I don’t have much faith in pure chiropractic myself, but how well it works is highly dependent on the practitioner. The basic premise of chiropractry is flawed in my opinion because the reason bones stay mis-aligned is because muscles are holding them there. That’s one reason multiple sessions are needed.
Hi Etherfish,
Thanks for your post. You are right that the effectiveness of chiropractic is practitioner dependent like any profession based on skill. Look at the wide disparity in skill levels between golfers for example. Yogis for that matter.
The idea that the muscles hold the bones in place is a common misconception that people have about how the spine works. Why? because as in AYP, the nervous system is primary. The muscles respond to the activity of the nervous system activity and this is what holds the bones in place.
However, if the integrity of the disc has been compromised due to injury and the nucleus propulsus has shifted, the bone will be out of place. The nervous system will respond to this with compensatory muscle activation. Muscle contracture and fibrosis resulting from this chronic condition can permanently shorten the muscle. Degenerative arthritis sets in and you have got a permanent problem in the spine that needs life time supportive chiropractic care with the goal of slowing the arthritis, optimizing joint, nerve and soft itssue function and greatly improving the quality of life.
There are many complex scenarios. In fact the most common initiator of this process is injury.
Physical emotional and chemical stress are contstantly bombarding this weak link in the spinal chain.
And the nervous system responds to the environmental input it receives. In fact 80% of the input into your spinal cord and brain is from the neural receptors in your joints, discs, muscles (cardiac, smooth and skeletal) and tendons.
I can tell you that as a practitioner of over 20 years, that pure chiropractic is incredibly effective in the vast majority of cases. I will also tell you that I don’t have the answer for everyone who comes to see me. But with my batting average, if I was a baseball player, I would be on the cover of every wheaties box in the country. Well, actually I would have to share it with alot of other chiropractors.
Occaisionally, I have resorted to trigger point therapy when adjustments alone did not do the job but that is the exception and not the rule. Most of the time pure chiropractic gets the job done. But not always.
My yoga teacher encouraged me to become a chiropractor. Originally, he poo-pooed chiropractic but then his view point changed thru a series of events and he came to see the value of it.
Back in school, I showed a fellow student of mine, a farm boy from central Iowa, my favorite book on hatha yoga, Yoga and Health by Yesudian and Haich. When he got done reading it, he said to me with a look of amazement on his face, “That’s chiropractic.”
When deciding on a profession, I looked at all the different healthcare professions and decided on chiropractic, because I saw the vast overlap in their philosophies.
Chiropractic’s goal is to clear the nervous system of any obstructions and to optimize its function promoting the free flow of life force to every cell of the body and as a result optimizing health. Does that ring any bells?
From Yoga and Health by Yesudian and Haich:
“The carrier of life is the spinal column. The positive pole is in the top of the skull, at the spot where our hair forms a whorl. This point is easily located on a child’s head. The negative pole is in the coccyx, the lowest vertebra. Between these two poles there is a current of extremely high frequency and short wave-length. This tension is LIFE!
Life wanted to manifest itself, and so it expanded the top most vertebra and developed it into a skull. It formed the fine material in the latter into a conductor of a current and gave it the ability to express intelligence and feeling. Thus the brain came into existence.
The nervous system serves to transmit the life current. The SELF clothed itself with the body and by means of the nervous system it radiates itself, that is LIFE,into every fibre of the body, filling the latter with perfect equilibriium and harmony. Thus the functioninng of the body is regular, that is, HEALTHY.
A major prerequisite for health is, therefore, that of gradually expanding our consciousness and leading it into all parts of the body. In this way we can avoid distubing the order–we can prevent disease. And if sickness is already present we consciously and intentionally restore the condition of order.
Hatha Yoga teaches us how to utilize, store and promote the free flow of life force to the maximum extent. If we give life force a free hand, it keeps us in perfect health.”
(the above isn’t what I gave my friend to read)
So you see, Hatha yoga and chiropractic are the perfect complements. Hatha yoga takes care of the macrocosm, the health and flexibility of the overall spine. Chiropractic takes care of the microcosm, the individual motor unit (two vertebra, the joint they form and the surrounding soft tissue).
In fact, an adjustment is like a mini yoga session for the compromised motor unit. The adjustment increaes the flexibility of the motor unit and improves the range of motion in all vectors. It improves nutrition delivery and waste removal. When a motor unit is stuck and the joint is not moving well, rehabilitating the function of the motor unit thru chiropractic adjustments will allow it to participate in the hatha yoga postures, whereas if it was left in its suboptimal condition, it could be aggravated and at the very least the nervous system would lock it down with protective muscle spasm inorder to prevent further injury.
I have many people who come to see me 1-2x per month because they instinctly know that the support their weakened joints receive from regular adjsutments greatly improves the quality of their lives. Some of them get regular massages, too.
I refer people for massage and they refer to me. Physical therapist, MDs, etc.
How much more their lives would improve with regular hatha and raja yoga. To me, This would decrease the need for chiropractic care tho not entirely. The reason it would decrease it is because, the hatha yoga would make their spine and body healthier overall and less subject to physical stress while meditation would greatly decrease the emotional stress which radiates into the muscles and then the spine via the nervous system. This would greatly decrease spinal tension. This in turn would minimize acute episodes of pain because with less emotional tension in the system, physical activity such as bending and lifting and other common activities of daily living which cause physical stress would be less likely to overload the spine’s compensatory mechanisms. The tipping point of spinal instability and acute symptomatic flare up would be harder to reach.
But not every body is a yogi. And people have tons of stress in their lives and as long as that is the case, therapeutic and supportive chiropractic care will in demand.
So you see there are many complex and interweaving factors affecting the health of the spine on a grosser level.
In fact the bone re-alignment can often be done completely through massage without “cracking” the bones at all. I think this more whole-istic approach is in its infancy and is ahead of its time.
This is another misconception, Etherfish. In fact, I really don’t aim at realignment. Most people’s conditions are so chronic you are never going to realign them. You are going to improve and optimize range of motion and function. I would repace the “often” with “once and a while.”
Every body’s spine is misaligned. It is when things freeze up that you have the pain and headache, etc. And the deceptive thing is that these stuck joints can be asymptomatic like a cavity in your teeth. And this is silently activating the stress response 24/7. Many people who come to a chiropractor already have as much damage to their spine as a person who waits until they have a tooth ache to see a dentist for their very first time.
All manual therapies have their affect on the body via sensory input into the brain and spinal cord. The brain is infact what we call sensory driven. In other words, it fires in response to stimuli from the environment. However the inputs are of a completely different nature when comparing chiropractic and massage. It is the high velocity and low amplitude nature of the chiropractic adjustment which sets it apart from all other forms of manual therapy and allows it to succeed where the others fail. This gives it its unique postion in the health care field.
The high velocity nature of the adjustment allows it to get past the protective muscle spasm protecting the joint and reset the neural reflex arcs, optimizing firing of joint position and motion receptors, static and dynamic muscles spindles and golgi tendon organs while inhibiting the firing of pain generating neurons. This normalizes the function of the motor unit.
In fact, when the motor unit is fixated, the balance is upset between these two systems and the pain system (nociception) over rides the motion and position system (proprioception) chronically activating the fight or flight stress response. So chronic decreased motion of spinal bones activates the sympathethic nervous sytem and inhibits the rest and digest of the parasympathetic system.
Of course, enlightenment is the ultimate optimizer of the autonomic nervous system. But an unhealthy spine can be a chronic source of very stressful and unhealthy input to the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord).
Believe me, and no offense to massage therapists, but they can not do what chiropractiors are able to do because of the nature of the adjustment which I explained above.
And you know, I have fixed many broken tailbones, pulled muscles, rib and pelvic fractures as well, simply because they were misdiagnosed. In the medical profession, if you have an ache or a pain, it is labeled a pulled muscle most of the time.
People come in to me and say it is a pulled muscle because they have been trained to think that every thing is muscular in origin and after I adjust them their pulled muscle is gone for the reasons I have explained above.
Sorry for the chiropractic lesson but,… “I” am a chiropractor. Its what I do. 
I want people to have concepts that accurately reflect the clinical reality so that they will seek out chiropractic if and when the need should arise.
I hope I fleshed out the concept of why bones stay misaligned and how chiropractic fits into the scheme of things.
Best wishes, yb.
), but something to the effect of the asana postures themselves effecting cleansing, is so true.