It’s a Brain Thing

Even after 120 years, there are still a lot of people confused about chiropractic adjustments because they don’t want to get their “bones cracked, or popped.”  They believe that the adjustment “pops” a bone that is out of place back into place like snapping Legos into position.  Some of this is the fault of the chiropractor as we have allowed this simplified interpretation to be perpetuated over the years rather than tell the whole truth which is a little more complicated.  The truth is that the adjustment is more about the brain than it is about the bones.

Chiropractors detect and correct something called a subluxation.  Subluxations are indeed minor misalignments of the spine that can create pressure and swelling on the nerves causing interference with the nerve signals thereby adversely affecting everything under the control of that nerve.  The problem with this is that bones don’t just go out of place on their own – they are controlled by the muscles.  There are approximately 108 muscles of the spine whose job is to keep the bones of the spine in proper alignment.  That’s great, except for the fact that muscles don’t do anything on their own.  In truth, muscles do only one of two things – they turn on to contract, and they turn off to relax much like a light bulb.  However, just like the light bulb, the muscle requires an electrical stimulus from the wiring system of the body or the nerves.  And when it comes to maintaining the alignment of the bones through the muscular system, the nerves that coordinate all of this are controlled largely by the coordination center of the brain known as the cerebellum.  This part of the brain requires constant incoming information from all the joints and muscles of the body to coordinate balance and movement and maintain normal posture and proper structure.  So you see, a misalignment of the spine or subluxation is really a coordination problem.  There has to be some kind of disconnect between the bones, muscles, nerves and cerebellum that would allow a bone to stop moving correctly and become misaligned.  Therefore, you cannot truly “pop” a bone back into place.  Even if you could, the imbalanced muscles would pull it right back out of place.  Rather, the chiropractic adjustment moves the bone enough in the right direction to fire off the nerve endings in the joint that report to the coordination center of the brain (cerebellum).  This stimulus from the joint gives the cerebellum the information needed to begin re-coordinating the imbalanced muscles so that the body can begin to move the bone back into proper position and heal on its own.  I like to think of this like resetting the circuit breaker.  Because the muscles and the nervous system itself are very habit-forming this process usually requires repetition to retrain this complex system and ultimately correct the misalignment or subluxation.  So even though most people go to chiropractors for various pains, the process really is not about reducing pain, but rather about improving the function of this brain/body communication.  When this is accomplished, higher function not only leads to less pain, but better performance and ultimately better health because the brain is communicating with the body more efficiently through the nervous system as it was designed to do.  I share this perspective with you because many people are suffering unnecessarily due to commonly held misconceptions about how chiropractic and the chiropractic adjustment work.