Chiropractic...About More Than Back Pain?

source:  http://www.metrotownchiropractic.com/en/faq_and_education.html

7 Reasons Why Chiropractic Is About More Than Back Pain
posted by PHS Chiropractic on Friday, October 09, 2015

Do your patients think their care is simply about resolving their back pain? It's time to educate them that while chiropractic is about that, it's also about so much more.
Research has demonstrated that chiropractic can actually help keep your body healthy and active and can be incorporated into anyone's lifestyle as a preventative regimen.

Chiropractic:

1. Boosts immune function, making it easier to ward off infection and illness.

2. Reduces inflammation. Higher levels of inflammatory compounds can lead to diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis.

3. Reduces blood pressure. In fact, patients who receive adjustments have seen blood pressure decreases that are equal to being given two different anti-hypertensive agents at the same time!

4. Reduces stress, including improving brain activity responsible for stress reactions and reducing cortisol levels.

5. Improves balance by restoring normal healthy spine function.

6. Relieves colic in babies.

7. Relieves asthma symptoms in both adults and children. As chiropractors, we know the benefits of being under chiropractic care extends well beyond just back pain relief. In an article published by ChiroHosting they give 7 reasons why chiropractic is about your overall wellness.

The core concept of chiropractic is to restore the function of your nervous system so that it can do what’s it’s designed to do: keeping your body healthy and active. Chiropractic is truly about prevention. If you keep your nervous system working smoothly and without interference, many health issues become non-issues!

Don’t take our word for it, though. Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of scientific research that shows that chiropractic is good for much more than just aches and pains. Here’s a review of some of this literature.

1 – Chiropractic Boosts Immune Function

A 2010 study found that chiropractic adjustments actually boosted blood serum levels of some important natural antibodies in patients. The authors suggested that chiropractic adjustments might "prime" the immune system, making it easier to ward off infection and illness.

2 – Chiropractic Reduces Inflammation

Researchers in a 2011 study compared back pain patients to people with no pain and gave both groups chiropractic adjustments. The authors found that the back pain patients who received chiropractic care had dramatically lower levels of a key inflammatory cytokine, known as TNF-α. High levels of TNF-α have been linked to inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and psoriasis.

3 – Chiropractic Reduces Blood Pressure

Hypertension is a huge public health issue in the US; it’s estimated that about 30% of adults suffer from this serious condition. A 2007 study in the Journal of Human Hypertension looked at a group of patients with high blood pressure. Half received an adjustment of their atlas, and the other half received a sham adjustment.

The decrease in blood pressure was so dramatic in the patients who received real adjustments that the researchers wrote that it "is similar to that seen by giving two different anti-hypertensive agents simultaneously." In fact, 85% of the study patients had improvement after just one adjustment!

4 – Chiropractic Reduces Stress

An interesting study by a team of Japanese researchers in 2011 gave chiropractic adjustments to 12 men and examined PET scan images and blood chemistry to examine the effect that chiropractic has on the autonomic nervous system.

After receiving a chiropractic neck adjustment, patients had altered brain activity in the parts of the brain responsible for pain processing and stress reactions. They also had significantly reduced cortisol levels, indicating decreased stress. Participants also reported lower pain scores and a better quality of life after treatment.

5 – Chiropractic Improves Balance

As we age, sometimes we start to lose some of our balance, strength, and flexibility that we had in our youth. Because of this, older folks are vulnerable to serious injuries from trips and falls. Chiropractic helps keep your body active by restoring the normal, healthy functioning of your spine. One of the important roles of your spine is balance, aided by nerves called proprioceptors. These proprioceptors relay information to your brain on the position of your body.

A small study from 2009 found that people who received chiropractic adjustments had reduced dizziness and improved balance. A 2015 review of the literature suggests that chiropractic care might be an effective, natural way to help prevent falls in elderly patients.

6 – Chiropractic Relieves Colic in Babies

In 2012, researchers studied 104 infants who were suffering from colic. One-third of the infants were treated with chiropractic adjustments and the parents were aware of the treatment; one-third were treated and the parents were unaware of the treatment; and one-third were untreated but the parents were unaware.

The authors found that the parents reported a significant decrease in infant crying in the treated babies, compared to the infants who didn’t receive treatment. The knowledge of the parent had no effect on the improvement.

7 – Chiropractic Relieves Asthma Symptoms

A 2013 study reported that chiropractic adjustments were effective at increasing lung functioning, and some recent research shows that chiropractic care can help reduce the symptoms of asthma in some children.


Reference Studies

1.  Teodorczyk-Injeyan JA, McGregor M, Ruegg R, Injeyan HS. Interleukin 2-regulated in vitro antibody production following a single spinal manipulative treatment in normal subjects. Chiropractic & Osteopathy 2010;(18)26.

2.  Teodorczyk-Injeyan JA, Triano JJ, McGregor M, Woodhouse L, Injeyan HS. Elevated production of inflammatory mediators including nociceptive chemokines in patients with neck pain: a cross-sectional evaluation. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics 2011;34(8):498-505.

3.  Bakris G, Dickholtz M Sr, Meyer PM, Kravitz G, Avery E, Miller M, Brown J, Woodfield C, Bell B. Atlas vertebra realignment and achievement of arterial pressure goal in hypertensive patients: a pilot study. Journal of Human Hypertension 2007;21(5):347-52.

4.  Ogura T, Tashiro M, Masud M, et al. Cerebral metabolic changes in men after chiropractic spinal manipulation for neck pain. Alternative Therapies. 2011;17(6):12-17.

5.  Strunk RG, Hawk C. Effects of chiropractic care on dizziness, neck pain, and balance: a single-group, pre-experimental, feasibility study. Journal of Chiropractic Medicine 2009;8(4):156–164.

6.  Kendall JC, Hartvigsen J, French SD, Azari MF. Is there a role for neck manipulation in elderly falls prevention? – An overview. Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association 2015;9(1):53-63.

7.  Miller JE, Newell D, Bolton JE. Efficacy of chiropractic manual therapy on infant colic: a pragmatic single-blind, randomized controlled trial. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics 2012;35(8):600-7.

8.  Engel RM, Vemulpad SR, Beath K. Short-term effects of a course of manual therapy and exercise in people with moderate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a preliminary clinical trial. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics 2013;36(8):490-6.

9.  Pepino VC, Ribeiro JD, Ribeiro MA, de Noronha M, Mezzacappa MA, Schivinski CI. Manual therapy for childhood respiratory disease: A systematic review. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics 2013;36(1):57-65.
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Maybe #chiropractic is about more than we thought? https://t.co/XE2ZrOd0ry

— Travis Robertson (@theuppercblog) October 20, 2015

Immunity and Upper Cervical Care?

Skeptics of upper cervical care question how it can help the immune system in the absence of scientific studies. One could also question how physicians for the last 100 years could say to drink fluids and rest if you have the flu. Does fluid drown bacteria? Does lying down cause a virus to die? Of course not. Clearly rest and fluids do not affect the microorganisms. They are intended to help the sick person’s body, specifically his or her immune system. This helps the body fight the microorganisms and their effect. Doctors have found through common sense and experience that the ability to fight off microorganism (the immune system) is improved by resting and drinking fluids. No one had to do studies. It is a self-evident fact. (Actually when you are sick you really do not feel like doing anything else but lying down. That is the innate (or inborn) intelligence of your body saying “rest”). No one is about to suggest that doctors stop making that recommendation until a Harvard Medical School research program can be completed in which 1,000 people with the flu will be allowed to drink fluids and rest and 1,000 others with the flu will be made to walk around while deprived of fluids.

Upper cervical care is based upon the same logic. If there is an interference in the nerve system, the immune system, which is intricately linked to it, will not function properly or at least not as well as it should. If you shut down the nerve system completely (death), the immune system will not work at all. Therefore, if you interfere with its function, the immune system will work at less then 100%. It is not necessary to do studies. It would be ridiculous to demand that physicians do the study outlined above to prove the validity of rest and fluids for the flu. It is just as ridiculous to do research to prove that upper cervical care helps the immune system work better. It is a self-evident fact. If the nerve system works better, every system in the body works better, including the immune system. Notice that upper cervical doctors do not claim that their care cures the flu, the common cold or anything else. We just maintain that if there is interference in the nerve system, the immune system will not work as well as it should and if that interference is removed, the immune system will work better.

How much better? Well, we do not know. But then we really do not know how much benefit fluid and rest are for the immune system. All these individually or together could be the difference between getting well from the flu or not. The point is that we just do not know. There are a lot of things about health, the human body, proper function and human potential that we do not know. In fact, there is probably more we do not know than what we do know. That is one of the beautiful things about upper cervical care. We do not have to wait until we have proven data from research studies. We can know that upper cervical care is good based on logic, common sense and self-evident facts. That is how physicians knew that rest and liquids help people fight the flu. That is how we know upper cervical care will enable the immune system and every other system in the body, for that matter, to work better.

Upper Cervical Care Affects Entire Body?

Upper Cervical doctors have long maintained that people without symptoms may benefit from Upper Cervical Care: that keeping the body free of nerve interference is a good way to help the body function better and be healthier.

Researchers decided to take people who have no symptoms, put them under Upper Cervical Care and then monitor various body systems for improved function. The author of this study reports that the available research does indeed “lend strong support to the popular contention that holding an Upper Cervical correction confers health benefits to people regardless of the presence or absence of symptoms.”

More than 20 research articles collectively document “significant improvements in respiration, range of motion, heart rate variability and autonomic function, endocrine function, cardiovascular function, immune function, muscle strength and overall athletic ability.” Improvements were also noted in “reaction-time and information processing, visual acuity, stress and reproductive hormones, healing/recovery time.”

The author concludes that since “these initial findings document objectively measured physiologic changes and their associated health benefits in nearly every major system of the human body, it is plausible that Upper Cervical Care may benefit every function of the body.”