What Is Chiropractic Anyway?

A couple years ago I picked up a neuroanatomy textbook in the library. For the students reading, I think it was by Martin. And as I was reading the initial chapters describing all the various parts of the brain, there seemed to be a common thread. Every section outlining that specific part's function mentioned, somewhere, that it was... also associated with emotion... and is also associated with emotion... and is also associated with emotion. Almost every bit and piece of the brain and brainstem.

In the eighteenth century a German physician named Franz Gall attempted to isolate about 35 areas of the brain into different roles. This one for hope. That one for self-esteem. The next for secretiveness and so on. He then tried to correlate each area to a bump on the outside of the head, and this was called phrenology. By providing a quality head massage, one's personality could be deduced. However, this all added up to three-fifths of nothing because we simply don't work like that.

"All perceptions, all volitions occupy the same seat. The faculty of perceiving, of conceiving, of willing, merely constitutes therefore a faculty which is essentially one."

This by a Frenchman called Pierre Flourens, three years after Gall in 1823, telling him to get real by coining the phrase: aggregate field. A nice way of saying everything works as one. All parts are interconnected. So much so that in the event of failure of one area, the others can, and will, pick up the slack - a concept like one side helping the other as I alluded to in issue #6. All parts are interconnected and the mind and body are one. In fact, the body is merely an extension of the mind. But if we were to detach these two for a minute, then we can delineate emotion and feeling.

It's written - in large books well suited to propping up car axles - that emotion is the bodily state and feeling is the conscious sensation. So if we dare to embrace this for the length of this paragraph, then one could appreciate that emotion is not locale specific, but extends throughout the entire body. It is a form of information which communicates between the nervous system and the immune system. Information is intelligence. Intelligence runs all systems creating behaviour. And thus emotion translates information into physical reality - that which you experience. Questions that might be raised could then include: Where does this information come from? How am I perceiving this information?

Casting your mind back to health being a function of multiple variables, when factors in one's life adversely affect the nervous system, this changes the value of the immune system because it is all connected. Unmaintained stressors lead to stress. Stress on the nervous system depresses the immune system. The emotion is within the entire body. It is stored in muscles, joints, vision, blood pressure, body temperature... everything changes. Different feelings that translate into bodily emotions simply make the body function differently. One might be more receptive to sadness than joy. And if, at a cellular level, one type of receptor is open and another is not, that would limit the body to what it can receive. Yes or yes? So in the state of a depressed immune system - because of the overt stress and emotion the body can no longer handle - one becomes sick because, for example, some viruses use the same receptors as certain neuropeptides to enter a cell when it is in that particular state of stress. The neuropeptides don't enter the cell, the virus does! But that's okay, you got your flu shot, right? It's just us versus the virus. Those damn viruses. That's all it is. That's all it's ever been. MAN VERSUS VIRUS. I'll let you in on a little secret... but don't tell anyone, 'kay?

Your immune system has the potential to encode for about a BILLION antigen-antibody complexes.

Wisdom of the body, huh? Who woulda thunk it? But that's alright. I presume the local vet down the road has the exact one you're looking for this winter. Hey, I bet he'll even throw some complimentary mercury and formaldehyde into the formula too. Bargain.

posted by Neil Bossenger  # 4:06 pm