People get well without Chiropractic the same way people get well without medicine, acupuncture, naturopathy, osteopathy or any other healthcare service.
Chiropractic is not the source of health and wellness, but rather an instrument utilized to assist the body in its own healing process. No healthcare service is the end-all, be-all, and cure-all when it comes to getting well. This is because health doesn’t come from outside the body but from within.
Let me give an example. Say you cut your finger. What might you do? You might pour hydrogen peroxide on the cut, slather it in Neosporin and wrap it in a bandage. A week later you take off the bandage and it's all healed up.
Now did the hydrongen peroxide, Neosporin and bandage heal the cut? If that is true, go down to the butcher shop, buy a steak, take it home and cut it. Pour on the hydrogen peroxide, slather on Neosporin and bandage it up. Now, will the steak heal? Of course not. You might say that’s ridiculous, but of course, the steak won’t heal, it’s not alive. And that proves a very critical point.
Only life can heal. Your body as you sit here is making living flesh and blood out of the lunch you had yesterday. Built into you is all the wisdom of nature. And that wisdom knows all there is to know about healing. In Chiropractic, we call this ‘built-in wisdom of nature’ our Innate Intelligence.
The term Innate Intelligence was coined by D.D. Palmer, the Discoverer of Chiropractic. Innate means “born with”. Innate Intelligence then characterizes our inborn capacity to maintain coordination, perception, understanding, organization and cognition, or simply, functions of the body. Quoting D.D. Palmer: “To express the individualized intelligence which runs all the functions of our bodies during our wakeful and sleeping hours, I chose the name Innate.”
Our Innate Intelligence has intention and direction that is beyond our consciousness. You can think of this in terms of a ‘subconscious’ but in reality, it is more apt to call it our ‘superconscious’. The ability to coordinate all the vital functions of life; from respiration, digestion, circulation, metabolism, thermoregulation, etc. is way above our conscious understanding. How well the body coordinates all these functions is the hallmark of health.
At this point, you might ask: “If health comes from within, then what’s my role in the whole thing? What’s the Chiropractor’s role? What’s any doctor’s role? Does it even matter?”
Health does come from within and you have the potential to heal from a plethora of conditions. That we should be cognizant of. We also need to understand that the conduits Innate Intelligence uses can be distorted and interfered with. The source of our inborn healing is limitless, the matter it uses though, is not.
The body is intelligent but is finite and can only work with the materials it has. Things can and do interfere with the healing process. Physical, chemical and emotional stressors create disruptions in our functional capabilities. These stresses come from both voluntary and involuntary sources.
Removing interference to the healing process is the goal of Chiropractic. The fact that there is a healing process means there are situations and times that require our body to heal. A vertebral subluxation is one major way that the expression of health can be disrupted.
The main conduit that is used by our Innate Intelligence to maintain function throughout the body is the Nerve System. The Nerve System controls all the movements we make, senses everything we feel, regulates all our body organs and relates us to the outside world. When nerves get stressed, it effects their sensitivity, perception and behavior to perform these functions. There are three types of stress we deal with in life. The stresses are physical, chemical and emotional in nature. These stresses create nerve tension and imbalance the spine.
Our Nerve System, guided by our Innate Intelligence, adapts to these stresses as best as it can to maintain balance in the body. If the stresses are too significant for the Nerve System to adapt, compensations arise. A vertebral subluxation is one particular compensation in the upper cervical spine.
A vertebral subluxation will cause the Atlas and Axis bones to get locked in a misaligned position. This lock will perpetuate an imbalanced spine and nerve tension. Nerve tension will lead to abnormal sensitivity, perception and behavior of the brainstem and associated nerve tracts. Nerve System function is interfered with.
When Nerve System function is interfered with, health expression will inevitably falter. The aim of Chiropractic is to correct nerve tension and the imbalanced spine. Chiropractors correct this by adjusting the vertebral subluxation. Correcting the subluxation better optimizes the function of nerves. The Nerve System overall can sense, perceive and behave at a greater potential when a subluxation is corrected. Health by effect has a greater potential to express.
Chiropractic didn’t reinvent the “wellness wheel” as much as it allows for a more natural use of it. While we can’t eradicate sickness and disease, we can try our best to enhance the expression of health and wellness. This should be the role of any doctor in their patient’s health journey. Quoting Dr. Herman S. Schwartz, DC: “The greatest aid the doctor can offer any patient is to adjust him physically, advise him nutritionally and help him to understand himself emotionally so that he can cope with all the organismic and environmental influences, and also learn to take hereditary influences in his stride. The organism then “cures” itself, for to be “normal” is the inevitable goal of all its energies.”
Jarek Esarco, DC, CACCP is a pediatric, family wellness and upper cervical specific Chiropractor. He is an active member of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association (ICPA). Dr. Jarek has postgraduate certification in Pediatric Chiropractic through the ICPA. Dr. Jarek also has postgraduate certification in the HIO Specific Brain Stem technique through The TIC Institute. Dr. Jarek is happily married to his wife Regina. They live in Youngstown, Ohio with their daughter Ruby.
