Upper Cervical Care And How The Body Heals

How Does the Body Heal?

By Dr. Adam Tanase

A few months ago a Golden Retriever puppy jumped in my lap and somehow scraped my forearm. One of his little puppy claws drew blood, leaving a visible 3-inch cut. After a couple days, a rather unsightly scab formed that looked like I’d been slashed in a knife-fight…

Within 4-weeks, the wound completely healed. Today, the scar is barely visible. Now, this is the type of thing that most people take for granted. We pay little attention to the fact that whenever we get cuts or bruises, they heal automatically. Believe it or not, we’re actually programmed to do so… Our body’s have their own “instruction manuals” for how to function properly. Upper Cervical Care refers to this ability as innate intelligence.


The cool thing about innate intelligence is that it’s free. You can’t buy it, borrow it, or even “learn” it. It’s just there, always and everywhere. But there’s one caveat… It can’t work properly if something interferes with it, disrupts it, or gets in the way.

Physical, chemical and emotional stress are particularly devious culprits, and will without fail impair your body’s ability to functional normally, ultimately impeding innate intelligence. This slows, limits, or even prevents the healing process from occurring.


Examples of physical stress include spinal misalignment, body imbalance, dehydration, repetitive micro-trauma, and poor posture. These have the ability to change blood flow, restrict movement, tighten muscles, strain ligaments, and alter body function.

Examples of chemical stress include toxins that don’t belong in the body… Things like processed foods, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, artificial sweeteners, MSG, and other artificial lab-created chemicals that don’t occur in nature.

I probably don’t have to give you any examples of emotional stress, but I’ll list a few anyway… Relationship turmoil, death of a family member, anxiety, workplace demands, and financial woes are some of the heavy hitters.

The conduit for innate intelligence is the Nervous System. While there are three distinct forms of stress, they all impair the quality of function within your nervous system.

Medications can effectively help people “deal” with symptoms, but you’ll never find a medication that can mend a troubled relationship, bring back a deceased family member, negate the effects of alcohol/cigarettes, or restore spinal alignment. Drugs are great for patching effects, but they’re not all that reliable when it comes to actual healing.

Innate intelligence enables your body to heal. Facilitating it offers you the best chance to get well. This is the objective of Upper Cervical Care.

13 Benefits Of Upper Cervical Care: Part 3

#3 Less Stress

Research studies have shown that people perceive their stress levels to be quite varied. On a scale of one to ten, respondents run the full range for what they believe their stress levels to be. Sadly most people see themselves in the higher ranges rather than the lower ones. Why is there such a wide variation and more importantly, why is it that most people perceive their stress levels to be high? Is it the economy? The world situation? Life in general? We really have no way of comparing the stresses of life today with 100 or 200 years ago.

It has been suggested that stress is not caused by the events or circumstances of life but by how an individual responds to those circumstances. Unpleasant events and circumstances have been described as adversities which when not dealt with result in stress. Hans Seyle, PhD, a world famous neurologist who did work in this area over a generation ago, described adversity as stress and the inability to handle that adversity as distress. He theorized that stress was good. We all need some adversity in our life in order to grow, to adapt, to be able to handle greater adversities as they occur. In the area of health, developing permanent immunity is merely a matter of handling the adversity of a disease so the body can learn to fight off the microorganism every time it comes in contact with it in the future. Permanent immunity makes you a stronger person. (Perhaps artificial immune procedures, while often making one immune to that disease, weakens the overall function of the body’s immune system by not subjecting it to adversity.) Lifting weights is a stress but if done properly with the right amount, this adversity can make a person stronger. Even emotional stress, if overcome, often makes us stronger. People even say, “Well if it doesn’t kill me, I’ll be stronger for it.”

We realize that certain adversities just cannot be overcome. They are just too overwhelming. Whether it is emotional, physical or chemical, if any given adversity is too great it will result in stress and that stress will reduce the quality of your life. Yet between insurmountable adversity and that which no one would even give a second thought to are the vast array of circumstances, events, and situations in life that cause tremendous stress in some people and do not affect others. From that we must conclude that there is a factor or factors inside of people that makes one person better able to handle adversity and not allow it to become stress and others less able to handle it.

One of those factors is head/neck misalignment. How well you adapt to all types of stress is dependent upon the proper function of your nerve system and head/neck misalignment not only may reduce the ability of the nerve system to work as well as it should but it is another stress upon the body compounding the stresses that you already have. In this day and age when people are constantly faced with adversity and potential, stress-causing factors, why would you want anything else like that which can reduce you body’s ability to handle the adversities of life? Further, if you do have nerve interference would it not be wise to have it corrected as soon as possible? That is why periodic upper cervical care is so important.

Upper Cervical Care And Emotional Stress

Upper cervical doctors often talk about the fact that physical, chemical, and emotional stresses can cause problems in the spine and interfere with proper function in the body. People have no problem understanding how a physical stress, such as falling, lifting, or repeated motions, can cause trouble. While chemical stresses may be a little more difficult to understand, after a little explanation people see how chemicals and poisons in the body affect the spinal musculature and can also cause problems. Today, more than ever, we are hearing about the effect that emotional stress can have on the body. People understand the link between emotional stress and ulcers, heart disease and headaches. Similarly, emotional stress can result in head/neck misalignment. There are probably a number of mechanisms but research done at Ohio State University a while back demonstrated some interesting results.

A group of college students repeatedly lifted 25-pound boxes while a special measuring device calculated the pressure on the students’ spines. During the first half of the experiment researchers offered words of encouragement to the participants while they were performing their tasks. In the second half of the experiment, the students were criticized, sort of like having your boss yelling at you while you are doing your job. While some of the students were not bothered at all, others, particularly introverted students who did not handle criticism well and who dislike repetitive work to start with, demonstrated an almost 27% increase in pressure on the spine. William Marras, professor of industrial engineering at OSU said, “What this shows is that there is a body-mind interaction that manifests itself as pressure on the spine.” The researchers were limiting their research to job-related pressure but they concluded that the same findings could occur “anywhere exertion and stress combine.” That could be the pressure of athletic competition or even non-physical stressful situations like talking on the phone with the head titled at an angle, sitting at a computer, or any kind of repetitive work while experiencing the pressures of your job.

Except for major physical traumas, it is likely that almost all head/neck misalignment, and the resulting nerve interference, occurs as a result of a combination of physical, chemical, and emotional stresses upon the body. That is why it is important to get your head/neck alignment checked periodically and corrected when needed.