The latest edition of Reader’s Digest (they come to me for free in my office) has a “medical breakthrough” special that piqued my interest. Usually when magazines have medical breakthrough stories, it is riddled with genetic engineering, the latest ortho-appliance, or how they are discovered the tensile strength of spider webs.

Well, this issue has those too; don’t worry. But, one article that I paid attention to was Brain Powered: A wave of new advances shows how the mind affects health in ways we never imagined. It starts out showing how they are mapping genes to certain parts of the brain, what progress they are having with Alzheimer’s, how they are getting drugs through the brain’s protective blood-brain barrier, and finally, a story on “how your mind heals you.”

This is interesting because the idea that the mind (nervous system) heals you is one that we’ve had as a fundamental in chiropractic since its inception in 1895. The power that made the body also heals the body. Health comes from within with the help of the smart choices that we make. The nervous system monitors every cell in the body and it provides commands or hormones to every cell in the body to maintain a steady state of wellness.

If the nerves don’t work well, you don’t work well.

Enter in researcher Kevin Tracey, MD, who found that when patients are challenged with overwhelming infection, changing a certain nerve pathway will change the way that the body fights the infection. Specifically, when you stimulate the vagus nerve, the body fights sepsis better.

The vagus nerve is one of the main nerves that control the heart, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, kidneys, and other viscera to help slow things down so organs can function better. You’ve heard of fight-or-flight? This is the opposite: rest-and-digest. The vagus nerve is one of the rest-and-digest nerves. It starts in the brainstem (receiving signals from various other parts of the brain) and travels in front of the spine (peculiar) to branch off in to visceral organs. These organs also receive signals from the fight-or-flight nerves coming from the spine.

This is the dynamic battle between the parasympathetic (heart slows down) and the sympathetic (heart speeds up) nervous system.

So, Dr. Tracey discovered a direct connection between the nervous system and the immune system, and this specific reflex is called “the inflammatory reflex.” I like that. This shows that when you take away a once dominant, stressed out fight-or-flight nerve signal, and replace it with a calming, relaxed rest-and-digest nerve signal, internal inflammation is decreased.

Most people have their sympathetic nervous system over stimulated. This occurs especially in our stressed society. When my patients come to me stressed, it is often apparent in their back muscles, causing their joints to be stiff and achy. This creates a positive feedback loop to the nervous system because this effectively prevents the joints of the spine to move through their full range of motion. This lack of movement prevents joint-nerve signals from entering the brain, feeding information to the cerebellum, thalamus, brain cortex, and yes, the brainstem where the vagus nerve originates.

It would be interesting to measure the effects of chiropractic care on this inflammatory reflex.