted upper cervically. We have many decades of clinical information that has shown us that the brainstem centers which control posture are also significantly affected. Together, these finding indicate that we have real ability to modulate (regulate) these brainstem centers. Not turn them up or down necessarily, but rather to help them all work together in a balanced way for optimal health.

Removing substantial interference to the nervous system and freeing the expression of life within each of us is a healthcare measure that the vast majority of humankind has not even glimpsed as a possibility.

The ability to ‘neuro-modulate the autonomic nuclei’ (what I was just writing about!) constitutes a remarkable primary health care measure that would fundamentally improve the health of humankind if they could be made aware of this possibility and, could gain access to corrective upper cervical adjustments. Removing substantial interference to the nervous system and freeing the expression of life within each of us is a healthcare measure that the vast majority of humankind has not even glimpsed as a possibility. No one looks for something that they are unaware of; and so we remain, for the moment, possibly the great secret in healthcare in the world. After studying many kinds of health care over the last few decades, I have never found anything else with the overriding potential of the upper cervical adjustment to fundamentally improve the health of people. I am proud to offer this work to all of you and I continue to write and conduct studies for publication which, if there is any justice in the world, may help to open the eyes of the world to this precious jewel in their midst.

(Note: this paper was published in the April 2013 newsletter for Quantum Spinal Mechanics)

We have done a fairly good job of explaining what goes on up to the point of the performance of the adjustment itself. We understand what happens afterwards fairly well too. It is the moment of the adjustment itself that has been a great mystery. What happens in that instant? How does the adjustive force cause the outcome we have empirically experienced? What actually happens during an adjustment?

The following is the beginnings of a tensegrally derived autonomic modulation theory for upper cervical chiropractic.

Distribution of vectored force by the adjustor translates the potential mass of the adjustor’s body into an incremental build-up of tension within the body of the adjustor that appears to match the magnitude and direction of resistance to optimal flow at the craniovertebral junction. This area of contact is a multifactorally important node where the tensegral forces fine-tune (minimize) themselves to the effects of gravity using the sensors in the cranial area for feedback. The accommodation of the sensors is however, from a practical perspective, secondary to the ongoing position of the pelvis with respect to gravity. In other words, these sensors at the cranial end of the organism can only adapt and compensate to a certain degree because they cannot by themselves, overcome the disequilibrium of a malpositioned pelvis with respect to gravity. (Big mass rules small mass). Once they have made all possible accommodation, the rest of the tonic musculature must release the optimal orthogonal strategy for stabilization and utilize whatever strategy is available to maintain upright status with respect to gravity. This is the origin of frontal and transverse obliquity in the pelvis as well as movement of the torso in the frontal and transverse planes.

Using directed incremental buildup of force is utilized by many chiropractic techniques in many areas of the body (generally as muscle focused therapies). Such introduction of force had long been observed to diminish the local muscle tension, releasing aberrant resistance throughout aspects of the whole myofascial envelope. The tension appears to be set by feedback between central pattern generators which make pragmatic decisions to moderate tension and protect the integrity of the tissues. This maintains as much local stability and function as possible. In an optimal, coherent organism, this pragmatic decision is also optimal for the stability and function of the entire organism. When there is a breakdown of the tensegral distribution of forces, a compartmentalization occurs in which sections optimize themselves and then work to coordinate with other sections, often creating a cantilevered balance of sections, decreasing overall efficiency but providing a diminished but engaged stability with respect to gravity. This sectional stability represents suboptimal solutions or ‘stability basins’ that lie around the optimal answer of coherent verticality. These are the misalignment patterns we have identified in standing neutral position. These misalignment patterns are static representations of available strategies for organismic movement with respect to gravity given the currently available parameters. (We have not yet examined the resultant movement patterns.)

Addition of a properly delivered adjustive force into the array at the craniovertebral junction overcomes the pragmatic and diminished solution of sectionalization by introducing enough force to redirect the local flow at the craniovertebral junction and provide the area with enough energy to restore the optimal balance of force and resistance. It does so by first physically introducing a vectored force that unbinds the local buckling and increased resistance but also by restoring blood flow, cerebral spinal fluid flow and unwinding tissue tractionization which secondarily, although more importantly, modulates the autonomic nuclei in the brainstem. The unique positioning of all these elements at the craniovertebral junction fundamentally changes neurologic traffic and distribution of force in the myofascial envelope with respect to gravity (regaining tonic symmetry) through this remodulation of the autonomic nuclei-specifically the pontine and reticulospinal tracts- when referencing alignment with gravity. The proximity of other brainstem nuclei to these tracts may also explain the multisystemic effects long noted after corrective upper cervical adjustment. Restoration of optimal integration requires addition of properly designed energy to the organism in a form it can use. The incremental buildup of force in the adjustment allows a matching of resistance (resonant energy transfer) while the direction is a function of analysis of the specific misalignment factors.

In real time, the distribution of tensions and resistances are being calculated by the nervous system on an ongoing basis. Each pull by the adjustor potentially changes the system’s potential to respond to gravity, etc., and so kinesthetic feedback between the adjustor and patient’s own neurological calculations are critical. Accessing the pathways is Dr. Friedman’s current focus. It is doubtful that any one vectored force, calculated by 2-D analysis (analysis of one plane at a time) of the 3-D bony aspects of the craniovertebral junction will restore the entire organism to optimal function. Most misalignment patterns are complex in nature and require an unwinding in more than one plane.

At the demand of the scientific community, we continue to look for a ‘biomarker’ which will allow us to step onto the world stage for their evaluation. The very idea of a biomarker however, presupposes a mechanistic problem and solution. In a mechanism, a part may become defective. This part is replaced. The mechanism runs properly again. The Atlas Subluxation Complex Syndrome (ASC syndrome) seems to occur in a different way. It is analogous to the view through a telescope. When the lenses are properly focused on what one wishes to observe, the picture is crisp and clear. When the lenses become unfocused, the whole picture becomes blurry and less recognizable. Optical resolution and functional coherence may be seen in analogous ways. Coherence requires optimal communication. Alteration of blood flow, CSF flow and tractionization of neural tissues at the craniovertical junction diminishes coordinated communication through the organism. Restoration produces the coherence necessary for the system to optimally resolve.

My wife Lexi, fell and hurt her knee recently. The next day, after walking on it around campus at school (she is finishing up a mathematics degree at the University of Florida this term), the two of us piled into the car for a trip to Atlanta. I was out of adjustment and we had made plans to get an adjustment for me. My Chiropractor is however, seven hours away (in Atlanta) and it takes some extensive planning to get adjusted!

Unfortunately, the car ride was very rough on her knee and the vibration of driving on the interstate felt excruciating to her by the time we arrived. I got my adjustment the next day and after lecturing at Life College with Dr. Friedman (my chiropractor, good friend, and the founder of Quantum Spinal Mechanics (QSM3), we drove home the next day. That night I found a proper brace and crutches and my resilient wife was off to school again that Monday.

The effect of not putting weight on one leg and using crutches soon told a story of pain in her neck and shoulders that actually became more painful than the knee itself! I was working with her, adjusting as needed and doing a lot of muscle work, but the stress of these days was wearing on her and she would come home and collapse on the couch for the evening. Slowly, too slowly for both of us, she began to feel the pain diminish. She took a day off from school and was able to rest for a long weekend and this helped quite a bit.

Lexi is still not out of the woods, but her knee has improved to the point she can begin to put weight on it and her neck and shoulders are recovering too although not without times of pain and spasm. She is now looking at graduating to a cane for some extra support and stability this next week. We are keeping her in adjustment and doing muscle work a couple of times a day.

I tell this story because it reminded me yet again that almost everybody has to deal with the effects of injuries. Things happen to us and we must recover. Standing on one foot with the crutches as she walked, caused her body to torque and deal with the stress of walking in a twisted, asymmetrical way. As her muscles attempted to keep her upright and moving forward, they had to absorb a lot of twisting force and this caused her to lose her alignment. Once she was out of adjustment, the muscle spasms and pains accelerated quickly. The brace stabilized her knee but also kept it from transmitting the force of her activities in a normal way. This (and her twisted posture) resulted in abnormal forces being built up and created a pattern of spasmed muscles all through her body. Adaptation and compensation are the best the body can do at times, but this alteration creates new problems too, as so many of you who come to see me for care are already aware.

When we are out of adjustment, our muscles do not function in a normal way. The messages they receive from the central nervous system are skewed. The normal tension of muscles that hold us upright begin to twist and compress. This leads to the many .variations of misalignment that we fall into when we are out of alignment. Everything is virtually connected to everything else and when one big problem occurs, it often causes problems in other places too. The problem is that the nervous system doesn’t know it is ‘out of calibration’ so to speak and it continues to make the same systematic error. If we have enough vitality, enough resilience, we can often overcome this issue and find a way to function, but often we can’t find a peaceful way to coexist with this twisted postural set and we begin to break down.

Some people are so strong and vital it can take five years before they realize they must get some help. Others, perhaps those with more extensive injuries, or perhaps just less resilience, find that life becomes painful and difficult almost immediately after a precipitating incident.

Most of you now know that once a set of pains has taken up residence in your frame and stayed for more than three days, it is time to get an upper cervical adjustment to resolve the twisting, the un-leveling, and the resulting pains, spasms, tingling and/or numbness that may accompany misalignment. Other times, the symptoms are manageable enough that people just ‘deal’ with it for weeks or even months before the slow acceleration of pains and other symptoms has become too strong to ignore any more.

Of course some people do not feel musculoskeletal pains but rather things like brain fog, headaches, dizziness, difficulty taking a deep breath, or change in digestion. Some of us have both! Each of us is a bit different in terms of the symptom picture that makes us realize we are out of adjustment. The upper cervical area is important in so many ways and misalignment is a profound insult to the normal function of our bodies and lives.

These deleterious changes are progressive and degenerative. Ignoring them seldom makes them go away. Over months and years of time they can slowly grind the quality of your life away. I am just trying to put words to what so many of you tell me when you come in to see me. You realize the profound effect of a corrective upper cervical adjustment in your own lives.

Many of you also consider the adjustment to be primary healthcare. It is just as important as making sure your organs are functioning properly because the nervous system is the controller for them! Upper cervical chiropractic often greatly helps acute problems such as sciatica or neck pains or shooting pains into the arms or legs but it also operates on a much longer timeframe, ensuring that all of your cells are receiving proper nutrition and instructions. This is long term health, the kind that perhaps will help you live into your 80’s and 90’s and beyond with a sound framework, a sparkle in your eye, and a lightness in your step!

As always, I wish you well and encourage you to stay in adjustment for the value it adds to your life.

Michael Thomas, DC

PS: Spread the word!

What did become clear to me was my own worth and value as a doctor and as a person. Perhaps like others, I had begun to devalue my own qualities because I was focused on the problems and not the opportunities that really matter to me. I got bogged down in the minutia, the constraints, the finances, and forgot that each day I get to come into the office and turn people’s nervous systems back on again. I relieve pain in many, many people. I change the lives of people who otherwise would not be able to maintain their own lives. Through my efforts, many, many people are able to continue in their own jobs and support their own families. I listened more carefully to the appreciation that I receive daily for my efforts from all of you. I remembered that some folks are driving two hours or more to see me. They don’t do that just for my ‘sparkling personality’ ,they do that because the adjustment changes their lives. In this office I can also take the time to sit and talk with people. I can listen to problems. I can tell stories. I can laugh and enjoy my time with the people who come through my doors. Over decades of time I have made real friends here.

I am remembering what got me into practice in the first place. I am remembering that the adjustment is a precious gift that I am honored to be able to offer my community. This life has been an adventure and it appears to have many surprises awaiting me in the future. I became a critical care nurse because I wanted to be of service to people who truly needed help. I wanted to do something that really mattered, even if, in this case, there wasn’t much respect in the outside community for it. Fifteen years at the beside in the bowels of hospitals tending to the critically injured and ill taught me so many things I could never enumerate them all. I learned about life and death. Untold numbers of people died in my hands as I struggled to save them. Many, many others went on to live their lives for another day. Ultimately, the pain of Medicine’s process, the misguided use of drugs to stifle life, the outdated models of physiology under which Medicine still labors, caused me to finally look for an alternative. It simply hurt my heart too much to continue within those constraints.

I began Chiropractic school on my thirtieth birthday. I had found something that was very different from the medical model I had labored within. I found a process by which I could help remove the interference to the power of life. I could do it routinely, all day long. In my own practice, I could treat people with respect. I could listen to them. I could hold their hand or hug them. I could be a whole human being working with other whole human beings and not just hide behind a pair of scrubs, a stethoscope, and a name badge with just my first name on it to protect my privacy. People are more than the problem they come in with. And the problems people have are often linked to the rest of their lives too. I didn’t change professions to move from ‘the gallbladder in 413’, to the ‘type two upper cervical misalignment’. I changed my profession so that I could engage the whole person and act to improve the flow of Life’s intelligence within us. I have done my best to do that in my office and I hope to continue for many years to come.

The last couple of years have initiated great leaps in understanding concerning this work. I am now the Director of Research for a progressive upper cervical technique named Quantum Spinal Mechanics (QSM3). Many of you are already aware of these leaps forward because I am often excited and yakking away about them. We have also been able to get some phenomenal results with many of you that were not happening before. We have one paper that should go to the publisher in the coming weeks. The next study is just now getting started in terms of data collection and more is on the drawing board. I am also writing a text which I hope will be helpful to the profession. The way that biology currently describes biological function and then addresses it in clinical (medical and chiropractic) terms is a hundred years behind the changes that quantum mechanics made in the early nineteen hundreds. I am attempting to develop a structural biology that is consistent with our findings in upper cervical work and do so starting from basic physical principles.

The idea of consciousness also has arisen in scientific circles. We need to bring the effect of our collective as well as individual consciousnesses to bear on healing too. We have ignored our own consciousness and its defining effects at our own peril for far too long. It is unsettling because we truly seem to find ourselves in a Post-Modern world. The assurance of the past seems far away now and things are not so certain. Many people I talk to now speak of feeling that chaos is immanent. The metaphors that sustained us in the past aren’t working so well now. We are perhaps struggling a bit with meaning in our own lives as our circumstances change.

Instead of lashing ourselves to a deep, immovable foundation, we find ourselves adrift in uncertain seas and now another kind of balance is required. It is not unlike the balance we must negotiate with gravity. The force of gravity is always present and it does not negotiate with us. It is we who must dance with gravity. We are always moving and our balance moves with us. We must find an always moving balance. We must find a stillness in the midst of movement. This is a dynamic balance that lets us do all the incredible things that human beings can do for so many decades of life. This is a letting go- kind of balance. It is an opening that is required, not a closing. If our joints (our centers of motion) cannot line up in an optimal way with gravity they will find other strategies. These other strategies are less efficient; they take more energy, cause more stress and cause changes in the tissues that we call diseases like arthritis and fibromyalgia.

A proper adjustment brings enough energy and direction to the system to allow the centers of motion to re-engage gravity in the most efficient way. The physical and emotional feeling that occurs after adjustment is often one of happiness and ease. (sometimes one finds, after an adjustment that Hering’s Law of Cure is occurring and transitional symptoms occur for a few days, as you all know too.) For most, there is a quiet and an easy strength that returns as muscles and other tissues return to perfect coordination with your whole being. This perfect coordination is part of what we call ‘health’. What we must hold onto now is our own center.

We must not give away our peace. These days it is too precious. Too often, television, radio and print media (which most everyone watches, listens to , and reads daily)significantly influences our sense of reality. We talk to each other about what we have learned. We are presented almost daily with huge crises that we consistently feel impelled to at least attempt to respond to. I know from my own history that too much crisis begins to dull your ability to feel emotion. Cynicism, sarcasm and fear raise their ugly heads. Too often we are forgetting that our peace, our real balance, is only found within our own selves. I am certainly not saying to ignore outside influences. I am saying that if we are internally balanced, calm and are functioning in an optimal manner, we will make better decisions in our lives. When we make healthier decisions, we make a healthier world.

So I am back to my own center and the peace I feel that stems from my decision to continue to live here in Belleview and continue to serve as your upper cervical chiropractor. I’ve got some new ideas and maybe we can be of even more help to you all in the future. In fact, this recent examination of what I am doing here has kindled a new fire in me. I’ll let you know more in coming months in these pages.

Michael Thomas, DC

When Dorothy clicked her heels together in the “The Wizard of Oz”, she fervently wished to go home again. “There is no place like home”, she repeated. Many of us feel a relief when we get home from our day’s activities and feel comfort in being back inside the familiar walls of our own homes. We feel safe and at peace. We don’t need to read a book or watch television or have someone else tell us we are at peace. We are in the ‘right’ place.

This same feeling of ‘rightness’ occurs for many people who receive an adjustment in the office. An inner knowing occurs accompanied by a feeling that everything is ‘right’ (or is returning to ‘right’!). The upper cervical adjustment creates a sense of well-being unlike anything else most people have experienced. This, more than all the talking we do in the office is what makes long term clients. Honestly, upper cervical work is extremely difficult to explain and only now are we really starting to understand why this return to well-being and health occurs. What is much easier is adjusting someone and letting them feel and experience the difference in their life. This is really the only way that upper cervical chiropractic has grown over the decades it has been available.

Only now are we beginning to understand the improvement in blood-flow through the head and improvement of cerebral spinal fluid flow through the head that accompany the adjustment. Only now are we beginning to understand that the adjustment can balance the control centers in the bottom of the brain that monitor body activities below the level of consciousness. As we begin to understand our relationship to our world, we are realizing that we must be in balance with it, we must be in exquisite coordination with our environment; and primary to that is our relationship with gravity. We are not as separate as we like to think. We are en-nested in many levels of relationship with the world around us.

The upper cervical misalignment and the related postural changes are a fallback mechanism that works to improve the remaining possibilities once we are not able to optimize our relationship with gravity (once we have gone ‘out’ of adjustment). Our bodies always know how gravity is affecting us. The best solution is to align our bodies with the force of gravity. This is why we measure your posture when you come into the office. Moving away from the vertical axis (this ‘line of gravity’) causes an abnormal cantilevering of our body position. When we are misaligned, our pelvis loses its optimal relationship with gravity and begins to tilt and twist. Our upper bodies must counter-lean and twist so we don’t fall over. Our head positions (head-tilt) are often the fine-tuning. Improper relation to gravity takes a toll on all of us. Muscles and ligaments must do their best to keep us upright. At first they tighten and harden, but after a while, they get tired and begin to spasm. We feel this as aching, burning pains that can be sharp or dull, in one place or generalized over larger areas. For some of us, the worst part is the change in brain function. Many people remark on ‘brain fog’. Some people feel emotionally depressed when they are out of adjustment. Things aren’t ‘right’.

Corrective upper cervical adjustment restores your relationship with gravity. It helps to re-balance not just your posture but also the function of all of the systems of the body through its effect on the brainstem. People often express a return to ‘rightness’ after an adjustment. Some people feel it immediately, others take some time. There is an inner peace that comes with the adjustment for many people. In this increasingly complex and uncertain world, feeling ‘at home’ inside your own body is a great comfort and ultimately necessary for long term health. Restoring our alignment with gravity greatly aids in restoring our relationship with our own bodies and the world around us. This inner knowing acts as a foundation for our actions in the world. When we are ‘home’ inside ourselves and in our relationships, we make better decisions. We worry less. We feel stronger and more vital. We trust the sense that ‘all is well’.

There is no place like home.

Dr. Gregory, the founder of NUCCA, often said he didn’t care how the spine got adjusted, -even if someone was adjusting the big toe-, if it resulted in correction on the post film. The outcome defined by the post film has become the gold standard for outcome measurement within upper cervical work. This makes great sense because the post film will not be orthogonal (with gravity) if the pelvis and all the ascending elements are not aligned with the vertical axis, gravity. We have learned that even if all the elements are ‘zeroed out’ on the film, -if the neck and skull are not on the vertical axis-, then the correction is not complete –nor often is the whole symptomatic picture of the patient. In fact we now realize it is possible to ‘force’ the elements into relative alignment as measured on the post films but that there is a difference. Reduction of the upper cervical elements but continued misalignment of the pelvis sets up an ongoing situation of aberrant tension in the whole kinetic chain. The clinical clue is in the stability. Some patients tell me that their dog can just nuzzle them, touching their face, and they go back out of adjustment. The whole kinetic chain remains under tension and one nudge can cause the misalignment pattern to return.

The upper cervical spine is the terminal end of the kinetic chain that originates in the pelvis. Forcing alignment of the skeletal elements in the neck and head is not the same as un-torqueing the whole array, bringing all of the elements back to the minimal stress, minimal energy state that we strive for on postural measurements. We all know of the immense improvement that resolution of upper cervical misalignment can have on health and function. Now we are beginning to understand how release of compression can un-torque the whole kinetic chain creating real equipoise for the patient.

One of my friends noted that he had tried to ‘turn people over’ when he was having trouble and while he could get reductions on the post he wasn’t getting the ‘wow factor’ he had come to expect after the adjustment. He had concluded that this wasn’t a viable idea. By itself, ‘turning people over’ is certainly not an answer. In the context of the biomechanical process, addressing the misalignment from the side which will give the most mechanical advantage and decompress the whole spine is the bigger picture here. Having a process by which you can reason through your measured data and know exactly what to do next is imperative and fundamental to safe and effective care of people’s spines.

Although the use of roentgenography in chiropractic has a very long history, no one has yet been able to show in the peer reviewed, indexed literature (the papers available to the scientific and healthcare community at large in the world) that we can set people into the x-ray chair, clamp them in, take a proper picture, and analyze the films with the degree of accuracy which is fundamental to a ‘gold standard outcome measure’.

Unfortunately, the current literature shows the opposite. Twenty seven years ago, a grossly flawed study was published in JMPT which asserted that doctors can only be within 2 degrees of each other in terms of inter-examiner accuracy. This is what the rest of the world knows about us. In the current paradigm, atlas laterality is the cornerstone of the work, the ‘biomarker’ so to speak. We know through long clinical experience that ¾ of a degree is all it takes to see loss of optimal alignment with gravity and initiation of the postural distortion associated with upper cervical misalignment. Rochester has verbally asserted that we probably can’t resolve accuracy to less than one degree. To “prove” the validity of using atlas laterality as a gold standard outcome measure, we would have to be within ½ degree of precision and accuracy.

UCRF is currently attempting, after all of these decades, to finally do a study that will assess what is possible for both inter and intra-examiner accuracy in x-ray marking. Since the whole basis of the NUCCA work rests on this critical issue it is timely if long overdue. The study should be complete at the end of the year. We wish them well. A rising tide carries all boats.

Dr. Friedman is now showing that while the misalignment of the upper cervical elements is critical and probably causal to the neurological effects that people experience, it may not be a primary cause but rather an effect of the disarray in the tensegral system of tension and compression throughout the body. It is not in dispute that once misalignment of the upper cervical elements has occurred that they cause the progressive and degenerative effects we have come to know as the ASC. It is rather that the misalignment pattern represents the best fallback position the body can accomplish given its options. The adjustment can correct the local misalignment of the upper cervical spine and greatly diminish or even eliminate the neurological distress at the brainstem. It may not resolve the dis-relationships in the rest of the kinetic chain including the largest mass, the pelvis. The heretofore undisclosed cause (compression) constitutes the long unexamined ‘elephant in the room’.

Upper cervical chiropractic is indeed a full spine technique but it must acknowledge and resolve all of the deleterious factors causing disharmony in the entire kinetic chain. QSM3 represents the first systematic process by which this critically important aspect is recognized and resolved. Many offices using the QSM3 protocols are now reporting phenomenal successes in correcting previously ‘impossible’ misalignments. While we have long acknowledged the full spine implications of upper cervical work, now we are able for the first time, with QSM3, to directly address this elephant in the room and give all patients an adjustment that frees the body from its compressive prison.

As an example, one of the patients I referred to earlier would go out of adjustment from a simple nudge of his dog’s nose on his chin. The NUCCA work had long been a great blessing to him in his life and had actually transformed his health and profession. Even so, he was a frequent visitor to the office. Once the QSM3 protocols began to come together, his misalignment was re-examined and the vector was greatly modified. He began to hold for many weeks at a time and related one day, that he had been playing volleyball in the sand. At one point, he dove headfirst for a ball and landed in a crumpled pile. His alignment remained intact. He wasn’t ‘holding’ it, He had an ease in his whole body that allowed him to absorb the force of hitting the sand without disrupting the structural elements. His happy story is now multiplied by many people in my practice. Reducing aberrant tension in the body increases resilience and vitality.

QSM3 protocols continue to evolve. While this may be frustrating for people who are used to a stable set of procedures, it actually an incredibly exciting time when old limits are being left behind and new possibilities are coming to light which are and will change the work forever and open it up to humanity in a way that hasn’t been possible before. No longer are we ignoring the elephant in the room, we are riding it!

Keeping oil in your car’s engine is easier than rebuilding a blown engine. In the same way, staying balanced, staying in adjustment is easier on your life than waiting until you have an acute problem. Most people will tell me that they knew they were out of adjustment for a period of time before the incident occurred that made their pains something that needs to be taken care of immediately. Sometimes it can be a surprise, but we usually have a sense about our body balance. We know ourselves better than anyone else because no one else is with us all the time!

We brush our teeth daily, most of us routinely cut our hair, we wash our clothes after we wear them. We bathe and shower daily. We can see all of these parts of our lives and recognize the importance of keeping up with them. We can’t see our spines. We only feel them when things have gone wrong enough to cause pains. In fact, the majority of nerves in the body don’t carry pain. They are involved in making things happen (the motor nerves) and feeling what is happening (the sensory nerves). One part of the sensory nerves carries pain but the majority have others jobs.

We are kind of trained by the way medicine works to just respond to calamity, but otherwise many of us feel like our bodies are a kind of ’black box’. Stuff goes in and stuff goes out, but what happens inside is essentially a mystery! No news from the body is good news! When the body starts to talk to us, it often begins with a whisper now and then. These little messages are easy to ignore. If we can’t ignore, we are trained to suppress. A couple of aspirin makes most minor aches and pains go away. When we find ourselves taking drugs on an ongoing basis just to be ‘okay’, this is when many of you ring us up for an adjustment. Of course some of you are stubborn enough to wait until you can’t really function anymore. As with many things, waiting till there is real trouble makes fixing it a bit more involved.

We don’t wait until our engine temperature is in the red before we change the oil in our cars and perhaps we might give our bodies the same respect! Maintaining adjustment, maintaining our body alignment is critical to proper functioning at many levels in the body (and some of my patients tell me it greatly affects their mental and emotional functioning too!), far beyond the feeling of pains we sometimes get when we are out of adjustment.

Although we can use upper cervical chiropractic for ‘disease’ care, helping us when we are in pain and distress, it has even more value by keeping us tuned up so we can fully live the lives we have been given. Getting an adjustment and staying in adjustment is no less important for your health maintenance than brushing your teeth (not just when a tooth hurts!) taking a bath (not just when you are filthy!) or drinking enough water (not just when you’re dying of thirst!) each day. Keeping our nervous systems tuned up with regular visits to the office can significantly diminish the troubles in your life and keep you healthy and happy. Upper cervical chiropractic is real health care.

How much does our attitude change our health? We have come to accept that we must drink enough water, eat various nutritious foods, get enough sleep, get off the couch a few times a week and move about if we want to be healthy. So how much does our attitude influence our level of health? My answer is that it is probably more important than anything else. Healing and staying healthy is an inside job. Pills don’t heal us. Even adjustments don’t heal us. What heals us after an adjustment is the release of interference in our nervous systems which frees our innate intelligence, the wisdom of our bodies, to unfold in the most optimal way. Adjustments remove the impediments to restoration of health. Health comes from within. We are made to be vibrant and resilient, happy and healthy. For some of us, traumatic injuries have limited our potential. For most of us though, we limit our potential by limiting our own sense of what is possible.
We all have ongoing personal stories that we tell ourselves to help us make sense of our lives. When we change the story we actually change the course of our lives. Life can be seen as the consecutive stitching together of these dreams, or stories. Victim mentality is a common response to the seemingly overwhelming complexities of living as shifting events change our strategies. But it is not the only available strategy.

It is complicated to live life in these modern times. We receive very strong inputs from many different directions that attempt to influence our decisions. We may call this ‘the news’, but it is also found in the 24 hour, seven day a week, advertising blitz that has become our social foundation. In these polarized times, the difference can be debatable. Audio and video input to our central nervous systems occurs in increasingly unique ways. Generally, sensory input (the information we gather from our senses) is associated with movement and context in the world around us and within us. We register most sensory input in a way that is linked to our body and behaviors and thoughts and smells and many other contexts within our environment. Television provides both stimulus and response as a single paired effect, as Joseph Chilton Pearce reminds us. He wrote:
“Television floods the brain with a counterfeit of the response the brain is supposed to learn to make to the stimuli of words or music. As a result, much structural coupling between mind and environment is eliminated; few metaphoric images develop; few higher cortical areas of the brain are called into play; few, if any, symbolic structures develop.” [p.166 Evolution's End. Joseph Chilton Pearce. Harper San Francisco. 1992.]

Children who watch a lot of television have more difficulty with symbolic conceptual systems. It is difficult for them to see events from perspectives other than their own. They have more difficulty with interpersonal relationships. We now have generations of citizens who are tied to social media but have no real social circle or connection in the flesh and blood world. Will they develop this connection over time? We hope so. The passivity of watching television encourages a profound sense of powerlessness. We see it in people all around us. Apathy, loss of moral values, and a sense of scarcity, that there is not enough to go around, drives the decline we see all around us.

Focusing on loss and want (worrying!) keeps your mind exactly where you do not want it. This is the crossroads we all find ourselves at. Do we focus on our fears and our anxieties? Do we build our lives around what we perceive to be missing, yearning for what we don’t have? Are we simply the accumulation of our memories? Are we nothing more than our minds?
I would suggest that it possible we are more than our minds. That perhaps, we have minds but that these minds are actually supposed to be tools for us and not our masters. I would suggest, (as does every truly spiritual path in history) that we are the witness of our minds. That we have a choice whether to listen to that incessant voice within us that never stops making thoughts. There is a deeper place within us. We often refer to it as ‘heart’. This is the place of deeper knowing. This is where our wisdom resides. This deeper place recognizes our intimate connections to this manifest existence. This deeper perspective realizes that creativity and abundance exist as much (or more!) as fear and survival mentality. The difference between these perspectives exists on the inside not the outside. The direction of our lives is very much within us to chart.

Conventional wisdom has long come to accept that the head is more reliable than the heart. I would suggest that it is the opposite. However, shifting this perspective can be the work of a lifetime. So much about it feels counterintuitive because we have been listening to our minds for our whole lives. Something inside you may know these words have truth in them. Something inside you may feel a connection to everything around you. Perhaps not all the time, but each of us has moments when the mind gets quiet and we feel a deep sense of peace and comfort. These moments can surprise us, watching the sun set, or holding a baby, or just a moment when all your cares drop away and there is a feeling of lightness and peace within us. Our hearts connect us to the greater whole, to a grander perspective than our little minds with our very limited perceptions could ever conceive. When we loosen the hold that our minds have on us, we may find that our thoughts have been binding us to limitations that are not real. We are more powerful and possibilities are more abundant than we have been told by our minds. There is no need to lose the rational qualities of the mind that have been so helpful to us. Instead, of seeing what is missing, we can open to the greater wisdom within us in each moment that sees the glass as half full.

But surely we have the best healthcare system in the world? Ah no. Actually U.S. News and World Report noted in 2010 that:

“Despite having the costliest health care system in the world, the United States is last or next-to-last in quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability of its citizens to lead long, healthy, productive lives, according to a new report from the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based private foundation focused on improving health care.”

Data from the 2007 report revealed that the US spends the most on healthcare of any developed nation. We spend on average, $7,290 per person per year on healthcare in this country! This is twice what Canada is paying and almost three times the rate that New Zealand spends on its people. The Netherlands has the highest ranked healthcare system in the world and they spend $3,837 per person per year.
The US actually ranks last or next to last in measures of access to care, efficiency, equity and long, healthy and productive lives. We are in the middle of the list of developed countries on issues of effective and patient-centered care. In 2008, 14 percent of U.S. patients with chronic conditions were given the wrong medication or the wrong dose. This is twice the error rate observed in Germany and the Netherlands. The US reports three times the rate of delayed notification for abnormal test results or being given wrong results as compared with Germany or the Netherlands. In the US, 54 percent of people with chronic conditions reported going without needed care in 2008 (more than half of us!), compared with 13 percent in Great Britain and 7 percent in the Netherlands.
Here in the US, 28.9 million people ((9% of our population) delayed seeking medical care in 2009 due to the expense. Another 21 million people did not receive the needed care due to being unable to pay for it. This means that 50 million people cannot get adequate healthcare in this country. It is estimated that one third of adults did not get medical care, did not fill a prescription, or skipped a needed test because of the expense. (2010 National Health Interview Survey from the CDC.) 44% of adults in the US did not have insurance at some point in 2009. This is a nine percent increase since 2003.

Universal healthcare, which is not unlimited care by any means, but is an attempt to provide a package of benefits to overcome financial risk, provide access and improved health to its citizens is available in many countries including most of Europe, Canada, Russia, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Greenland, Russia, Korea, Japan, New Zealand, and others. The controversial Obamacare plan does not provide universal coverage. It still leaves an estimated 23 million people without access to insurance.

How can chiropractic change this for you? A large 2004 study performed by a Chicago –based HMO revealed a decrease of 43 percent in hospital admissions for chiropractic patients. For those that did have to go into the hospital, their stays were 58.4 percent shorter. It decreased by 43.2 percent the number of outpatient surgeries and procedures and cost 51.8 percent less in drug expenditures. Staying healthy is a lot cheaper than waiting until disease has set in and then having to deal with the consequences. Chiropractic care can keep us healthy.
(“Clinical and Cost Outcomes of an Integrative Medicine IPA,” Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. June, 2004; 27(5): 336-347)

That is probably enough numbers and statistics for now. An informed patient makes better decisions. I have gathered these together to help you begin to understand this healthcare world a little bit better. I believe that upper cervical chiropractic opens up a whole other world of effectiveness. Many of you have experienced this this in your own lives. While upper cervical chiropractic is becoming well known for its effectiveness in many conditions, it may be most effective in keeping you healthy in the first place!

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If the link above is broken, you can always go to YouTube.com and search for Thomas Chiropractic Care. That is my channel’s name.