The Master Builder In Us All...Amazing!

By Rose Panico / Bill Remling

DID YOU KNOW THAT...

* One cubic inch of the brain's cortex contains 10,000 miles of connecting tissue.

* Your brain gets signals from 137 million light receptors in your eyes, 100,000 hearing receptors in your ears, 3,000 taste buds in your mouth, 30,000 hot spots, 250,000 cold spots, and 500,000 touch spots on your skin.

* Electrical impulses flash along your nerves at 393 feet per second, or about 270  miles per hour.

* In nine months, 6,000 billion cells form an average baby.

* Your heart pumps about 2 1/2 gallons of blood per minute. If you could loan your heart to pump donor blood into pint bottles, it would fill so may bottles in one year that they could stretch from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio.

* If your blood cells were put in a single row, it would extend around the world four times at the equator. Every second between 2-3 million red blood cells are launched into the blood stream.

* There are more than 600 muscles in your body. Many muscles work in a team.

* Your lungs contain a half billion tiny air sacs with a surface area of 40 to 60 square miles.

* In 70 years, your stomach will produce about 60,000 quarts of digestive juice, it will digest about 40 tons or 80,000 pounds of food.

* Each kidney contains one million functional units that filter your blood.

* Your brain regulates, stimulates, creates and controls all these body functions and millions of others. When the body is functioning normal, we tend to forget about the very complex activities that are constantly going on. Nonetheless, the cells keep functioning and reproducing themselves.

* The organs and the glands keep regulating such diverse activities as digestion and growth, and the nerve system keeps receiving, reterpreting and sending messages. Without this continuing harmony and coordinating activities, this could be no psychological life as we know it.

* There are more than 100 billion nerve cells or neurons in the brain of an average human being. That is more more than 14 times the amount of people living on earth, and their are billions more in other parts of the nerve system.

We are quite literally amazing.  Be in awe of yourself and all the things you do every second of the day.

7 Important Things To Remember About Upper Cervical Care

1. Upper Cervical Care is a specific system of analyzing and correcting the upper cervical vertebrae of the spinal column.

2. The atlas and axis are the only vertebrae in proximity to the brain stem. When they misalign to the extent that they put pressure on the brain stem and or spinal cord they interfere with the vital messages being sent to and from the brain to all parts of the body.

3. Any part of the body can be effected when there is pressure on the brain stem or spinal cord because almost all of the nerves have to pass through this area before reaching the part of the body they innervate.

4. Each correction is unique to the individual. Upper Cervical Care looks to correct interference to health and healing, not just treat your symptoms.

5. Upper Cervical Care isn’t about twisting, popping or pulling the spine. It’s about a very specific correction for the greatest results with the least amount of care.

6. Upper Cervical Care utilizes neurological tests, heat sensitive instrumentation and other means for detecting when interference from head/neck misalignment is present or absent. A correction is made only when nerve pressure is present.

7. Upper Cervical Care utilizes precise x-rays of the upper cervical area to determine which way the vertebrae has misaligned so that a precise and specific correction may be tailored and administered to that individual.

Posture, Upper Cervical, Proper Function

The below abstract is relevant to Upper Cervical Care in the sense that when head/neck misalignment is corrected the body assumes a more optimal posture. Just another way, from a mechanical perspective, Upper Cervical Care benefits the body and helps with conditions at sites far removed from the upper neck.

POSTURAL AND RESPIRATORY MODULATION OF AUTONOMIC FUNCTION, PAIN, AND HEALTH

John Lennon, BM, MM, C. Norman Sheeley, M.D., Roger K. Cady, MD, William Matta, Ph.D., Richard Cox, Ph.D. and William F. Simpson, Ph.D.

AJPM 1994; 4:36-39 (American Journal of Pain Management)

Despite considerable evidence that posture affects physiology and function, the significant influence of posture on health is not addressed by most physicians. In fact, neither comprehensive postural nor structural evaluation is a routine part of training in physical diagnosis, and most osteopathic physicians do not describe postural/spinal mechanics in their usual patient evaluations.

Observation of the striking influence of postural mechanics on function and symptomatology have led to our hypothesis that posture affects and moderates every physiologic function from breathing to normal hormonal production. Spinal pain, headache, mood, blood pressure, pulse, and lung capacity are among the functions most easily influenced by posture. The most significant influences of posture are upon respiration, oxygenation, and sympathetic function. Ultimately, it appears that homeostasis and autonomic regulation are intimately connected with posture. The corollary these observations that many symptoms, including pain, maybe moderated or eliminated by improved posture.

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What does Head/Neck Misalignment do to your muscles?

There is anatomical terminology in this one hope the basics make sense to everyone though.

Atlas Subluxation Affects on Muscles

From Dr Marshall Dickholtz, D.C. and NUCCA

A stressor has been defined as a condition in the body produced by an injurious factor and manifested by a syndrome (H.Selye). A subluxated C1 distorts the spine and the pelvis because it causes spastic contracture of the extensor (antigravity) muscle of the spinal column. Spinal and bodily distortion result. A subluxated C1- therefore, is acting as an injurious factor, manifesting itself as a syndrome, which is verifiable by measurement and can be correlated to the C1 subluxation. The patient with a subluxated C1 has a subluxated spinal column, an over-innervation of the motor neurons of the spinal cord, neuromuscular imbalance, loss of muscular synergism, distortion of the spinal column from the true axis of the body, and leg disparity. This is the C1 subluxation complex syndrome, and is correctable solely from a precise and predetermined C1 adjustment.

If disequalibrium and cervical spine displacement do not cause a state of subluxation until C1 moves laterally on the occipital condyles, what constitutes a normal lateral range of motion for C1? Vertebrae can be shown to displace and not cause detriment or insult to the nervous structure. If a vertebrae does displace and thereby causes insult to the nervous structure, it is logical to assume that it has abnormally moved, or moved beyond its normal range of motion. Because C1 cannot misalign laterally more than one half of a degree from its alignment to the occipital condyles (about the thickness of a sharp pencil mark), without imbalancing the neurological inhibitory mechanism of the reticular formation at the caudal end of the brain stem. C1 has practically no normal lateral range of motion.

This phenomenon has been observed and tested on over 10,900 cases over a period of many years. The C1 distortion syndrome has always manifested itself whenever C1 has moved laterally three-quarters of one degree or beyond on the occipital condyles when the vertebra was moving from its normal position toward the abnormal position.

The type of neurological detriment that is caused by the lateral displacement of C1 on the occipital condyles appears to be a mechanical tractionization of the caudal end of the brain stem. It has been noted in medical literature that pathological and traumatic situations affecting the brain stem can produce impairment or loss of the inhibitory control over the body's extensor musculature. National Upper Cervical Chiropractic Research Association (NUCCA) research on the effects of a subluxated C1 on the caudal end of the brain stem confirms the medical hypothesis.