What Is Chiropractic Anyway?

Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth [1]. But so far, the best advice I could ever give to a young person is to read: To read in, around and beyond the scope of whatever one's focus is. Any line drawn becomes more accurate the more points of reference one has, and connecting the dots becomes simple. And one of the frequent accompaniments of a sudden enlightening realisation is laughter: The cosmic joke being the side by side comparison of illusion with reality [2].

It's beyond comprehension why practitioners need to place all their eggs in the basket of well, chiropractic just works, okay? when the evidence for why it works is overwhelming, and bearing the burden of quack is needless. But then perhaps it's not the young people who are not doing their reading homework these days?

Hippocrates said to look to the spine for the cause of disease, so enter the chicken from the medical journal, Spine [3]. Laying on its side, the four week old pecker is anaesthetised. It has the side of its lower neck cut open, exposing a small ligament that runs between two vertebrae. The scientist tugs on it repeatedly with a tiny weight and then tracks the production of Fos-positive particles within the nervous system by fluorescing them. Fos production in nerve cells is a response to the activation of c-Fos; c-Fos being a highly regulated gene in the nuclei of neurons whose transcription is elevated for a short time after mechanical stimulation. In other words: Tugging on the ligament changed gene expression - gene expression being a signal. This signal affected both sides of the spinal cord, went all the way up it, altered gene expression within the brainstem, changed signals in the cerebellum, and then went on to higher brain centres. The entire central nervous system was a Christmas tree of light with gene expression changing everywhere. The results of the study showed that the stretching of a spinal ligament resulted in a massive and widespread input of neurologic information from several levels of the spinal cord [3].

In 1897 the founder of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer, was almost killed in a train accident. Fearing chiropractic would be lost to history if he died, he decided he must teach his new discovery as quickly as possible. He taught that tone is the basic principle, the one from which all other principles that compose the science have sprung. He went on to say that he believes the universe consists of intelligence and matter. This intelligence is known to the Christian world as God. As a spiritual intelligence, it finds its expression through creation. In all animated nature this intelligence is expressed through the nervous system, which is communication to and from individualized spirit, and that the condition known as tone is the tension, firmness and elasticity of tissue in a state of healthy, normal existence; that the mental and physical condition known as disease is a disordered state because of an unusual amount of tension above or below that of tone [4].

Man is a sensorial organism, which means he operates by virtue of all the information and signals he receives from his environment on a moment to moment basis. The reactions within the body to this information are subtle. Man is not an android - he is a highly sensitive being made up of trillions of cells, all operating on a score of different levels, singly and in unison. Man and spirit, as an entire organism, has an oscillatory tone which reflects the state of the nervous system. This is dynamic and changes continually. Sometimes one can feel how it changes depending how attune one is, highlighting the point of subtle information exchange, subtle signals, subtle stress, and subtle gene expression from tip to toe. The trick is being attune though. A state many never reach because only after six-point-five insurance reimbursed adjustments, chiropractic doesn't work for me.

Understanding function and the ubiquity of the nervous system brings about the cosmic joke of illusion and reality. When the measured effects of an adjustment begin to blur the differentiation between sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation and slowly we start to realise that possibly everything is connected, ego fuelled debates over technique and rationale for chiropractic care present themselves as futile and unintellectual.