Is it how you feel or how you function that matters?

22 Dec Is it how you feel or how you function that matters?

Everybody knows a story about someone who died unexpectedly. Perhaps the person maybe was seemingly very fit and then all of a sudden they just died. Maybe it was during a sporting activity or maybe it was just overnight in their sleep. We also know about many people who are young, they’re in their 30s, and then they’re diagnosed with a terminal illness such as cancer and the cancer is quite advanced at the point that they are diagnosed. These examples are pretty upsetting and might hit a raw emotional nerve, but it sadly is so very true.

These stories, though they’re common, haven’t really changed our culture, which continues to believe that bad health always involves pain or symptoms. An interesting fact about pain and symptoms are that signals need to reach a certain part of the brain called the “thalamus” in order to be perceived as pain. In a paper written in 2000 titled “The Neurophysics of Human Behaviour” from Furman and Gallo, it was reported that while the brain receives several trillion bits of information per second, it appears that we are perhaps unconsciously aware of 50 bits of information per second at any given time. …  in other words, only 50 out of three trillion bits of information could reach the conscious part of our brain where we may “feel” the message. In other words, relying on symptoms is not really a sound way of determining whether we’re healthy and well.

This science describes exactly why most dysfunction and disease goes unfelt and undetected until the late stages of the disease. It also confirms that one of the worst things that we can do is to base our health purely on how we feel. One of the key things about being a chiropractor is that we recognise that health is about function, not just about feeling. Our function is controlled by our brain, and our brain is heavily reliant on the healthy mechanical function of our spine. If ever our spine stops moving and functioning currently, which is called a vertebral subluxation, we have a de-stimulation of the brain. Stimulation of the brain means that vital processes occurring in the brain to help control the vital physiology of the organ systems of the body gets disrupted to some degree. Whilst many people use chiropractic services to alleviate back pain, neck pain, and sciatica for example, it’s really all about the brain. The more that we can impact and create healthy spine mechanics, the better people’s brains function and therefore we receive overall health benefits.

There are two key messages really that I’m reiterating here.

Message number one: Relying on symptoms and pain and signs of dysfunction to determine our level of health and well-being is not reliable because only 50 out of three trillion bits of information per second reach the conscious part of our brain where we may or are capable of actually feeling something in our body.

Message number two: Adjusting the spine whilst providing incredible pain benefits at the localised area of dysfunction, (if it is painful), really has its greatest impact in the role that it plays in creating a healthy brain pathway pattern and allowing the flow of information from above in the brain, down and inside the spinal cord and out through to the body cells, tissues and organs….. then in the reverse order back up to the brain. That flow of information neurologically and electrically is a key part of our health and a fact that sometimes gets overlooked.