What's in an Adjustment?

Why are you getting adjusted? To feel better? To reduce pain levels? To hear a pop? There are a multitude of reasons I will have someone walk in the door and want to be adjusted (though I will admit that pain is probably the number one reason); but what if the benefits are so much more than just pain relief? What if chiropractic care can provide something that is more than just a quick release or a quick limbering up? The reality is that chiropractic care has been shown to be extremely helpful in relieving pain and providing long-lasting relief, but it also has benefits that are over and above just some basic pain relief!

Let's start with joint mobility. Joints, like every other part of the body, require nutrition and a good blood supply to remain healthy. But they also require something else. Joints require motion! In fact, motion is as vital to a joint as air is to the lungs. Motion allows the joint to circulate fluid, receive proper nutrition and maintain its structural integrity. In fact, joints that no longer move will degenerate and often rather quickly. A joint that has undergone degeneration loses its ability to move fully and smoothly. Think of a degenerate joint like a hinge that's been left in the rain for a while. If the hinge doesn’t seize altogether, it's hard to move; it creaks and groans when you forcefully get it moving again (sound familiar?). Chiropractic adjustments work to restore a joint's full ranges of motion and, just as importantly, they work to maintain those ranges. A well-adjusted spine can be thought of as a hinge that’s regularly greased and not left out in the rain to rust.

So having great moving joints is important because it means you can use those joints for years to come. But there is still more yet, there are deeper benefits of the chiropractic adjustment as well! To understand the further benefits we must first understand something called allostatic load. Allostatic load can be defined as the sum of all the stressors your body has to deal with. The more stressors, the higher the load. As this load of stressors increases, it moves your body into a state of sympathetic dominance. This state is most commonly known as your fight or flight response. In short bursts this state is beneficial, it results in higher wakefulness and higher energy output. But this increased energy output comes at a cost, our bodies give up on their basic maintenance. Things like sleep and digestion are put on the back burner, and cellular healing is also slower to work. If we remain in this state for a few hours our bodies are able to recover fine, even a few days and our bodies can get back to healing themselves with little consequence. However, if left for weeks to months we can start to run into some real issues. Chronic stress can lead to higher sensitivity to pain, increases in headaches, insomnia, and low energy levels. So how do we combat this state of sympathetic dominance? This is where chiropractic comes in. Chiropractic care and adjustments work specifically to reduce your allostatic load. By decreasing the physical and neurological stressors on your body, chiropractic is able to help you out of this state of fight or flight. When your body is no longer feeling tension and joints are free to as they are designed, your body can better divert energy to where it is more needed.

The best thing about chiropractic is not that it gets you out of pain, the best thing about chiropractic is that it allows your body to better modulate itself and do its job properly. After all, our bodies are designed to be healthy, we just have to make sure there's nothing getting in the way. When our bodies are moving well and the joints are able to go through their full ranges, when our allostatic load is low, our bodies are able to maintain themselves and make sure we have the energy to focus on other things.

-Dr. Benjamin Davey D.C.

Are You Cleared for Takeoff?

Let’s talk about pain today. We have all experienced it from time to time and to varying extents. Whether you just stubbed your toe, touched a hot stove, or rolled your ankle. One of the first things you will feel is pain. Why? Well, it's our warning system. Pain tells us that we are damaging our bodies. It might be saying “hey, stop touching that stove it’s burning your hand!” or “hey, you can’t walk on that ankle until I have a chance to fix the torn tissues”. We understand that pain very well, it’s for our protection and we could get severely injured without it. However, there is another type of pain that is less straightforward. That pain is chronic pain.

To start looking at pain we need to understand a little bit about how pain works in the first place. The best way is with an analogy. Imagine your brain as a flight control tower. Like a flight control tower, your brain has control of and is constantly communicating with everything around it. The control tower will tell pilots when to take off and when they are cleared to land. Just as importantly the pilots will communicate with the control tower to let them know if there is a problem. Let’s suppose one of the plane engines is not working right and the plane is not safe to take off. The pilot does their final check before takeoff and sees there is a problem with the engine. The pilot will call up to the tower and let them know that the plane is not safe to takeoff. After receiving the call, the tower will cancel the takeoff and direct the plane back to a hanger. This is great! A damaged plane has not taken off and there was no harm caused. However, I want you to now imagine that there is a bit of a troublesome plane. This plane has an engine failure every time it tries to take off. Every day the plain is scheduled to fly, but right before the plane takes off, the tower receives its call from the pilot and the pilot once again tells the tower that the plain is not safe to fly. Now the tower controllers are very efficient at their job. After weeks of the pilot calling the tower and telling them that there is an engine problem before every takeoff, the tower controllers stop picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. As soon as they see the call come in from the pilot they simply cancel the takeoff and send the plane back to the hangar. However, a few weeks after the tower stopped listening to the pilot, the engine problem was finally fixed! However, there is now a new problem. Now every time the pilot calls the tower to let them know that all systems are go, the control tower simply cancels the takeoff without ever picking up the phone to hear what the pilot has to say. The plane remains grounded despite the fact that there is no longer anything wrong with the plain. The problem is no longer a mechanical issue with the plain, it’s now a communication problem. In order to straighten the issue out, proper communication must be restored.

Ok, so what does this rather long analogy have to do with chronic pain? Well, believe it or not, this is very similar to what happens when a person develops chronic pain. If an issue lingers for too long, the brain will stop consulting with the tissue and just assume the tissue is still damaged. Recent studies have shown that most chronic pain is actually not related to damaged tissue and is in fact a brain communication problem. So what can be done? The brain must learn to pick up the phone again and talk with the tissue. When a new signal is sent from the tissue, the brain will pick up on that new signal because it’s not the one it usually receives from the tissue. One of the most powerful signals is that of motion. When motion is put through a tissue there is a signal sent to the brain. It's like the mechanic calling the control tower instead of the pilot to say that the plane is good to fly. After multiple calls from the mechanic saying everything is fine, the tower will eventually start picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. When the body receives enough motion signals saying that there is nothing wrong with the tissue, the brain will start to communicate properly again. This is how a chiropractic adjustment helps those in chronic pain! The adjustment sends a huge motion signal to the brain, after receiving multiple of these motion signals from an adjustment, the brain starts to listen and to communicate properly again.