What Chiropractic Is

Background

Chiropractic is based on the philosophical premise that the body has an Innate Intelligence that guides its development, healing, and growth. The easiest way I’ve found to think about this is to use the example of a papercut. When you cut your finger, extra blood rushes to the area of trauma, it bleeds, the blood coagulates, fibers develop between the sides of the cut, the fibers stitch the separation together, scar tissue forms and then disappears. Think about the organization this took! It emerged out of evolution, out of trial and error and the chemistry of the way all of the pieces fit together, but your body acts with purpose to heal an injury.

This Intelligence is constantly adapting all of the forces of the world around and within you to maintain homeostatic equilibrium within you. Constant temperature, pressure, and movement are maintained through the interactions of literally trillions of cells, all coordinated by the nervous system.

Doctors of the Nervous System

Chiropractors are doctors of the nervous system. If you’ve seen a Chiropractor, and they’ve never talked to you about your nervous system, I’m truly sorry. It’s an unfortunate commentary on how Chiropractic education, caught in the requirements of the various state legislations that regulate it, causes budding Chiropractors to miss the point, or to lose their nerve when talking to patients about what they’re really doing. Even graduates of my school, which is very philosophically grounded and focused, often seem to miss the point and talk about pain management and moving bones, even while thinking about the nervous system. This only generates a confusing patient experience, which no one is served by.

The practice of Chiropractic leads to the liberation of the nervous system from patterns of behavior that are not grounded in present-time experience, but previous trauma. These patterns of behavior are represented in the spinal column as distortions in the posture. The crucial point here, though, is that it is not where the bones are that can lead to problems, it’s how the bones can move.

If you cannot bring your spine into any of the positions and postures that the shapes of the bones, tightness of the ligaments and tendons, and the cartilage surfaces have the ability to move into, you are reacting to your environment from within a habitual pattern. The rule of mobility in the body is “move it or lose it.” Any movement patterns that you habitually don’t engage in, you gradually lose the capacity for.

Emotions and the Body

In addition to the physical mobility, psychologically speaking, the positional and movement relationships among the vertebrae correlate with emotional experiences. Think about this in this way: when someone is really angry, you can generally tell by looking at them. You tell this because of their posture, their facial expression, and any number of subliminal clues relating to how they are using their body. If your spine gets stuck in a set of patterns that are implicitly related to anger in this way, other people perceive anger in you, and respond accordingly, if unconsciously. In all likelihood, your own status-reporting mechanisms report “all systems normal” because the implicit anger will be filtered out of the status report if it’s been there long enough.

All of this is to say, Chiropractic is a healing art that liberates the spine from habitual fixations. This liberation leads to greater functioning of the nervous system. This leads to the ability to develop new, more flexible patterns of behavior, both physically and emotionally. Chiropractic increases the individual’s capacity to sit still in readiness to respond purposefully to the environment.

In part 3, I’ll tie together the aims of Chiropractic, yoga, and Alexander technique, in an attempt to triangulate more clearly on just how good a tool for understanding the nature of the total self each of them is. Thanks for following the ride!