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What the Heck is Chiropractic??

I hope y’all brought your coffee and are ready for another week of Coffee and Chiropractic! I have really enjoyed thinking of awesome blog topics but I thought maybe I should start with the basics of what chiropractic is and what the heck I’m studying at school. Chiropractic is defined by the all-knowing Wikipedia as “a system of integrative medicine based on the diagnosis and manipulative treatment of misalignments of the joints, especially those of the spinal column, which are held to cause other disorders by affecting the nerves, muscles, and organs.” I’d like to break down that definition into a slightly simpler way of looking at it since you’re only two or three sips into that delicious cup o’ joe (or tea, I don’t discriminate) and maybe aren’t quite ready for that deep thinking.

To start, your body is constantly adapting to the environment that you consciously put it in. For example: Have you noticed when you go outside when it’s chilly your hands and toes are the first things to get cold? When you expose your body to the cold environment, naturally and unconsciously your blood vessels in your extremities constrict to preserve heat so that your core temperature remains as close to normal (98.6 F). The organ controlling this constant and intelligent adaptation is…the BRAIN. In order to communicate with the entire body, the brain relies on the nerves that extend from the spinal cord to the rest of the body. When there is interference in these nerves from a misalignment of a vertebra is when there’s a problem and your body ends up not adapting to the best of its abilities and this is when we see SYMPTOMS.

A chiropractor’s job is to locate this misalignment and analyze it to decide if it is the cause of the interference and if it is, apply a specific corrective force to put the spine back in proper alignment. You can think about it like a kink in a hose, in order for you to get optimal water pressure through the hose it needs to be clear of kinks so it can perform its functions. To be clear, the chiropractor’s job is not to fix the SYMPTOMS, your body does that part, their job is to clear the body of these problem-causing misalignments to allow the brain to communicate with the rest of the body effectively. I hope this clears up any confusion about what chiropractic is and what a chiropractor’s job is! I hope you’re enjoying that coffee and I’ll talk to y’all soon!

Welcome to Coffee and Chiropractic!

Coffee and Chiropractic go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly.

If you would seek health, look first to the spine.

— Socrates.

This is the first post on my new blog, so welcome! The purpose of this new adventure is to bring about the topics of chiropractic to the masses. I hope to stimulate discussion and challenge the way health is perceived from a more philosophical standpoint, like you would at a coffee bar!

I’m going to begin this blog with my “Why”. Think about someone you encountered in your life that seemed to be really happy at work. It could have been a salesman, or a barista, or even a mechanic at a tire shop! These people are what I aspire to be, and I believe this comes from introspection and connecting your daily life with what drives you as a person.

Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted to be a chiropractor. I hadn’t really dug into why I wanted to do this or even how I would reach this goal until my Senior year of undergraduate at James Madison University in Virginia when it was time to apply for graduate school, or start looking for jobs. I started thinking about what I would be good at and this led me to my personal ideology that I believe that God gave every person a gift that they could use to exceed at something in this world.

My job during undergrad was a mechanic at a bicycle shop, while working there I quickly discovered that my gift is the ability to use my hands and fix things and creative problem solving. This was a great realization and helped me further decide that I wanted to be a chiropractor, I would just have to translate my skills of working on bicycles to working on humans!

Since starting chiropractic school I have been able to connect with my “why” on a deeper level and I firmly believe that God blessed me with the gifts necessary to be a great chiropractor. The human body is far more complicated than a bicycle for obvious reasons, but the chiropractic philosophy that involves finding the root of a problem like vertigo, TMJ syndrome, or Sciatica has been more and more appealing to me as time goes on. I appreciate whoever is reading this and I hope that in some way this can inspire you to pursue your “why” in life. It doesn’t have to even sound remotely like mine, but when you can connect what you do daily with your core values, people can tell and trust me it is contagious.

Conserving Energy

Have you ever found a new way of doing something that saves you a lot of effort, time, and headache? Have you bought a new app or tool that makes a usually strenuous task much easier? What if I told you your body is capable of the same thing?

Your body has a natural healing system that you are born with. This system is controlled by an intelligence that you are also born with called innate intelligence. This intelligence is what told your stem cells exactly what to become in order to make you the being you are today. Thank goodness I wasn’t in charge of creating my eyeballs or my digestive system, those structures are so complex there’s no way I’d be able to get that right! The same thing applies to your immune system, skeletal system, etc! All of these systems are designed using energy in the most efficient way possible whether you get your energy from potato chips or carrots (this is not an excuse to eat potato chips, we will talk about that later).

As we go through life, we are exposed to stressors on our body that can include anything from meeting a deadline at work to re-living the glory days and sliding into home plate in your adult league softball game. Your innate intelligence is responsible for adapting to these stressors and maintaining functionality. It does this in the most energetically conservative fashion possible, not wasting one calorie more than it has to. Unfortunately, there are times where our body is under so much stress that it is unable to adapt to the environment we put it in. When our innate intelligence cannot adapt to the amount of stress its under, it causes dis-ease within the body, which simply means things are not working as perfectly as they are designed to. What if I told you your body can be even more efficient under chiropractic care? BECAUSE IT CAN!

Chiropractors re-establish the connection between you and your innate intelligence by removing subluxation, which is the cause of this dis-ease. They do this by analyzing your spine and providing gentle, specific adjustments to your spine in order to allow your innate intelligence to be expressed at its highest potential. Essentially, it is a nervous system upgrade that allows your body to HEAL better, and in turn frees up so much energy that you no longer have to use to SURVIVE and can use to LIVE.

Conserving Energy

Have you ever found a new way of doing something that saves you a lot of effort, time, and headache? Have you bought a new app or tool that makes a usually strenuous task much easier? What if I told you your body is capable of the same thing?

Your body has a natural healing system that you are born with. This system is controlled by an intelligence that you are also born with called innate intelligence. This intelligence is what told your stem cells exactly what to become in order to make you the being you are today. Thank goodness I wasn’t in charge of creating my eyeballs or my digestive system, those structures are so complex there’s no way I’d be able to get that right! The same thing applies to your immune system, skeletal system, etc! All of these systems are designed using energy in the most efficient way possible whether you get your energy from potato chips or carrots (this is not an excuse to eat potato chips, we will talk about that later).

As we go through life, we are exposed to stressors on our body that can include anything from meeting a deadline at work to re-living the glory days and sliding into home plate in your adult league softball game. Your innate intelligence is responsible for adapting to these stressors and maintaining functionality. It does this in the most energetically conservative fashion possible, not wasting one calorie more than it has to. Unfortunately, there are times where our body is under so much stress that it is unable to adapt to the environment we put it in. When our innate intelligence cannot adapt to the amount of stress its under, it causes dis-ease within the body, which simply means things are not working as perfectly as they are designed to. What if I told you your body can be even more efficient under chiropractic care? BECAUSE IT CAN!

Chiropractors re-establish the connection between you and your innate intelligence by removing subluxation, which is the cause of this dis-ease. They do this by analyzing your spine and providing gentle, specific adjustments to your spine in order to allow your innate intelligence to be expressed at its highest potential. Essentially, it is a nervous system upgrade that allows your body to HEAL better, and in turn frees up so much energy that you no longer have to use to SURVIVE and can use to LIVE.

Chiropractic and How it Can Explain Biochemistry (kinda….)

Hope y’all brought your coffee again! This week we will be discussing chiropractic’s foundation and that is the 33 Principles. These principles could be compared to the Constitution of the United States being the “why” behind all of the processes that occur every day on Capitol Hill. The principles are in general what separates Chiropractors from any other doctor out there and why some chiropractors look at the world entirely different than the average person. I will spend more time on all of the principles in other posts but for now I’d like to discuss how one principle in particular relates to everybody’s favorite basic science: Biochemistry.

Biochemistry is the study of the chemical reactions that are responsible for life and today we are going to focus on principle 17 of 33 which is “Every effect has a cause and every cause has an effect.” I’m sure we’ve all heard the saying of cause and effect when it comes to slamming a door and it making a noise or putting money in a vending machine and candy coming out, but what about when it comes to health and more specifically biochemistry? Have you ever thought about why we put our food in the refrigerator or maybe why it’s good for you to take a multivitamin everyday or even why it’s necessary to eat? Okay don’t think about that stuff too much… let’s move on.

When it comes to biological processes, they take time (which is actually principle 6 but that’s beside the point). The breaking down of food is actually a biological process that is slowed down (effect) when exposed to low temperatures like the refrigerator (cause). The same thing goes for why you take a multivitamin. Certain proteins in your body called enzymes need vitamins in order to function, so by y’all health conscious people taking those multivitamins, you’re causing an effect which is your body working better! As for eating, the foods you eat cause a whole lot of processes in your body to get working to break it down into nutrients that fuel your every day life! Heck, even the coffee you’ve been drinking will have an effect on the body which is hopefully waking you up so you can have a great day! Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next time!

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