Do you "hold" your adjustments?

The other day, someone asked me if anyone ever "holds" their adjustments.  This is based upon the old chiropractic notion that a vertebra "out of place" is pinching a nerve and creating illness.  By "resetting" the vertebra with a thrust the pressure is taken off the nerve and healing occurs.  Therefore, the adjustment should "hold" or always stay in its proper place along the spine.  Unfortunately, this just doesn't happen.

The notion that one can hold an adjustment is believe that the body is a machine - it is a collection of parts that work together like a watch or an automobile.  Your car will hold its front end alignment.  When the wheels go out of alignment, you have that adjusted and it should stay that way until you hit a curb.  The medical people work from the premise that the body is a machine.  They feel that when something breaks down they can replace it with another part, human or artificial.  This is all based on the old Newtonian/ Descartes view that the Universe is just a collection of parts whirling around each other just like an old watch that you have to wind up.

This just isn't true.  The body is not a machine.  It is a living expression of consciousness.  It is the expression of intelligence in matter.  It is energy flowing.  Your body is constantly taking in information from it's environment, beyond your immediate comprehension, and adapting to the constant flux of energy so as to stay alive.  And, the environment goes beyond what you see around you, it is also your thoughts and feelings.

Your body is programmed to do only one thing - keep you alive!  Everything it does is to meet that end.  So by monitoring it's environment, the body will make changes and reposition itself to stay alive.  In other words, it is in a constant changing dynamic with the world within, and without.  When it senses danger,  i.e. stress, it will go into a survival mode.  It will curl up, so to speak, or tense up to protect itself.  Stress is a learned response,  so the body will respond to events not necessarily based upon immediate danger, but rather on what it learned as danger.  So you may not be stressed at the moment, but your body may be reacting to something that on a subconscious level it understands to be stress.  It will also react to all your thoughts and emotions.

Since your environment is constantly changing, your body's response to it is constantly changing.  The nerve system, which reads and interprets the environment, will constantly change and react. The body is an expression of the nerve system.  So if the nerve system constantly changes, the expression in the physical body will also.  And that means the body is in constant flux.

To assume that an adjustment is "holding" is to assume that the body never changes.  It is to assume that the body is a machine just standing still and never moving.  This is impossible.  It is impossible to assume that by "resetting" a vertebra, it will stay that way forever.

People need to be adjusted regularly because the effects of stress are cumulative. And only spinal adjustment can change that and keep a person in a more relaxed state.  Instead of living in survival mode, the body can be relaxed and live in "living"mode.  This in itself will keep the body healthier!  And it doesn't matter if you have to adjust the same vertebra over and over and over.

Can Chiropractic Create World Peace?

Wow!  That's a heavy statement, don't you think?  Quite presumptuous, too.  But, is it really far fetched?

The other day one of my practice members, Mary, sat up after being cleared and said how wonderfully at peace she felt.  Then she asked, "What it would be like if everyone were under chiropractic care?"  I said, "There probably would be world peace!"

Stress is the number one cause of loss of health.  We can't escape stress, it's part of living in a physical body in today's society.  There are only three forms of stress: emotional, chemical, and physical.  I list them in this order on purpose because about 95% of the stress I help people through is emotional.  We have to deal with all elements of society: the economy, family issues, taxes, politics, the ever present war, traffic, our jobs, and so on.  Stress puts our bodies into survival mode also known as 'fight or flight'.  We either have to fight for our lives or run like hell, but the bottom line is that we constantly live on the edge.  We are never at peace.  If we, as individuals, are never at peace within ourselves, we are never at peace with each other, and nations will never be at peace.  Society, as a whole, is in fight or flight.  Then nations are in fight or flight, albeit mostly fight.

The chiropractic adjustment takes a person out of survival mode.  It changes the tone and tension of the nerve system to "living" mode so that we can be at peace within ourselves.  When we are at peace, we are centered, able to deal with life constructively.  If more people lived this way, society would be centered, in "living" mode.  Then nations would be centered and at peace.  If everyone in the world could be cleared of living in survival mode, it is safe to say that there would be peace!

More thoughts on Vaccines

I went with my daughter and granddaughter to visit her pediatrician for my granddaughter's first birthday check-up today.  The pediatrician is very nice, very laid back, and very supportive of our decisions regarding natural health approaches.  We told her way back before Maddi was born that we are choosing not to have her vaccinated.  She has supported this decision, but has asked with the two visits I have attended in the past year if we still do not wish to have vaccinations, or were we waiting for Maddi to be a little older.  Lindsay again told her that there will be no vaccinations, and the doctor noted this in Maddi's chart.

What makes me wonder is how can learned people who claim to be health care providers can still promote the use of vaccines on children.  I just read three articles dealing with vaccines that describe how they don't work and even cause disease.  One article talked about the dangers of the Hepatitis B vaccine in children.  It is linked to the onset of Multiple Sclerosis, Systemic Lupus, sudden infant death, and auto-immune diseases.  Hepatitis B isn't even a childhood disease - it is a disease of drug users and specific sexual habits!

Another article discussed how immunized children in Pakistan are developing polio. 70% of of the polio cases being seen in Pakistan are in children that were vaccinated.  And yet another article talks about how the CDC admits that the flu vaccine doesn't work, it wears off, and that's one of the reasons you have to have a new one every year.  Well the flu vaccine has aluminum and mercury compounds in them, detergents, dead diseased chicken cells, viruses, MSG ( I guess so it will at least taste good), and other toxic substances.

And that is just in the past week.  Everyday articles appear, not in the main stream media of course, that discuss the dangers of vaccines.  Hopefully one day enough people will wake up and vaccinations of our children will go the way of blood letting to cure disease.

A Vaccine for Shingles?

Today I saw a sign in front of Walgreens that they are offering shingles vaccines.  Now if there is anything that says how ridiculous this whole vaccine issue has become, this is it.  The reason? Shingles is NOT an infectious disease that spreads from person to person like flu.

The virus that causes shingles is the same that causes chicken pox.  Chicken pox is the primary manifestation of exposure to the Varicella virus.  This virus is in the Herpes virus family.  A characteristic of Herpes viruses is that once you have them, you always have them.  You get a big infection, then the virus goes dormant in the the nerve roots of the spinal cord.  It can be dormant forever without ever showing itself again.  But every now and then it may manifest, like a cold sore which is a Herpes virus.  As I said, Chicken pox is the primary manifestation of the Varicella virus.  When you get over chicken pox, the virus did not go away, it went dormant in your nerve system.  Then 50 or 60 years later, you get stressed out and the virus grows again and you have shingles!  Shingles is adult chicken pox!  You could also say it is a form of a "cold sore" that shows up on the trunk of the body.  The thing is, and this is very important: YOU HAVE TO HAVE HAD CHICKEN POX TO GET SHINGLES LATER!  If you never had chicken pox, then you can't get shingles until you get chicken pox.  Therefore, getting a shingles vaccine is a waste of time, let alone dangerous as all vaccines are!

But, you may say, then why not make sure all kids get the chicken pox vaccine? Because the vaccine does not work and is very, very dangerous.  From 1995 to 1999, there were 10,000 reports of adverse reactions to this vaccine, all involving nerve damage.  These reactions include: encepahlits (brain inflammation), inflammation of the spinal cord, Guillian-Barre syndrome, Bell's Palsy, Cerebellar Ataxia (sudden loss of co-ordinated movement and speech), seizures, and Paresthesia.  Is this a chance you would want to take with your kids? Or yourself?

Shingles is certainly not a condiiton to wish on anyone, but don't be fooled into thinking that there is a vaccine for it.  There isn't.

Chiropractors are dangerous? Seriously?

My daughter told me at dinner tonight that the husband of one of her employees is scheduled to have back surgery.  Apparently he has been diagnosed with a herniated disc.  So far he has gone through physical therapy and nerve bocks that have not done any good so the only option left is surgery.  He has young children at home and he won't be able to lift them until September!  My daughter asked if he had tried seeing a chiropractor, and the wife said that he did ask his physician and was told that that will only make it worse!

Now, chiropractic is NOT a back pain specialty, it is a total health approach for the body.  However, many studies have been done to show the efficacy of chiropractic care for the treatment of low back pain, and it is, hands down, far superior than anything medicine has to offer.  There are no "side effects" other than the person might just get well.  And in 27 years of practice, not one person in my office has ever been crippled from our care.

So let's see.  This poor man has been suffering for I don't know how long, he has had anesthesia injected directly into his vital nerve system - you know, the one that controls and coordinates the life of the body - and now he is going to have his back opened up with the possibility of paralysis and even death.  He may become crippled from this surgery.  This is rare but I have known it to happen.  He may become addicted to pain drugs, as many do.  And chances are very good that he will have additional surgery because the pain still didn't go away and the surgical area filled up with scar tissue that is choking off the nerves.

You decide.  Who is going to make it worse?

4 Weeks

As of yesterday it has been a month since my body revolted on me. I don't want to call it an injury, since I had done nothing to injure myself. But rather it was a more like a seizure. Just as a rabbit or a deer will seize in front of headlights, my body seized in response to an overload of stress.

Since then I have improved quite a bit. I started seeing a chiropractor who specializes in upper cervical adjusting. This is the approach we were initially taught at Palmer College. BJ Palmer, the founder of our school called it the "Hole in One Technique". By addressing the atlas, i.e. the first cervical vertebra, you will affect every process throughout the body. For decades this is all that was taught at the school. Adjust the atlas and let the Innate Intelligence of the body free up and do the healing. This is a very powerful concept, often forgotten by chiropractors because they feel that they have to "treat" the pain rather than free the body to do its own healing. However, the power that created the body heals the body. There is no other way, and when you consider that creating the body is nothing short of a miracle, then healing becomes a miracle too. We don't have to control it, just release the power and get out of the way!

I started running again. My leg still feels weak and the muscle aches at times, but I am able to run about two and a half miles with some walking thrown in. I'm able to adjust people longer without having to sit down. And the numb area has gotten a little smaller. Just a little. But it gives me hope that I will overcome this, and soon. It is very weird when you suddenly lose a function of your body. It changes you, and not in a good way. And you appreciate it so much more when you get it back! You just can't take health for granted because all it takes is a second to lose it!

Health - You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone!

It's funny how we can take out bodies for granted. I try not to, full appreciating all it does for me. But when something suddenly changes, you begin to realize how important a fully functioning body is.

I recently hurt myself that resulted in intense back spasming and left leg weakness. The weakness came on so fast, it was incredible. I found it difficult to stand, let alone walk, and of course, running was out of the question. I love to run. I feel like my life depends on it. I run 4 days a week all year long and in all the weather typical to Cleveland. But not for the last 10 days.

I began to feel like an invalid. I could get up and walk, but after 30 seconds, I had to sit because my thigh would burn in pain as the muscles tried to hold me up. I couldn't do anything. I mean anything! I couldn't go to the store, I could barely get through my day at the office. All I would do is go to the office, sit while I adjust people, and come home. Then I would sit on the couch or the chair in front of the TV and veg. I began to wonder if I would ever have my life back.

I have been working on myself, and with the help of a chiropractor friend of mine, Dave Budney. Slowly the strength is coming back and today I finally felt strong enough to try a run. Actually, I didn't feel strong enough, but I could not take another day of sitting. Running withdrawl is horrible. So I put on my running gear and went or it. It was difficult at first, but I was able to get in about 2 and a half miles. When I got home, I felt absolutely great!

I know now that what has gripped me is slowly leaving and I can see the end of the tunnel. But the body you've been given is the only one you will ever get. A healthy body is defined by how well it works, not how well it feels. And in the matter of a moment something can change that suddenly changes how it works. And that is a horrible, horrible feeling. Thank goodness for chiropractic, because that is the only approach that can restore health, and keep us healthy (i.e functioning!). Because once it's gone, health may be gone for good!