While many Chiropractors do quite an excellent job merely focusing on re-aligning misplaced bones, some of us Doctors of Chiropractic practice a significantly broader modality of healing. And while our Mind/Body/Spirit integrative interpretations of health can differ in details from one practitioner to another, a single basic belief unites us outliers. We treat our patients holistically, conscious that the whole array of one's feelings, thoughts, actions, diets, relationships, traumas, stressors and destinies are often wreaking havoc upon one's nervous system and spine. 

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A famous saying comes to mind, "Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day, teach him to fish and he can eat for a lifetime." If I straighten your spine every time that stress in your life leads to muscles in spasm yanking your bones out, I am merely giving you a fish. But if I can help you to alter the way your nervous system reacts to periodic challenges in your life, I can incrementally help you stay healthier forever. Ideally this is true, even though it is occasionally much easier said than done.

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Sympathetic Nervous System Disorder

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While your muscles obey orders from your mind to act out certain tasks through what we call The Motor Nervous System, there is also an automatic Autonomous Nervous System that silently regulates all your organs and glands.

 

Without you hearing even a peep from your mind, this multi-tasking system simulates a myriad of chemical neurotransmitters to be released from all over your body. These chemicals, like adrenaline, endorphins and serotonin, when stimulated in appropriate quantities and situations, determine whether you are being prepared for a Fight, Fright or Flight reaction to danger OR being prepared to Rest, Digest and Repair, a deep dive into healing calmness.

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The FF&F is called the Sympathetic Nervous System, while the RD&R is call the Parasympathetic Nervous System. For evolutionary reasons, which I address with my patients, most humans in modern cultures are far too often stuck in their FF&F adrenaline/cortisol stress modes and experience far too little time in the healing and healthy digestion mode of Parasympathetic biochemical release.

 

Sadly, there are disease states called Sympathetic Dominant Nervous System Disorders and most patients I treat are suffering what would be considered sub-clinical Sympathetic Dominance. This means that while the imbalance hasn't yet led to disease (and may never), two significant problems are afoot. Firstly, FF&F chemicals flowing in the bloodstream alert the mind that danger is imminent (even when the danger is just fear-based imagination, which too often is the case). Then in a cascading, miserable, vicious cycle, this negative chemical earthquake tells the mind not to release healing, calming chemicals. 

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The second part this old computer program begging to defragged so we can learn to stop adding insults to our literal and figurative injuries, is our outdated erroneous mental reactions to physical pain. Whereas most pains are meant to be short-lived reactions to acute injuries, the way the mind relates to these relatively benign situations is to add molten fear-riveted thoughts and fears that multiply the sorrow in a hugely disproportionate way. So instead of endorphins naturally being secreted to deal with all pains, we suppress endorphins again with adrenaline and cortisol. Thus do acute injuries remain unaddressed by nature and hence become chronic beacons of permanent pain.

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Participants Assimilating in Space/Time: The P.A.S.T.

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If some of the above wordiness strikes you as too esoteric, exit this page now because here we go for real. Occasionally, when I feel a patient needs more than my physical skills, I lean on a mind/body/spirit guided meditation to 'teach them how to fish'. In these occasions, I am believing that the patient has fixated a past emotional or physical trauma and locked it as chronic pain in the mind and the body. Through a visualization of lying beside our Sacramento River (which never stops flowing in time and space) I show the client that just like the river eventually reaches the sea and then partially evaporates, turns to snow on Mt. Shasta, melts and once again becomes part of the Sacramento River, that all past traumas return through the river of time to be attended and healed.