What Is Chiropractic Anyway?
This blog is no longer in use. Please refer to www.spinewave.co.nz
September 06, 2007
WICA (30) Special Issue: My First Five Years
I sat in my first "health care class" all those years ago, presented by the same chiropractors who still check me today. With all the knowledge we acquire, with the entire physiologic and philosophical ramble that enhances and enriches us to the point of total saturation, the elegant simplicity of thought that a nerve system without interference has the power to heal is timeless. And with the nerve system being the ultimate tool of thought and creation; love, emotion and desire; the interface between you and the world around you, the philosophy extends far beyond the objective here and now. This healing art can be a gateway to understanding all subjective experience in this life - depending how far down the rabbit hole one wants to go.
I was reminded recently about what I said that evening of the health care class. Having no prior experience with chiropractic, but being marginally well educated, I thought I knew something about the way of the world. Yet, allegedly, it was reported I exclaimed after the class, "This is brilliant! Why isn't this room full?"
So therein also lies a lesson for the doctor: No matter how few you're presenting to, not only could you be creating a lifetime patient, but another doctor of chiropractic with vision beyond sight. In that instant, it all made sense to me. Compounded quickly by years of frustration as to why I hadn't seen it like this before. In that instant, plans were actioned promptly to do what needed to be done. I had no idea I was living a short drive from one of the best colleges in the world. I had no idea how much it would cost. I had no idea how I would be accredited. I had no idea how long it would take. So making a life altering decision in a moment like that was irony defined for someone who occasionally takes fifteen minutes to choose a pair of pants in the morning.
Something as simple as a thought placed in the centre of one's life can be the source of all contempt or the source of all life.
I had travelled halfway round the world to find new beginnings and, boy, did I find them. The work and toil to get through college is inconsequential to the gift of understanding that I have acquired over the last five years about my place in the universe. The fact that there is no "me" to start with and that I'm only a witness to these writings makes me laugh already. That the human physiology is part of the cosmic physiology and every rhythm of the universe naturally has an effect on the individual and vice versa, in the words of Maharishi Yogi. That I can give up my positionalities on genetic determinism and false healing pretenses. That I can give up my positionalities on biomedical paradigms. That I can give up the pay-offs for making excuses about things I don't feel I am worthy of, nor deserve, nor can achieve for lack of stoic self concept. That I know my ego can now relinquish all these things through the understanding of chiropractic teachings, I am eternally grateful. That I have found a new zest for spiritual awareness where once before I only trundled amongst man-made constructs, and that I can connect to the Divine without the middle man any time I choose, I am also grateful.
Healing comes from you, not to you. A very sickly man was once in need of help where no help could be offered by any conventional means. He was told to seek out the saintliest of healers on the highest of mountain peaks. For days the man walked to find him. And when he did, he came upon the healer kneeling by a creek, praying. The man knelt down next to him, but in that moment, the healer thrust the man's head into the water. Believing this was a test, the man did not struggle initially. But the seconds wore on and his lungs were beginning to burn. He began to writhe, thinking now the healer was surely going to murder him for disturbing his state of placid meditation. The healer then jerked his head clear of the water and the man gasped like he had forgotten what it was ever like to breathe. "Are you trying to kill me?!" he panted in exhaustion. The reply came, "When you truly want healing, it will come as easily as that first breath."
In our lives the miraculous is ongoing and continuous.
© Neil R. Bossenger 2007
New Zealand
Notes.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
August 04, 2007
WICA (29) Potentiality
The methods of philosophers are not those of empirical science, since their methods are a priori rather than a posteriori, and this means that philosophers evaluate information that is independent of experience, not that which they have already observed. The aim of philosophers is therefore to state analytical truths. And the truth or falsity of an analytical proposition is subject to its meaning: What does it mean? In the other camp of thought, if a proposition is not empirical, i.e. it cannot be understood by observation of the observable world, then it is said to be meaningless. But, as free thinking children of God, to be self righteous in the stance that something is not true by empirical understanding alone, and to call it meaningless, would be a naive absurdity and I would have to take you into a separate room for a quiet word.
Meaning, therefore, is a very subjective experience. It is the fabric of an attempt to answer the questions, what are we doing here and what's the point? The experience becomes a life-long process. And one's life cannot be disassociated into separate parts to explain how you've become the person you are today. It's a collective experience of thousands of contributions and thousands of decisions. Without the process, you would not be... you. It is this process of the collective experience of all things which has evolved your state of being in the world. The process has imbued your mind and body with the potentiality to affect not only your own life, but the lives of everyone around you. It is a sense of vitality that puts out a field to change the world around you. This is non duality right here, friends. You, and the world around you, are not independent. Who you've become, your sense of vitality, and how you choose to participate in the world as choices are presented to you, creates its own field that affects everyone and everything.
The essence of vitality is that we are more than just the sum of our parts. In growth as human beings we wish to experience life in all its fullness and this requires vitality. Vitality is an idea that the processes of life are not explicable by the laws of physics and chemistry alone. Vitality is a subjective experience. It is the domain of spiritual awareness, consciousness, life and existence itself. If you were to ask someone what the three most valuable things in their life are, generally it boils down to: Faith, family, and business. But without true vitality, one cannot fully experience any of these and they become meaningless. Without meaning, there is no power.
Meaning can be derived through better expression of man the spiritual. D.D. Palmer once wrote that physicians deal with the physical while chiropractors deal with both man the physical and man the spiritual. Often people think that they're being driven by their past decisions, when really they're pulled into their future. This is potentiality becoming actuality. For instance, if one were to plant a sunflower seed and watch it grow day by day. No matter how much you bay and bawl at the small plant, raising clenched fists to the heavens, commanding God to create a tomato plant, a sunflower will still become the actuality. However, what the sunflower needs to achieve its potential are the right conditions: a little sunshine and a bit of water, and the sunflower is perfect in its own right. Reconnecting man the physical and man the spiritual requires the right conditions and extends beyond the empirical understanding of the world around you because you are not independent of it. The universe is non linear, it is only one's perception of sequential events that makes one think it's linear - a this causing a that. Your thoughts don't have any meaning either, only the meaning of that which you give them. Therefore it comes down to spiritual choices, pulling you into the future to which you were destined to become. And in the abundance of our universe, we are only limited to that which we choose to give, or not give meaning.
© Neil R. Bossenger 2007
New Zealand
Notes.
- For those who are aware of the research I've been doing on heart rate variability since July 2006, I'm proud to announce that a research grant of NZ$7,000 has been approved by the Hamblin Trust Fund. As a result, and with the tempo of the final months of chiropractic college picking up, WICA is being reduced to a monthly issue.
- I am also pleased to announce that as of July 23, 2007, after swearing allegiance to Elizabeth, I am now proudly Kiwi and can move through customs without being bitten by the Green Mamba.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
July 08, 2007
WICA (28) Chiropractic Market Revisited
Like war is not the opposite of peace, vitality is not the opposite of disease. One glance at the Ego of any young soldier in the Middle East today clearly demonstrates that it is not dedicated to peace. It's fuelled by the desire for, and dedication to war itself. It is a stance of duality. The realm of the Ego sets up the perception of opposites, which turns the wheels of mentation onto a presumed self-existent "objective" universe, independent of the observer. It presumes that there is an "out there" independent of an "in here". Stating this objectively is already a subjective statement. All information, knowledge and the totality of all experience is the product of subjectivity, which is an absolute requirement intrinsic to life, existence, awareness and thought. War is simply the absence of peace, not it's opposite. A peace that is always present and readily available.
The consumer is becoming more self aware and cognisant of integrity these days because, for the most part, the serious health care consumer is smarter than he or she has ever been in the history of the world. They can see through people like a sheet of cellophane and if the health care provider isn't seriously concerned with the individual's well being, he or she will pick it up instantly. They don't need to think about it. They know immediately whether the provider is concerned about him or herself, or whether the provider is concerned with the individual's best interests.
So now the new challenge is laid forth in putting knowledge into action by providing the market with appropriate information that can explain chiropractic and its tenets across every model of chiropractic that is currently employed with a single voice. Vitality is always present, like a continuum from cold to hot. Hot is not the opposite of cold. Coldness is merely the absence of heat. When vitality is not present, one is found at a lower end of the continuum toward disease, but largely this is a subjective experience: Invisible and immeasurable, however all that is really meaningful and significant in human life. Subjectivity and vitality is the domain of spirituality, life, consciousness, awareness and existence itself. The quality of experience in this life is determined by the spiritual choices one makes from moment to moment, so one would think that they ought to be good ones.
© Neil R. Bossenger 2007
New Zealand
Notes.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
June 12, 2007
WICA (27) The Mustard Seed
Certain levels of consciousness exist within ourselves, society and throughout the world. Levels of shame, guilt and apathy to levels of reason, love, joy, peace and enlightenment. Largely society exists within the realm of reason. That is the world of the school; the professor; the university; where life is directed by reason and education. Society stresses education above all else. Education is the road for determining one's career, one's income and one's social status. Levels above reason are beyond Newtonian understanding for if something cannot be weighed or measured then it doesn't exist in that context, but we all know that's a naïve absurdity because the universe doesn't come to a crashing halt with our inability to process complex data. According to David Hawkins, only 4% of the population ever transcends the level of reason [1].
Man's destiny is shaped by seemingly small events. A phone call that wasn't made or a flight that was missed. The course is altered rapidly with chaotic, exponential effects in a direction completely different to what one might have intended. In fact, chaos is defined as exactly that: A small variation in initial conditions producing wildly different results. This is an interruption to a pattern due to minuscule change, and new results are only ever achieved by interrupting patterns.
I hardly ever plan these articles, least of all intentionally attempt to script passages from the bible into my work, but the words 'mustard seed' came immediately to the fore when I was considering this topic and I have no idea why. Given that I understood the universe is governed by an organizing intelligence and we all exist as one pervasive consciousness from an early age, I never even listened in bible school. Yet somehow, because there is no such thing as causality, because everything is the result of everything else in its totality, the parable was on my frequency at this moment:
Another story by way of comparison He set forth before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. Of all the seeds it is the smallest, but when it has grown it is the largest of the garden herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and find shelter in its branches [2].
The sages of our world's history that operated within the levels of peace and enlightenment were the Great Teachers and, like Jesus, taught through parables. From the onset they were open to interpretation because if the Teachers weren't, then they would merely be telling people what to think, do and believe. One is encouraged to seek what they sought.
The adjustment is what happens after the hands leave the body. And therein is the moment of change. Chiropractic affects change at a subconscious level and neurological associations are altered without one being aware. The interruption of old patterns provides a small window of opportunity to be still. For just a moment. The mustard seed was generally the smallest amongst seeds sown in the garden, but the parable was interpreted to mean that great things start from seemingly small seeds of information or a suggestion.
D.D. Palmer defined the mental impulse as "an incitement of the mind by innate or spirit in the form of an abrupt and vivid suggestion, prompting some unpremeditated action or leading to unforeseen knowledge" [3]. The body uses the suggestive information in a process of self creation. Self creation means moving forward, not moving backward to a status before one's visit to the chiropractor. To evolve. To be more creative in one's life. The kingdom is the here and now, readily accessible and deserved by everyone.
The concept of mental impulse is highly debated within the chiropractic fraternity and since society functions primarily at the level of reason, it is refuted because it cannot be measured. D.D.'s son, B.J. Palmer, suggested that the innate intelligence of the body is the "sum total of individualistic mental impulses, each of which is composed of multitudes of intellectual immaterial units of energy, after they have been received at the brain and transformed for the needs of the body" [4]. Quite simply, intention shapes the matrix of this intelligence and you ultimately become what you think.
The overwhelming evidence that supports dramatic improvement in quality of life through chiropractic care [5-9] oftentimes cannot be explained by reason and, like religious dogma, is condemned to Hades because it is too much for the intellect to compute. The irony is though that the less one thinks about it, the easier it becomes to understand.
© Neil R. Bossenger 2007
New Zealand
Notes
- Hawkins, D., The consciousness level of America, in The Highest Level of Enlightenment, Nightingale Conant: USA.
- Matthew 13: 31-32., The Amplified Bible. 1983, USA: Zondervan Publishing House.
- Palmer, D.D., The Chiropractor's Adjustor. 1910, Portland: Portland Printing House Company.
- Senzon, S., A history of the mental impulse: Theoretical construct or scientific reality? Chiropractic History, 2001. 21(2): p. 64.
- Blanks, R.H.I. and T.L. Schuster, A retrospective assessment of network care using a survey of self-rated health, wellness and quality of life. Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, 1997. 1(4): p. 1.
- Boone, W.R., et al., Physical, physiological, and immune status changes, coupled with self-perceptions of health and quality of life, in subjects receiving chiropractic care: A pilot study. Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, 2006. July 5: p. 1-6.
- Hannon, S.M., Objective Physiologic Changes and Associated Health Benefits of Chiropractic Adjustments in Asymptomatic Subjects: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, 2004. April 26: p. 1-9.
- Kirk, R., et al., Quality of Life Changes in a Disadvantaged, Underserved Chiropractic Patient Population: A Retrospective Case Series Report. Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, 2005. April 15: p. 1-3.
- Marino, M.J. and M.L. Phillippa, A longitudinal assessment of chiropractic care using a survey of self-rated health wellness & quality of life: a preliminary study. Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, 1999. 3(2): p. 1-9.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
May 13, 2007
WICA (26) Caveat Emptor
The typical mid life crisis usually requires only slight modifications to lifestyle and behaviour, such as trading in the old car for a new car. Or if one is inclined to peaking early, a quarter life crisis may mean dropping out of university and packing the bags for a foreign destination. Slight modifications to behaviour are continuous, i.e. you're still driving a car, it's just new, or you're still confused as to what to do with your life, you're just in a different country now. A discontinuous behaviour means adapting lifestyle and behaviour to a completely new modal of thinking. Adopting a behaviour that has not existed in one's life before. Only a small percentage usually has the courage to take on the challenge of new thought and behaviour; to change their lives for the better. While the group behind them does likewise purely because it seems like a good idea, however not done of their own volition. And then there are the traditionalists who will never change for love nor money.
The question is often raised: If my body, and each cell therein, is completely renewed every year, then how is it that I still experience the same conditions over and over again? It's because behaviour never changes. And behaviour is an energy pattern - the lines along which cellular reconstruction takes place. Thoughts become actions through habitual patterns and as a traditionalist these will never change. A new energy pattern requires a quantum leap of new thought. "Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, and the pleasant from the unpleasant. It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit" [1].
The spine is not covered under warranty and the consumer must take responsibility for the service he or she purchases: caveat emptor (Latin. "Let the buyer beware"). The irony is that it's not the traditionalist who seeks chiropractic for front line health care, but it's the traditionalist they meet. Herzog [2] wrote that reflex changes in the nervous system which accompany a high-velocity, low amplitude thrust are not dependent on the audible "pop", nor are they dependent on the magnitude of the force applied [3]. A paper by Bakker and Miller [4] states that possibly the greatest therapeutic benefit of the audible release may not be physiological in nature but rather psychological. The joint crack may have a powerful placebo effect on both the patient and practitioner. Both patient and doctor have come to expect an audible release and when the expectations, especially of the patient, are not fulfilled, this may have a negative affect on the clinical outcome. If an audible release is achieved, especially with reinforcement from the practitioner, then a powerful placebo effect may be expected.
The audible pop of a joint is usually hailed as the hallmark of a successful adjustment, even though the desired reflex changes are not dependent on them, and the accuracy of where an adjustment is aimed, and where the "cavitation" actually occurs, is only fifty percent true [5]. So state your purpose then, because adjusting a joint again after it has cavitated without an audible release can be damaging [4]. Shifting from this mindset of what supposed clinical success is may present the mid life or - in the student's case - quarter life crisis. Making the quantum leap in understanding the autonomic nervous system's subtle control of the body may pose an issue for the traditionalist transfixed on simply buying a new car, instead of considering a different vehicle of consciousness altogether. The second irony is: That for the traditional reader of these concepts, not a single behaviour will change. And neither will the position of chiropractic in today's health care market.
New Zealand
Notes
- Hippocrates, 5th century B.C.
- Herzog, W., On sounds and reflexes. JMPT, 1996. 19(3): p. 216-218.
- Cooperstein, R., Sacroiliac Function and the Gait Mechanism. Dynamic Chiropractic, 1998. 16(19).
- Bakker, M. and J. Miller, Does an audible release improve the outcome of a chiropractic adjustment? J Can Chiropr Assoc, 2004. 48(3).
- Ross, J.K., D.E. Berznick, and S.M. McGill, Determining cavitation location during lumbar and thoracic spinal manipulation. Spine, 2004. 29(13): p. 1452-1457.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
April 21, 2007
WICA (25) Form Follows Function
Health is a state of perfect subatomic communication and ill health is a state of communication break down. Ill health can also be viewed as the body responding inappropriately. For appropriate communication and subsequent function, the organism needs to be completely self aware at all times, and then perfect form follows perfect function. Current research - which to relay would be beyond the scope of this prose - illustrates that communication is local and non local. The body is a sea of energy. If two sticks were placed in the sand at the edge of this sea, and a wave washed in, both would fall at the same time. If the observer wasn't aware of the wave, it would appear one stick affected the other non locally. This is the field of cellular communication because each cell emits a field - it is how magnetic resonance images are able to be captured. When energy reaches a certain threshold, molecules vibrate in unison, create coherence and exhibit quantum qualities, affecting each other non locally. Practically, this implies that addressing one area of the body will have quantum effects in other regions, warranting re-investigation and not owning what was found on first examination. The body's communication systems are akin to the internet: Logging on connects one everywhere, simultaneously.
Further, cells are known to emit light. There is abundant historical reference to our spiritual nature being associated with light, and there are physiological structures and functions in the brain that could organise endogenous light (light from within) into resonant interference patterns [3]. Since interference patterns can themselves interfere with one another, endogenous light in the brain may interact with a broader substrate of interfering light in its own frame of reference (God) to produce consciousness. A hologram of sorts. And consciousness is a state of awareness the body requires for self preservation and self creation.
Albert Einstein, Time's "person of the century" [4], stated that the only reality is the field. So it is time now, as emerging chiropractors of the next generation in health care provision, to bridge the explanatory gap: That which fails to explain consciousness in terms of present neuroanatomical and neurophysiologic knowledge. However, it is at least here that we must begin our journey in changing the face of chiropractic and shifting public perception of the profession. If not; if chiropractic retains its façade of mechanistic manipulations for conditions that have little relevance to the objectives so many practitioners claim to serve, then the profession will never be able to reclaim its long-lost heritage because the race for higher levels of consciousness in health care will be swallowed by the mediocrity of services that are suddenly emerging, basing what they have to offer on the current research chiropractors do not read. The more we learn, the easier it is for others to follow in our footsteps.
New Zealand
Notes and references
- McTaggart, L., The Field. 2001, UK: HarperCollins Publishers.
- Dossey, L., Reinventing Medicine. 1999, USA: HarperSanFrancisco.
- Simanonok, K., Endogenous light nexus theory of consciousness, in Tucson 2000: Toward a Science of Consciousness. 2000, Center for Consciousness Studies: Arizona.
- Golden, F. Person of the Century: Albert Einstein. Time 2000 [cited 12 April 2007]; Available from: www.time.com.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
March 29, 2007
WICA (24) Drive
This issue is dedicated to Dr Phil McMaster for his endeavours in philosophy at the
WICA (24) Drive
Any inferences made about conscious revolution should always be broached with caution. For one, people look at you as though you've finally dropped your last marble and are blindly padding around on hands and knees for it because that's not what we were taught! That's not how things are! That's not how life works! Oh, neo-Darwinists, bless them. And for two, it would bode well in one's favour to be armed to the teeth with a list as long as one's arm of well-respected references.
And I can’t help but ask myself how much I'll let the fear take the wheel and steer
Where did it all go wrong? Why do I always have to defend what I do so tenaciously in society today when there is so much evidence to support every premise chiropractic embraces? Danah Zohar observed in The Quantum Self that "
It's driven me before; it seems to have a vague haunting mass appeal
Changing the biocultural mindset to embrace an energy framework would require either a giant leap of faith at this point, or a-whole-nother twelve years of schooling, undoing everything that's been done, rewriting text books and returning the focus of belief systems to the pervasive intelligence of the universe. An intelligence that collectively desires to express itself in the best manner possible within all things and, within man, to continually express itself intellectually and physically higher in the scale of evolution. Some have called this life force flowing through the universe 'collective consciousness', while theologians have termed it, the Holy Spirit.
Lately I'm beginning to find that I should be the one behind the wheel
Why science of the twentieth century didn't do chiropractic any favours is because the principles of that time couldn't support what our forefathers understood intuitively. They taught that the ultimate goal of chiropractic was the perfection of the human spirit, because the spirit is eternal and the body is not, and that it tends always to express itself fully, not only through the nervous system, but through the entire organism as a communicative whole. Intuition, innate intelligence and instinct are all inherent products of collective consciousness, and therein lies the practical way forward to embrace the true source of power: Biological decision making.
It's driven me before; it seems to be the way that everyone else gets around
Field + Matter = Structure. The power derived from the field, the source, the spirit, the universal intelligence, integrated with the physical matter of the body, derives structure and function. This is the science of today. And the Palmer science of yesteryear was such that "the chiropractor looks upon the body as more than a machine, a union of consciousness and unconsciousness, Innate's ability to transfer impulses to all parts of the body - the co-ordination of sensation and volition: A personified immaterial spirit and body linked together by the soul - a life directed by intelligence uniting the immaterial with the material". So if a stage of consciousness can be loosely defined as a level of awareness in the world, the science of chiropractic's forefathers was so ahead of its time that it should raise deep, concerning questions within every individual of the profession as to where chiropractic should be right now and why it isn't there.
Lately, I'm beginning to find that when I drive myself, my light is found
The practical way forward is biological decision making. This is learning to understand the communication the body holds with one's own consciousness everyday. For example, one has no conscious control over diarrhoea. If it's time to go, it's time. The body communicates with consciousness. Walking into a room of friends, one might feel uplifted. Being down at work is a communication that something needs to be explored or altered. Your body talks to you. Spirit communicates through matter. But are you listening? Do you mask the signs? Do you ignore them? The brain has the most outstanding ability to funnel stress from the field that it cannot deal with, from the senses, down into the body. There it resides, weakening the audibility of communication from body to consciousness. Over time the signals become so weak they're not even heard any more. A stage of consciousness is a sustainable mode of being in the world, i.e. a worldview. The more that an individual contacts higher states, the more the experiences from those states inform one's everyday level of awareness [3]. Let chiropractic be your vehicle of consciousness.
Hold the wheel and drive [4].
© Neil Bossenger 2007
Notes and references
- Zohar, D., The Quantum Self. 1991,
- McTaggart, L., The Field. 2001,
- Senzon, S., The secret history of chiropractic. 2005,
- Lyrics by Incubus., Drive. 1999,
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
March 14, 2007
WICA (23) Quack
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.
New Zealand
Notes and references
- Lurhman, B. 1999, "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen".
- Hawkins, D. R., Power vs. Force. 1995, USA: Veritas Publishing.
- Jiang, H., et al., Identification of the location, extent, and pathway of sensory neurologic feedback after mechanical stimulation of a lateral spinal ligament in chickens. Spine, 1997. 22(1): p. 17-25.
- Senzon, S., The secret history of chiropractic. 2005, USA: Instant Publisher.
- Past issues are now available at the WICA homepage.
- If you received this letter as a forward and would like to be added to the mailing list directly, please send an e-mail to neil.nzchiro@gmail.com with 'add me' in the subject line.
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