“I Have A Crick In My Neck or Catch In My Back…”

Chiropractic Treatment, How Does It Help?

Chiropractic is more than the adjustment, but that’s what we’ll focus on here.

When you are hurting in your neck, back, or some other joint it often feels like you can’t move it. It feels out of place. You go to the Chiropractor, get an adjustment, and you can move again.

This seems to mean that the Chiropractor popped the bone back into place.

On the surface it seems like this is what happens.

Chiropractic Care is not about a bone that’s out of place and ‘popping‘ it back in.

It’s much more complicated than that… yet this is what many people sort of think about Chiropractic.

I know, you’re not a Chiropractor. You may be thinking, “who cares?“

It matters because it’s important to better understand what’s wrong so that you can better understand what needs to happen to improve the problem so you can get better and not continue having ongoing problems.

We’ve known for decades that an adjustment helps people by restoring movement, improving muscle tone, and helping your brain and nervous system better control and coordinate your body.

In fact going all the way back to DD Palmer, even he suggested the changes an adjustment makes were due to changes in the nervous system.

Current research shows that he was right about that even though he was wrong about how those changes happened

Of course but this was in the late 1800s.

We’ve learned a lot about so many different things about everything since that time.

The big over-simplification of what happens is that your nervous system changes your movement / ability to move in an attempt to protect you in some way… or at times there is damage from say an injury that changes the way you can move.

The problem is that our nervous system and body get a little carried away at times and this puts us in bad positions that severely limit our motion, cause pain, and in the case of injury compromises our ability to heal properly.

How Does Chiropractic Help People?

Chiropractic can help in many ways.

If we’re talking strictly about the adjustment then the chiropractor can reset the muscle tone or length and help the nervous system better ‘see‘ where the problem part of the body is in space so that it can better control it.

The adjustment also causes the nerves to fire into the spinal cord (and up) to help turn off pain nerves (see closing the pain gate here).

The adjustment also helps injuries recover better by restoring better movement during the healing process allowing the scar tissue to be the appropriate length and better strength while mechanically sort of pushing out the local inflammation in the area.

If you’re one of our patients, you’ve probably noticed that often after a Chiropractic treatment that you don’t just move better and have less pain, but also have a better mood, can think clearer, or have more energy.

This has to do with the ‘return‘ nerve traffic going up to the brain allowing things to function better.

It has nothing to do with a bone out of place.

It’s about restoring normal function to a problem area so that it moves better through both local effects and through changes in the nervous system.

At Hagebusch Chiropractic, our ultimate goal is to help our patients feel better and function better so you can perform your best in everything you do whether at home, at work, during your favorite hobbies, playing with your kids/grandkids, exercising or playing a sport.

This is the basic idea of wellness… not just getting out of pain and feeling better but actually being better.

It’s the only real path to wellness which is optimal function not just minimal symptoms.