What is Chiropractic?
Chiropractic is Greek for ‘practice by hand’ and emphasizes natural and preventative care-based medicine. It increases energy flow from the brain to the rest of the body, allowing the body to heal itself. Chiropractic patients achieve optimal health through pain reduction and functional restoration of nerve impulse flow, allowing the patient greater range of motion and flexibility in joints. Chiropractic also encourages lifestyle modification through proper diet and exercise to help achieve optimal results in health improvement.
Why Chiropractic?
The nerves send strength and energy to your organs, muscles, and cells; in essence to your whole body. The spinal column forms the main channel of nerve current from your brain to the rest of your body. Emotional, physical, and chemical stress can cause spinal misalignment. Emotional stress could be from work, or life events. Physical stress involves stress caused by repetitive activities, incorrect posture, acute or chronic injury, and trauma. Chemical stress involves the environment in which we live, and the food we put in our bodies. Spinal misalignment also known as a subluxation occurs when our bodies don’t properly adapt to the stresses in our lives. These subluxations “dam” up the nerve current, reducing the flow to bodily tissues. Subluxation acts like a dimmer switch where less current gets through the body, reducing the body’s ability to receive signals from the brain. The stresses and postural distortions weaken the nerve flow, causing a range of bodily symptoms; weakness, fatigue, tightness, pain, and organ problems relating to digestion, blood flow, filtering, and excretion. Chiropractic treats the body’s communication network directly, the nervous system, which sometimes helps to improve or alleviate symptoms from the entire body.
What is an adjustment?
Spinal adjustment involves the direct application of forces utilized to facilitate the body’s correction of nerve interference. The force is the right amount of pressure in the right direction at the right time. Chiropractors spend almost 4 years studying the art of adjustment and the science of diagnostics. Our education helps us to determine where the problem lies, and correct it naturally.
Chiropractic for Infants and Children
The first cells to differentiate about 7 hours after conception become the brain and spinal cord. This is how important the nervous system is to a child’s subsequent development. Once developed within the womb, the nervous system helps develop the rest of the body and growth processes both before and after birth.
Labor isn’t as injurious as it once was – yet still, an infant experiences some trauma during delivery which can cause spinal problems that show up in other areas of the child’s body. Colic, ear/nose/throat infections, fussiness, unbalanced skull symmetry, foot inversion, torticollis, etc.
A baby can’t yet speak to let us know what is wrong. They can only express discomfort, not its place of origin. Many parents see immediate results in the well-being of their child since the misalignment was handled in a timely fashion. Regular chiropractic checkups during a child’s formative attempts at supporting his/her head, sitting upright, and learning to walk remain indispensable tools to continue healthy development, from the perspective of preventative care.
The main goal of infant/child chiropractic care is to restore and/or maintain spinal alignment so that your young one can regain their natural dynamic state of harmony, balance and ease… and therefore continue growing and developing the way the body is designed to.