Being “In” Adjustment
Michael Thomas, DC
People often ask me, “When should I come back?” This is a fair question and an important one. Some people only return to the office when life has become too difficult again. “”Doc, that pain has returned and I can’t play golf”. “I’ve been feeling it for four or five months but just in the past couple of days I find that I can’t get comfortable in bed at night”. “I thought it would go away but it just keeps returning and it seems to be getting worse!” “This is a different pain than last time and I didn’t think it was related.” “I didn’t think you could help so I went to five other doctors, got cortisone shots, did weeks of physical therapy, had two MRI’s and now the surgeon wants to operate.”
These and many more are common comments from patients when they return to my office in acute pain or problem. The vast majority of the time, an adjustment will once again, return them to health and happiness. “I didn’t realize you could help this!” “I didn’t know it was related to my neck!” “My other doctor told me chiropractic couldn’t help this.” “This is voodoo!”.
I hear these and many other comments like these every day. This is why educating patients is almost as important as adjusting them. If you don’t know when I can be of help, you won’t come in to get the adjustment you need to return you to health or to maintain your health. This educational problem is a deep one. In our society, people are generally not taught anything about what we do or even how our bodies really work and therefore don’t realize the results you receive from upper cervical adjustment are even possible. We have always grown our patient population one person at a time. Once you have been adjusted and realized, felt, and lived the restoration that occurs, then you begin to get the bigger picture. This picture is actually bigger than the symptom expression in any one person -they know what it has done for them in the past but many have no idea of the possibilities.
Let’s briefly explore (this is a whole book in itself!) the areas and issues that can be affected by upper cervical adjustment.
Through ongoing research, we now understand that misalignment in the top of the neck changes blood flow through the head in a dramatic fashion. It also changes flow of the cerebral spinal fluid, which lubricates the brain and spinal cord and removes toxins. Many people have headaches and brain fog that seem directly related. Dizziness and equilibrium problems are frequently helped by adjustment. The cranial nerves also seem to be affected by misalignment and many people have found improvement in vision, hearing, TMJ and other facial problems. Many people remark they can’t take a deep breath when they are out of adjustment. Many people have noticed that their blood pressure returns to normal when they get back in adjustment. People report that their esophageal reflux improves when they are in adjustment. Many people report that their digestion becomes disordered when they are out of adjustment and returns to normal once they’ve been back to the office. One of my patients starts burping as soon as they are back in adjustment and this is a sign their gut is working again. We celebrate! I have several patients whose nose starts running and clearing their sinuses right on the adjusting table! (I have tissues!)
Many people have found that they begin to feel depressed when they are out of adjustment and that this will lift almost immediately when they get an adjustment. More than one person has told me they could finally get pregnant after getting an upper cervical adjustment -after trying for years without success. Seizures have often been greatly reduced or stopped all together.
This is just a sampling of the thousands of people who have come through the office over the years. We haven’t even gotten to pain yet. Chiropractic has been painted as “maybe good for low back pains at times” but results in this office would tend to expand it’s usefulness. In the last week I found patients telling me that their horrific trigeminal neuralgia pain was gone. One person related that she had been sitting on doughnuts for years but that she had come in for shoulder pains. After one adjustment her shoulder was 90% better but her tailbone pain was gone! So was the pain in her knee and ankle. Several people were scheduled for surgery. Most of them cancelled it after receiving relief. They had been told there was no other choice, but we are a choice they don’t know about.
A proper upper cervical adjustment restores your body to an optimal relationship with gravity. It restores the ability of your body to function as a whole and not have to scramble to keep up with hips going one way, shoulders another, and head yet another. Fighting gravity is a battle we always lose. Gravity is relentless. The adjustment restores equipoise, that ability of the body to balance easily right on the gravity line, a vertical axis that goes through our middle. It is much the same as a gyroscope. When a gyroscope has enough energy, it spins cleanly and easily. As it loses energy it begins to wobble more and more in an attempt to remain upright. The extra effort decreases its energy further and it increases its wobble until it falls over. The adjustment restores all the ‘pieces’ (head, neck, trunk, hips) back into alignment decreasing the energy needed just to keep us upright. This energy can then be used where it is needed in the rest of our body maintaining and restoring our well-being. We can think better. We have greater agility and ease in moving about. Best of all, we stop the degenerative processes that occur when we are out of alignment, causing joints and muscles to adapt and compensate just to keep functioning, halting the progression of arthritis and chronic muscle spasms.
My experiences have shown me that upper cervical chiropractic is primary health care for human beings. It is a hidden jewel that you have already found and has likely already made a change in your life. Like any precious gift, the more you know about it, the better it can serve you. I hope this piece has expanded your knowledge of upper cervical chiropractic. Now let’s spread the word!
How Are You?
How are you? It’s a question that we ask others when we first greet them, and we in turn are asked many times a day. “Oh fine”, is a common answer. “Okay.”, is another. We know that most people don’t really want to know how you ‘are’, it’s just a common greeting. I notice this in the office because when I come out to the reception room to bring people back to my adjusting room we often exchange ‘pleasantries”. Unless they are in significant pain, people generally are all smiles and ‘doing fine’. I generally don’t ask “How are you doing?’ in the reception room because that is a private matter between doctor and patient. Once we are in the adjusting room I will often ask: “How are you REALLY doing?” This often makes people chuckle a bit, but they recognize that the social pleasantries can often mask the truth.
In fact we often mask the truth from ourselves. Only when symptoms become bothersome or begin to obviously negatively impact our days (and nights!) do many people decide to come into the office for care. No one wants to focus on their problems and I don’t recommend that either. Our minds are a powerful tool. Too many of us are prisoners of the ongoing accumulation of negative, self-defeating thoughts we have stored in our minds in the past and continue to generate in the present. For too many of us, we have an underlying negative self-talk going on in our minds. We are literally programming loss and want and sadness and dire circumstances into our minds all day long, each and every day. This immense mass of biased negativity impacts not just our emotions and thoughts but also in profound ways, our bodies and the whole life we live.
Not everyone does this. There are those among us who consciously monitor the quality of thoughts that the mind generates and then consciously, on purpose, begin to change their thoughts. We are often drawn to such people. This is the deal, our minds work like a ROM (read only) drive on a computer. The drive fills up with what we put into it. When new situations arise, it is this database that our minds go to for assistance in understanding and perspective. If the mind is consistently negative, then new events will always be ‘flavored’ with that same negativity. We will see everything that happens to us through the lens of this same negativity.
Prayer, meditation, affirmation, and the conscious desire to be grateful, are examples of ways to begin to shift the balance of thoughts and feelings inside ourselves. We didn’t get to where we are in a day or a week or a month, and we must work on a consistent basis to change this default negativity, but in all times and places, there are people who are doing exactly that. What they have realized is that the past and the future do not exist. All that exists is the present moment. Only in this moment do you have the option to change. You can’t change the past, and the only way to change the future is in this present moment.
Resilience is a term that applies to all of our lives. It means the ability of our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts, to ‘handle’ what is happening in front of us in the present moment. Increasing resilience increases your ability to ‘handle’ life. Low resilience means you must constantly protect yourself from the push and pull of life. Lack of resilience diminishes our experience of life and diminishes our possibilities. I have used this metaphor with many of you in the past, but you might think of your life as having a size and shape. Perhaps you could visualize a ‘balloon’. In this metaphor, your life occurs within the confines of this balloon. So long as events stay within these boundaries, you are able to tolerate what comes to you. If for some reason, events move past the boundary of the balloon, you will find that the stresses of life are bigger than you can tolerate. This is when people become symptomatic. They begin to feel the negative emotions, the unbalanced thoughts, the aches and pains that come with being out of balance, of over-extending yourself, so to speak. Even if there were stresses going on that were less than optimal in your life, if they were within the confines of the balloon, you probably didn’t notice any problem. Only when they exceeded the boundary of the space you have made for yourself do you begin to realize ‘something is wrong’.
Negative thinking, lack of exercise, poor food choices, lack of sleep, inability to deal with the ongoing stresses that life can bring all diminish the ‘size’ of your balloon. This can mean that you lose function and ability to be healthy. The good news is that becoming conscious, getting active, eating properly and dealing with our stress, all conspire to enlarge the size of your ‘balloon’. You have more ‘room’ to live your life in peace and comfort. The upper cervical adjustment is one of the most powerful ways to ‘enlarge you balloon’ that I am aware of. By itself, it is incredible in its power to restore you to the life you aspire to. In conjunction with all the factors you have control over (thinking, eating, sleeping, stress management), you begin to have a powerful method for maintaining and even improving your health and your experience of life. Many of you have already experienced this in your own lives. The adjustment can act as a ‘re-boot’ for your life. Reducing postural misalignment and improving blood flow to your brain through the upper cervical adjustment is in my opinion, one of the most powerful healing modalities I have ever come across. The more we learn about it the more incredible it gets, as research is continuing to show.
Even without making any change in your life, the adjustment has the potential to be invaluable. Many of you say you don’t know what you would do if you couldn’t get adjusted. I have been assured many times that if I ever move, I will have a lot of folks following behind me! This is how powerful the adjustment is in their lives. They recognize the primary importance of the adjustment in their life. Life works better for people who are in adjustment and once this is understood, most people want to stay in adjustment!
Some people are even more pro-active. They are careful with their diet. They exercise, they manage their stress and they get plenty of sleep. Life becomes an adventure, not just something to be endured. They generally require fewer adjustments than people who rely on the adjustment to restore them for a few days or weeks until the lack and stress in their lives builds up again and they need another adjustment. We all make choices in our lives. Once we understand the consequences, we can make better decisions. We can consciously improve the quality of our own lives or we can remain the victims of negative thinking and watch our lives dwindle in an ever narrowing spiral of disappointment, pain and sorrow. Yes, life can send tough issues our way. It is in how we respond to these issues that expands or diminishes our quality of life. Are we consciously building the life we aspire to or are we victims of the negativity in our own minds? How are you? –I mean, really?
Michael Thomas, RN, BS, DC
In Tune
When a musician picks up a guitar, he or she first checks the tuning before beginning to play a song. Each string must be properly taut, and more, they must be in proper tension with all the other strings. This is because the strings resonate with each other. Fortunately for the purposes of this metaphor, a guitar is tuned at the neck! And so are we! Our muscles and tendons and ligaments are strung between our bones under a light tension even at rest. Just as a guitar string needs to be under tension to produce a tone that will sustain and vibrate the string, so our muscles and the sinews between them must be under a bit of tension so that they can respond and act in a coordinated manner.
It isn’t enough for a string to be under a bit of tension. It must also be in proper relationship to all the other strings. Our bodies are the same way. All of the muscles must be in balance so that they act in in concert with each other, allowing us to move and act in an efficient way. It is possible for a master guitarist to perhaps find where the notes are on a poorly tuned guitar and play a song. It would take great effort and the notes wouldn’t be at the frets where they usually are found because the tuning is off. We do the same thing when we are out of upper cervical adjustment. When our nervous systems are out of tune, we call it ‘out of adjustment’. We must adapt and compensate to continue to perform the activities of our lives. When the tension is unbalanced, we find one leg going short compared to the other one. One hip may be higher and twisted forward or backward. Our torsos must then lean back toward the middle to keep the forces of gravity from making us fall down. Last, but certainly not least, the head acts to fine tune this fall-back strategy. It is the fine tuning for our posture. We are forever dancing with gravity and when we are in adjustment we are optimally prepared for what life brings to us.
Unlike guitars, we must also be in tune with our environments. We aren’t as separate from our world as we might think. It isn’t enough to be in tune just within ourselves. We must also be in tune with the never-ending force of gravity. Everyone who moves about on the Earth must contend with gravity and its consequences. When we can stand tall, with equal weight on our two feet, with a level and untwisted pelvis, our head on straight, directly above the center of gravity in our pelvis, this makes for the finely tuned instrument we know as an optimally functioning human being! We are forever dancing with gravity and when we are in adjustment we are optimally prepared for what life brings to us. We can then use the minimal amount of our precious energy to act in our lives, saving our resources for other important tasks like thinking and digesting our food.
When we are out of adjustment, the opposite occurs. We must power up just to stand up. We must use more tension in our muscles to keep ourselves upright and move about. Like the center pole in an old pup tent, if our spine is not standing up straight and instead leans to one side, the ropes that are attached to it find themselves with very unequal tension. Tension on one side is ratcheted down, having to literally keep the pole from proceeding on to the ground. The other rope is loose. In human beings this situation also occurs and people can rub their skin and feel a tension and thickening in their necks and shoulders and backs. This is because unlike a rope, our bodies adapt and change all the time. Our muscles become unequal. They get used to this inequality and actually change shape! The majority of our energy is used by our muscles to move us about in our world. When we are out of tune the energy cost accelerates.
When we are out of adjustment, out of tune, our energy is shunted away from important activities like thinking and wound healing and cellular repairs. All the elements in our bodies need to be in tune with each other. Our internal organs serve to create a steady environment within us. They help give the power to the muscles so we can move and interact with our environment. When we are out of adjustment, out of tune, our energy is shunted away from important activities like thinking and wound healing and cellular repairs.
We must use more of our life energy to just stand up and move around. So this is what upper cervical chiropractic patients already know: when we are in adjustment, our life works better and easier. We can think better and we have an ease in moving about. We know life is more fun when we are ‘in tune’ and our life can become the beautiful symphony it is intended.
Michael D. Thomas, RN, BS, DC
Turning Life Off Is Not Turning Life On
If you suddenly had a painful splinter in your finger there are a number of options available for you. You could do nothing, let it fester, and allow your immune system to gradually decompose it through phagocytosis. You will heal eventually. It may take some time. That’s what our bodies do; they heal one way or another. However, if you decide to do something about your splinter, there are several more options. One, you could take enough pain medicine until you can’t feel the discomfort anymore, or you could sever the nerve going to your finger and this would keep you from feeling the pain any more. You could just cut your finger off and the stump will heal eventually, leaving you with four fingers. Or, you could pull the splinter out and let your immune system quickly heal the tissues now that they are not being interfered with by a foreign object. This option leaves you with all five fingers in working order and is the most rapid route to returning to normal function. I know this sounds a bit silly, but we are confronted with this decision all the time in other areas of health care.
The medicines that are trumpeted every day from all manner of media generally act in a way that is similar to cutting the nerve to the finger. They are suppressive and palliative. Pain is a messenger that something is wrong. ‘Killing’ the messenger will diminish your pain but it doesn’t do anything to solve the actual problem. You just live life in ‘blissful ignorance’. This is actually true for most cardiac medications among many others. The ‘heart’ pills do not just go to the cells of the heart and cardiovascular system where you want them to go. They go to every cell in your body and change functions at that level where ever they go. These changes can and do cause problems and these are known as ‘side effects’.
We are comprised of trillions of cells. They combine together to form tissues and organs. All of these structures work must together in harmony for us to be healthy. At any moment, our bodies are doing the very best they can with what they have to work with. Medications (drugs) generally interfere with metabolic pathways inside cells. They shut down certain functions. They can shut down communications between cells. This is the opposite of removing interference and allowing the vital force of life inside you to function without constraint. Turning life off is not turning life on.
Sometimes, it is the best we can do. Being numb may be preferable to living a life in pain. But what if we listened to the message and understood it? What if we have more power inside us than we have been told? What if you didn’t have to constantly control your symptoms with toxic drugs but could actually free the life that struggles to express itself inside you?
This is the incredible reality of upper cervical chiropractic. If you have been under upper cervical care for a while you already have experienced this truth. The adjustment works not because of what it ‘does’, but because of what it ‘un-does’! Freeing the power of life to communicate freely with all the cells of the body allows the body to work in the optimal and coordinated manner that it was made. Diminishing function, decreasing communication also lessens the ability of life to find a way back to health.
You know what the adjustment has done for you. Many of you say you don’t know what you would do without it now! No one wants to live with life turned down once they have lived life in adjustment! Imagine if the whole world had access to this amazing healthcare. Imagine if everyone felt well and healthy. Imagine the kinds of decisions we would all make if all of our nervous systems were working properly. Keep imagining and spread the word!
Michael Thomas, RN, BS, DC
Happy New Year
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
Viktor Frankl
The winter solstice signals the yearly extreme of the darkness of night as well as the minimum of day. From this point in the calendar, the light of day will now grow with each revolution of the Earth, incrementally shortening the night, gradually increasing the length of solar illumination each day. This occurs because the spin of the earth is not perpendicular to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. This makes the whole Earth wobble, and it takes a whole year to wobble north to south and back to north.
The celebration of the end of one year and the beginning of another, offers us a moment to consider the rhythms of our own life. Circles within circles. Circles have neither beginning nor end, but we do. The rhythms of our lives begin in the womb and end with our last expiring breath. The cycle of our life is a truncation (shortened version) of the endless cycles around us. For instance, there is a cycle of atoms and molecules that continuously move into and out of us, exchanging themselves with other atoms and molecules in our planet’s air, water and earth. Where we begin and end may be more fluid than we usually consider. The Moon pulls on the liquids within our blood just as it tugs on the water in the oceans producing the tides. We have relationships with others that we see and talk with as we go through our weeks and months and years.
The gravity that binds us to this Earth causes us to wobble too. We always move in rhythmic fashion in little micro-orbits around the line of gravity formed by our mass. The center of our wobbling (our center of gravity), generally resides in our pelvis. When we stand up on our two legs, our center of gravity is several feet off the ground. Our incredible nervous systems continually adapt and compensate in order to optimize our positions to best match up with whatever we are doing at any moment in time. Equipoise, we call it.
While our bodies dance with gravity, we are usually busy finding balance in other ways. We don’t want to be too hungry or too full. We try to get the right amount of sleep so we can be alert in the other parts of the day. We want to be sensitive to others and yet maintain the boundaries necessary for our own emotional and mental health. We must be active enough to be healthy but not work so hard we begin to break down. There is no magic action or thought or feeling that always works in every situation. It is in the balance of all the aspects that life happens. The relationship between the ‘pieces’ turns out to be more important than the pieces themselves.
This idea is called a systems approach and is increasingly being seen in science as the next step after many decades of reductionism. In any structure, it is the way the ‘pieces’ are arranged that produces the utility. Until recently in biology, when we wanted to study cells we would take them and blend them up. We would then put them into a centrifuge and spin the contents around until distinct layers revealed themselves. Each layer was then analyzed chemically and in a microscope and we thought we understood a lot about cells. It turns out that the structure inside cells is essential to their function. Destroying their structure destroyed our ability to understand them. It took several decades to figure this out. It is in the relationship of all the parts that creates the functionality of life. We are more like verbs than we think. Even molecules act from their edges. The push and pull of charge and repulsion, tension and compression, light and dark, playing out over time creates the circles of cycles that comprise our lives and all of Life.
What meaning is there in a circle? In our society we spend a lot of time trying to get somewhere. A circle always ends up where it started. This question is one that each of us must answer for ourselves, but the stories of our lives play out in the rhythm of the cycles we encounter. We can be carried away by the extremes. We can be bored by the moderate times. We can suffer through lack. Our perception, the way we assign value to what comes through our senses, creates the meaning. Perception is a choice. We think it is hard wired, we have even been taught that it is hard wired. It is not. Disciplined intent changes our perceptions all the time. (Oh, and so does undisciplined intent!) Our minds are meant to be our servants not our oppressors.
In this moment of moving from darkness to light, we can acknowledge our own cycles of light and dark. We are not narrowly defined by either our darkness or our light, but rather by how we navigate the between the two in the living of our lives. One doesn’t exist without the other and neither do we. As we understand the polarities within ourselves, so we also heal the rifts between us all. If we can make space in our hearts for our own extremes, perhaps we can find the room to better understand the extremes of others.
Don’t believe all the naysayers. Don’t let the news steal your peace. Changing yourself does change the world. It’s the only way it will change. You are the balanced center of many forces. Acknowledge your center and be that balance in your own life and in your actions out in the world. Make it a happy new year for us all.
Michael Thomas, D.C.
