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!
Brain Fog
Michael D. Thomas, D.C.
‘Brain Fog’ doesn’t show up on most lists of diagnoses or in medical texts. Every day however, you folks come into my office and talk about it. I hear people say they can’t think clearly; they are forgetful, discouraged, depressed. It was actually my patients who cued me in to the fact that upper cervical adjustments can overcome this debilitating problem. In fact, after the initial course of care has occurred and people begin to find themselves out of adjustment weeks or months later, it is the brain fog that brings them in more often than not.
“I’m just not myself.”
“I can’t focus on anything but what is right in front of me.”
“I feel like I’m looking down a tunnel at life…”
They may admit that their neck is starting to ache or their hip or whatever symptom it is that lets them know they are out of adjustment, but it is often this feeling of ‘brain fog’ that makes them come into the office for an adjustment. We all want to be able to think clearly and be able to handle all of the parts of our lives. Our brains and our nervous systems allow us to sense and perceive not only what is outside of us but also what is within us. When there is interference to this critical communication system, our lives begin to break down.
It is the toll that upper cervical misalignment and subluxation take from our lives day after day, month after month, year after year that diminishes the fire inside of us.
Upper cervical chiropractic directly removes interference to the nervous system and brain. New studies from UCRF (Upper Cervical Research Foundation) and other research is beginning to pinpoint how we do this. Early results of specialized imaging studies is beginning to reveal that misalignment of the bones in the upper neck diminishes the ability of the blood in our heads to get back out! If the blood can’t get out it can’t get new blood in. This means that oxygen and nutrients and waste products are not moving in or out properly and our brain function begins to change. This isn’t an acute issue most of the time although many people will wake up in the morning and find they are deep inside the fog, having knocked themselves out of adjustment in the night or the day before. It is the toll that upper cervical misalignment and subluxation take from our lives day after day, month after month, year after year that diminishes the fire inside of us.
Because we stand on two legs and are upright critters, the joints connecting our head to our neck are quite different from other animals. In addition, the pathway for blood to drain out of our heads (the venous accessory drainage system) appears to become compromised. Changes in head position can greatly change the pressures inside the head and having the ability to rapidly shift the volume of blood in our head is essential. Other animals also have great challenges here. Bats fly at great speeds and frequently make rapid turns, eating mosquitoes and avoiding branches and other obstacles. They therefore have a unique venous drainage system as do whales which must be able to function on the surface of the ocean but also at great depths. We don’t have the same tremendous forces to deal with but misalignment does now appear to compromise this system and therefore hinders the nervous system in its critical job of keeping us updated and controlling movement.
The plaques that form in the brain in multiple sclerosis (M.S.) (visualization of these plaques in imaging (MRI, etc.) is an important diagnostic indicator of the disease and are occurring in these very same venous outflow tracts. Research out of Europe and here in the United States is currently finding strong correlations between compromise to this system in M.S. and other chronic neurological issues such as Parkinson’s and dementia.
Once again, the central importance of upper cervical alignment is becoming clear. One of my patients will occasionally come into my office with a sad and downtrodden look on her face. She tells me that there is no joy and she has an overall feeling of depression. Her posture is slumped and life does not work for her. In fact, one of the ways I know I have reduced her misalignment is that as she sits up on the table after an adjustment, there is an immediate sparkle and gleam of life back in her eyes. Immediately she is standing up straight and she can take a deep breath again. She tells me, even before I have measured, that she is back in adjustment. She is just one of dozens that find this same inner sense of peace and calm turn back on again after an adjustment.
I truly believe after seventeen years of examining and adjusting people, that the upper cervical adjustment is the single most powerful way to improve our resilience.
Brain fog is often talked about as related to toxic metals, (Copper, mercury, aluminum, cadmium, lead and others), toxic chemicals from car interiors, upholstery, lawn chemicals, paints, among others including toxins dissolved in the water you drink. Bowel toxicity, dehydration or drinking of contaminated water, adrenal fatigue or ‘burnout’, low thyroid, yeast infections, hypoglycemia, food or chemical allergies, pharmaceutical side effects, hidden viral infections, parasites, sensitivity to electromagnetic fields, and many more causes are all blamed for ‘brain fog’.
Many of these issues may well stress the body and the nervous system to the point that thinking is affected along with other physical problems. Toxicity, whether due to chemicals, electrical lines, infections, or even psychological reasons all create stress in your life. How much stress you can handle depends on how well your body is functioning. Resilience is the ability to overcome obstacles and continue to function at a high level even considering the problems we encounter each day. I truly believe after seventeen years of examining and adjusting people, that the upper cervical adjustment is the single most powerful way to improve our resilience. When we have impaired nervous system function, even little things can be too much.
There is no doubt that toxins are a real problem in today’s world. We must be vigilant with our diets and try to drink clean water. Many of us are looking at various ways to get these toxins out of our bodies. At the same time, if we are functioning at full power, we will be able to tolerate toxins and all other stresses better. We will be clear-headed and make better decisions. Our nervous systems become finely and accurately tuned to the realities inside and outside of us. Once in adjustment, we find we can better handle what life brings us.
Once in adjustment, we find we can better handle what life brings us.
The NUCCA adjustment frequently offers answers to problems that can seem impossible to solve. This is because we are doing something very specific that restores function at the level of the brain itself. The greatest difficulty we have in this practice is to let people know about this answer to so many problems. People don’t realize there is a practical answer and that all treatments and interventions are not the same. If someone doesn’t realize there is a possible answer, they don’t even look for it. Educating people to the power of upper cervical chiropractic is a tough road for this reason, but I am not quitting until everyone knows they don’t have to take drugs to turn their life off but can remove the fog and live life to the fullest with a nervous system that is operating at full capacity!
Why Does Upper Cervical Chiropractic Work?
“I don’t know how you can touch me behind the ear and fix my low back pain and sciatica, but I don’t care- it works!”
“It’s all voodoo or magic to me!”
These are comments I frequently hear as I go about my days adjusting all of you as you come into the office for care. I am in my seventeenth year of taking care of folks in Belleview and almost every new patient has made a similar remark through the years. It isn’t immediately obvious how such a light touch under the mastoid on the side of your head could somehow change pains on the other end of the body. In all of the time I have been in practice, this head scratching confusion on the part of patients has been equally joined by their surprise and happiness at the relief they have felt after getting adjusted and getting stable in their alignment. After a short listen to the neurophysiology that tends to come out of my mouth to explain the work, they shrug their shoulders and say,
“ Whatever… I don’t care how it works, I just know it does!”
In addition to being your chiropractor, I am also quite interested in the research that will bring this odd work to more of the world’s suffering people. I am a longstanding board member of the Upper Cervical Research Foundation. In addition, I am also a long time writer and associate editor for The Upper Cervical Monograph. In those roles, I spend quite a bit of time looking at the papers that are published and brainstorming with our researchers to help all of us understand the work in a more comprehensive way. The differences in our work tended to cause us to move away from the rest of chiropractic and the healthcare world. Not only do patients not understand why we get the results we do, but neither do the researchers in chiropractic and elsewhere in the healthcare community. After decades of frustration, we are finally building the bridges that will link our work to the rest of medicine.
One big reason that this work is so difficult to understand is that its foundation lies in a very different idea than the one that underlies medicine and indeed, most of the rest of chiropractic. Medicine (and much of today’s chiropractic) is based in a ‘therapeutic’ model. To be simplistic about it, if for example, you had a muscle spasm, the ‘treatment’ would be to do something that made the spasm go away. You can measure the increase in range of motion and validate that it ‘worked’. A spasm hurts, so relief of the spasm is the goal of the patient. If you had tingling into your fingers, relief of this tingling is your goal, and so forth.
Many people like the gels that feel warm and make pains and spasms ease. For them, the gels ‘work’. The reason they, for example, work is because the pain fibers that are communicating the problem to you are tiny class “c” fibers that transmit their messages pretty slowly because they don’t have a myelin sheath around them which speeds up transmission of the nervous impulses. The feeling of warmth travels on other nerves that do have this sheath around them. Because their message gets to the ‘gate’ (of your consciousness) before the pain, the feeling you get is warmth not pain. There is nothing wrong with this and sometimes such gels provide welcome relief, but it is a process of ‘killing the messenger’ not ‘fixing’ the problem.
Science and the scientific method have come to rely in recent times on taking the big picture and breaking it down into discrete parts. The idea is that if you ‘fix’ each individual part, then you ‘fix’ the whole. Science has been extremely successful in many ways using this idea. Medicine in particular uses this idea as its foundation. Doctors specialize in one organ or problem. Drugs are given for each symptom that people have with the idea that when all the symptoms are ‘gone’ then the person is ‘well’. All of us are beginning to see the problems with this method of ‘treatment’. Drugs are said to have ‘effects’ and ‘side-effects’. You (the recipient of these drugs) want the effects and do not want the side-effects! If you get a ‘side-effect’ it won’t feel like it’s off to the side… it will have a direct effect in your life and most probably an unwelcome one. Why would you get unwelcome effects from drugs that are supposed to ‘fix’ you? The reason is that we are very complicated critters. In the last few decades we have begun to develop ways to understand what are called ‘complex systems’. (You can be seen as a complex system!)
In a simple system what goes in is consistent (and proportional) with what comes out. As an example from mathematics, if you have an equation such as 2 times ‘x’ = ?, any number you insert for ‘x’ will double in the answer in a consistent and proportional way. However, we are vastly more complicated than that simple mathematical equation. We have many inputs, many functions within us, and the output can vary widely and not be consistent or proportional. We are ‘complex systems’. A small change in input can create a very large change in output or a small one or anything in between. This is known in mathematical terms as the “Butterfly Effect”. It is a metaphor that says a butterfly fluttering its wings in the Amazon can potentially change the weather systems to the point that it could result in a tsunami in Japan. In medical terms, we call this a ‘side effect’ because it happens much less frequently than the expected effects. Those now struggling to regain their lives in Japan after the recent tsunami there do not think this effect was ‘minor’. (I am not making any point about the reason for the recent Tsunami in Japan and am also not blaming butterflies in the Amazon!)
The mathematics for understanding complex systems is maturing, but what seems clear is that dealing with simple systems is very different from dealing with complex systems. Instead of forcing discrete changes on a complex system (such as yourself!) to make all the ‘parts’ return to ‘normal’ levels, there is another way to improve function. This involves removing interference to the system. Complex systems can maintain themselves. They don’t need ‘help’ so much as they need to remove interference to their function.
The upper cervical adjustment (You knew we’d get back it this!) removes interference to the nervous system at a critical place in the anatomy. The junction between your head and neck is a most unusual place. The bony joint system at this junction is the most complex set of joints in the whole body. All of the information that comes from your brain travels out the foramen (hole) in the bottom of your head and down into the body through the spinal cord and associated nerves. All of the information that comes from your body travels through other nerves, up through this same foramen (hole) and into the brain where it can be processed and dealt with by the neural centers of the brain. Without the nervous system you would have no knowledge of the world outside your skin nor even any information about all the parts of your body. Interference to this flow of information into and out of your head changes your awareness of both the world at large and your own body function as a result of changes in your own perception.
In upper cervical chiropractic we have long found that we can trust that our nervous system and understand that our bodies know what to do. The innate intelligence that made us in the first place and runs our incredibly complex lives knows exactly what to do. You don’t have to tell your pancreas to release insulin or your stomach to make acid to digest your food or even how to stand up without falling down. These functions all work together as one unified whole…you! Forcing one part to a predetermined ‘normal’ level does not equal normalizing the whole person. In fact, forcing one piece to a predefined normal can destabilize other aspects over time and create whole new and deeper levels of problems. If this sounds a bit like the current practice of medicine, I think so too.
Sometimes a symptom could kill you and then I am very much in favor of suppressing it! Medicine does a very good job at this level of emergency care. This is called tertiary care. Thankfully, the vast majority of our lives are not played out on an emergency level however. Symptoms are messages that the whole system is doing the best it can but considering the message, it may not be doing very well! Stifling the message does not improve health; it rather diminishes the vitality and resilience of our complex natures. If that is the best we can do, then so be it. But the upper cervical adjustment points at a whole new level of answer.
This answer trusts the power of life inside of us. Specifically, the upper cervical adjustment appears to restore normal blood flow into and out of the head. The brainstem in particular seems to change how blood flows through it on the initial studies we have begun. Corrective adjustment seems to restore normal blood flow into and out of the brain itself. This makes your brain work more optimally and we are finding that many of the problems that people have can be related to this altered blood flow. This includes changes to how your body holds itself up with regard to gravity. Misalignment causes the muscle tension to become unequal, drawing the leg up and twisting the pelvis, causing the upper body to move away from its normal position to accommodate the unleveling and twisting of the pelvis. Most probably, it also changes how you think to some degree and many people talk about ‘brain fog’ when they are out of adjustment. Many people feel emotionally depressed when they stay out of adjustment for any length of time. We have a study that shows many people can normalize their high blood pressure when they are in adjustment. These kinds of changes are happening in every system and organ in the body.
The x-ray films that I take at the beginning of care are carefully analyzed and precise measurements are taken. One of the most incredible things about this work is that it is measurable. I can measure that you are out of adjustment and adjust, then measure again to see if I have corrected the alignment. If I haven’t completed the correction, you have probably had me lay you back down on the table to finish the job. The measurement system takes the guesswork out of your care.
Beyond the measurements (and more interesting to my patients!) are the results of removing this nervous system interference. I wish you could listen to the many ways I hear patients tell me that the adjustment has changed their life. I believe this is primary care for human beings. So many aches and pains could be relieved, so many drugs could be stopped, so much more life could be lived, if people knew how to stay in upper cervical adjustment. This is what drives me as a researcher, and this is what drives me as a chiropractor. There is enough pain and suffering in this world. The upper cervical adjustment makes the world a better place, one person at a time!
Michael Thomas, D.C.
Radiation
The very word makes people fearful. These days there is some real cause for concern, but how much concern? And what do we do about it? Fear without knowledge is a scary spiral into panic. So let’s talk a bit about radiation. What does the word mean? Radiation is energy that is originated from a particular source and travels away from the source through space or matter. Light, sound, and heat are all examples of radiating energy. This kind of radiation of energy is called non-ionizing radiation. Other examples include infrared radiation, radio waves, cellphone radiation, and microwave radiation. There are questions about the biological effects of cell phones and microwaves, for example, but that is a topic for another day. Some radiation however, comes from unstable atoms which have an excess of energy. This is called ionizing radiation. Unstable atoms are defined as radioactive. In order to get stable again, they radiate (give off) the excess energy and mass. You may remember Einstein’s famous equation: E=mc2 . This equation relates matter to energy. In fact in certain circumstances, it says matter and energy are the same. Electromagnetic radiation (like light, sound, heat) is well known to us and we couldn’t live our lives without this radiation. We wouldn’t see or hear anything if this radiation of energy didn’t occur. Particulate radiation happens when the energies are much greater. When this occurs, mass is given off too. Ionizing radiation has enough energy to change the atoms it encounters. X-rays (energy comes from electrons), and Gamma radiation (energy comes from the nucleus) are examples of ionizing electromagnetic radiation. Beta (a high speed particle identical to an electron that comes from the nucleus of an atom) and alpha (particle emitted from a nucleus of an atom that contains two protons and two neutrons) radiation are examples of particulate radiation.
Irradiation is exposure to penetrating radiation. This happens when part or all of the body is exposed to radiation from an unshielded source. This external irradiation doesn’t make people radioactive. Radioactive contamination occurs when material which contains radioactive atoms comes into contact with skin or clothing or anything else where we don’t want it. The person who has been contaminated with radioactive material will continue to be irradiated until the radioactive material is removed.
The term for the amount of ionizing radiation received by a person is called a “Sievert” (Sv). The effect of radiation is a factor of how much and how fast the exposure occurs. 1 sievert received all at once will make you sick. 2-4 will likely kill you. If you receive the dosage slowly over time, your body can usually deal with the damage and cumulative effects over a span of time are also looked at carefully. The fact is that we live on a radiative planet. There is no way to escape radiation and we wouldn’t want to because we would instantly freeze, and have no vision or hearing! (Not that this would matter if you were quick-frozen!)
Just sleeping next to someone in bed at night will expose you to 0.05 micro-sieverts. (a micro-sievert is one millionth of one sievert). Eating a banana exposes you to 0.1 micro-sievert. Using a CRT monitor for a year will expose you to 1 micro-sievert. The depth of the atmosphere winnows out the cosmic radiation present at ground level so the higher you are, the less protection you have. One day on the Colorado plateau exposes you to 1.2 micro-sievert . The background dose for a normal person having a normal day is 10 micro-sieverts. A chest x-ray exposes you to 20 micro-sieverts. If you live in a stone, brick or concrete home, you are exposed to 70 micro-sieverts per year. An airplane flight from New York to Los Angeles exposes you to 40 micro-sieverts. Potassium is often radioactive. The natural potassium in your body (yes, it’s naturally radioactive) exposes you to 390 micro-sieverts per year. Total background exposure for a normal person per year is 3.65 milli-sieverts per year. (A milli-sievert is one thousand micro-sieverts.) 85% of this is from natural sources (the rest from medical scans). A CT scan of the chest exposes you to 5.8 milli-sieverts (5,800 micro-sieverts!). The maximum permitted dose for US radiation workers is 50 milli-sieverts. The lowest dose that has been linked to increased cancer risk is 100 milli0sieverts. 400 milli-sieverts received in a short time can cause symptoms of radiation poisoning. Severe radiation poisoning (sometimes fatal) occurs with exposure at 2000 milli-sieverts (2Sv). 4 Sv causes extreme radiation poisoning, survival may be possible with rapid treatment. 8Sv is fatal even with treatment.
We have been talking about the biologically received dose of radiation, what it does if it is present inside the body. This “sievert” is figured by measuring the dosage absorbed and then multiplied by a factor that describes the damage of this type of radiation in the body. There are many different terms being used today and the U.S. health physics community uses different terms than the International Standard. Terms you may read about include “Rad” (radiation absorbed dose) which describes just what it says, the amount that has been absorbed into some material. It does not describe the biological effect of the different radiations which is why the sievert is used internationally. “Rem” (roentgen equivalent man) does relate the absorbed dose to the effective biological damage of the radiation.
Effects of radiation are many. They include somatic effects which are effects from some agent, like medical radiation to treat cancers. Genetic effects are seen in the offspring of individuals who have been (pre-conception) exposed to radiation. Teratogenic effects occur when an individual has been exposed while pregnant. Stochastic effects occur on a random basis and is independent of the size of the dose although more likely with increased dose. Cancer occurring after irradiation is a stochastic effect. Non-stochastic effects are related to the dosage received and increase in damage with increased dosage. A skin burn from radiation exposure is a non-stochastic effect.
So what happens when someone is exposed to ionizing radiation? I am going to illustrate the effects, but I am doing so not to make you more afraid, but rather to educate you so you can understand if and when you are in danger. Obviously, this is dosage related as explored above, but the symptoms are identical to those of patients receiving radiation therapy for cancer. First signs include nausea, fatigue, possible reddening of the skin and often vomiting. Next come hair loss and diarrhea. Usually patient exposure stops at this point in radiation therapy, however, if the dosage continues, there is destruction of the intestinal lining (these are fast growing cells and they can’t grow new cells if radiation has attacked the genome in the nucleus of the cells that tells what proteins to make for the new growth. Radiation always affects faster growing cells first because of this and is why you hair falls out. Central nervous system damage occurs next, then loss of consciousness and eventually, death.
What do we need to do about this? I think you need to stay calm and assess situations as they evolve. Often there is nothing you need to do because exposure is low and your body will most likely take care of it. Remember we are a self-healing organism. We were born onto a planet bathed in the radiation from the sun, and radiative materials are everywhere and always have been. The problem is when the dosage accelerates and your body can’t handle the onslaught. Once the symptoms of radiation damage have occurred, there is little to be done from a western medical point of view. The best way to deal with radiation is not to be exposed to it. Recent articles indicate that radiation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi has been measured at 400 milli-sieverts per hour. This is one big reason why they have moved the population away from the plant. Radioactive iodine-131 released into the atmosphere comes back down in the rain. Fields of grass and crops uptake the radioactive iodine and the first indications were found in the milk from cows who ate the grass. So milk and dairy products should not be eaten if contamination has occurred. This is the best way to avoid the radioactive iodine. There is a lot of talk about using potassium iodide to diminish absorption of the radioactive iodine by the thyroid. This can help in diminishing the effects on the thyroid but does not protect against dangerously high levels of radiation. Also, taking large doses of potassium iodide over a period of time will alter physiology and can be harmful in itself. Taking the potassium iodide does nothing regarding other isotopes released such as cesium-137. It is certainly appropriate if you have been exposed to a high dose of radioactive iodine. Cesium is absorbed by all the tissues of the body and remains in the organs and tissues and environment much longer than the radioactive iodine. So far, as far as we know, only a small amount of cesium has been released from the Japanese reactors. Much of the decontamination procedures simply involve soap and water and washing the radioactive material of the clothes and skin of a person who has been exposed.
So at this point, there isn’t much that needs to be done by folks living here in Florida. We have our own nuclear power plants (the closest one at Crystal River). Your increased risk from this nuclear plant is minimal so long as everything is working the way it is supposed to. For someone living within 50 miles of the plant for a year they will receive 0.09 micro-sieverts of exposure. The current EPA limit for radiation exposure for the general public is 1 milli-sievert (or 1000 micro-sieverts).
Dana Ullman wrote a good post regarding the use of homeopathy for radiation poisoning. Rather than try and synopse it, I will provide a link to his paper. He also points out that fear is never healthy for us and undo alarm serves no one. Being prepared for potential disasters however is just reasonable, and can help to ratchet down the fear and anxiety which only serve to steal our health. His paper is found at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/homeopathy-for-radiation-poisioning_b_842664.html
Those of you who already use homeopathy in your healthcare understand the power and safety of this approach. If it’s not your cup of tea, I understand! The best thing you can do is to be aware of what is happening and changing in the world around us and to work to optimize our health so we start from a resilient, vital position regardless of what stress we encounter. While upper cervical adjustments don’t diminish a dose of radiation in our bodies, they do improve our resilience, our vitality and help us to clear toxins every day.
I hope this paper has helped you to understand the risks and dangers of radiation. I hope it has also relieved some of your fears and anxiety over the current situation in Japan. We have a myriad of things to worry about these days. Stay informed, eat well, get enough sleep, stay in adjustment, monitor your stress level and make meaningful changes when you need to. These can be, in these crazy days, complicated things to accomplish but your life is worth it. In the meantime, we are here if you need us!
Michael Thomas, D.C.
