Your Body Works Better With Chiropractic Care

Here’s Why:

More flexibility

Having more flexibility means that the joints of the spine and the body are moving better. With chiropractic care this better movement from normal function means that the nutrients are getting to the joints, making them last longer, making them feel better, and making them less vulnerable to injury. Chiropractic care helps restore the movement to the joints with an instantly apparent result as the joints are felt to “move into place.”

Your joints generally have a poor blood supply; if there were blood vessels in the joints, they would be crushed, or collapsed from weight. So, joints get nutrients not from blood, but from movement. Chiropractic care restores proper movement. If a joint stops moving, the fluids inside become stagnant. The synovial fluid congeals, and when this happens, the hyaline cartilage of the disc material can start to break down. The joint breaks down.

With more flexibility from chiropractic, the neurological sensors in the joints are more active, improving neurological feedback to the entire nervous system. With the joints moving as they should from chiropractic adjustments, the feedback helps the muscles know how to guard the joint from abnormal motion. Muscle tone is restored, and so is normal physiology, allowing the body to heal itself.

Better muscle coordination

Chiropractic adjustments ensure that muscles are contracting and co-contracting for better movement and better control. This means that you’ll be less likely to injure yourself, whether you are playing sports, playing with your kids, or playing with your housework. When the body detects that spinal joint motion isn’t as it should, whether it is from joint fixation, instability, or irritation, the muscles will either brace to prevent injury, or they will be inhibited to take weight off the offending area. As stated above, restoring normal joint mechanics with chiropractic adjustments will help the normal muscle programming.

We have clinically seen patients come into our chiropractic practice with a measurable difference in grip strength if they had an elbow or wrist problem. In most practices, as in ours, doctors use a Jamar hand Dynamometer to measure grip strength to determine disability. If someone has an irritation to the elbow, or any other part of the upper extremity, this may inhibit the muscles that produce the grip, and produce a lower objective reading. In many cases, we’ve seen low readings increase to normal after a simple elbow adjustment. Patients can feel the difference too when doing simple exercises to arm muscle groups. This can also be seen with bad low backs, where the patient feels strength restored after an adjustment.

A simple test to perform to check the strength and viability of the low back muscles is the “modified Trendelenburg” test. You can do it on yourself by lifting one leg high, like a big step, and slowly lowering it to the ground. If you feel shaking, your low back muscles are having a difficult time bracing or “shunting” this action. Clinically, this can be remedied with a course of chiropractic care including some methods and combination of methods relatively unique to this office.

Better Balance

Spinal adjustments help to increase the signals from the spinal joints to the cerebellum for coordination, the vestibular nuclei for balance, and the brain for body position awareness. The muscles and joints of the neck are very closely linked to the vestibular area of the brainstem. As there is dysfunction found in the upper cervical area of the neck, there can also be seen an imbalance of the cranial nerves (there are twelve pairs of nerves coming from the cranial vault to the face and guts.) This imbalance can show up as one pupil being larger than the other, the soft palate being weak on one side compared to the other, or some type of disruption of the way the eyes move.

Anecdotally, we have seen numerous cases of patients with these soft neurological signs improve with a course of care. This care is careful to provide a sufficient stimulation to the neurophysiology, while avoiding an excessive stimulation to the nervous system to avoid fatigue. Home exercises are given to augment the long term potentiation of neuroplasticity, and avoid recurrences of the the dizzy or off-balance condition.

With a proper care plan, this treatment can result in lasting benefits. Lasting results mean that the balance will be maintained for a longer period of time

Todd Lloyd, DC
St. George, UT chiropractor