Preventing Disease

The prevention of disease seems to be of major concern to many people these days. The public is beginning to exercise to prevent heart problems and cut down on cholesterol to prevent cardiovascular disease. They are quitting their smoking habits to prevent cancer, and on and on. Prevention of disease, however, perpetuates a very serious misconception concerning disease, that is that it has a single cause. If a lack of vitamin C was the cause of the common cold, taking vitamin C would prevent it. While resistance is dependent upon vitamin C, it also depends upon a number of other factors. That is why three children in a family can all drink their orange juice and two will get a cold and one will not. Resistance depends upon how well the body is working, how well it can utilize vitamin C, the amount of rest a person gets and, of course, the frequency of coming in contact with the virus. There are probably a dozen other factors as well, many of which we do not even know and some, like genetics, we cannot control.

If exercise prevented heart attacks, Jim Fixx, the guru of running, would not have had a fatal heart attack on one of his daily runs. There are people who smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for thirty years and do not get lung cancer. Conversely, there are people who never smoke a cigarette and die of lung cancer.

Here is the point. There is only one thing that is truly effective in preventing disease, that is staying healthy! The more things you do to promote your good health, the greater the likelihood of not ending up with a disease. Exercise is important, but it is only one piece of the health picture. Vitamin C and all the other aspects of good nutrition are another piece. Avoiding poisons like cigarette smoke is another. The more aspects of health that you address, the greater your probability of being healthy and the greater your chances of preventing disease.

Of course, maintaining the integrity of your nervous system is a vital part of health. That is where chiropractic comes in. You must correct vertebral subluxations because they interfere with the proper function of the nerve system. Besides directly improving the nerve supply, the removing of subluxations also indirectly affects the other aspects of good health. If there is interference in your nervous system, you may not be able to properly utilize good nutrition or get the maximum benefits from exercise and rest. Your body will be less resistant to the poisons you cannot help but be exposed to, like second-hand cigarette smoke. If you want to prevent disease, the proper attitude is not just doing certain things to prevent certain diseases. That is a futile approach. There are just too many diseases. The proper approach is to do those things necessary to be healthy. Perhaps if everybody was doing everything necessary to promote and maintain health, we would not have to worry about preventing disease. That seems to be the most intelligent idea.

The proper approach to health is to do those things necessary to be healthy

You Are Here

I don’t like going to malls. I am not a shopper. I usually only go if I have something specific to buy. Consequently, I am not very familiar with the local malls. I also have a very poor sense of direction. As a result, I spend a good deal of time in front of the directory/map of the mall to try to figure out where I am going. The most important thing to do is to first find out where you are, hence the little arrow showing you the location of the directory you are staring at. You see, you cannot figure out how to get somewhere unless you know where you are. Often people will call on the phone to ask directions to the office. The first thing I have to ask the prospective patient is “from where are you coming?” I cannot get them to the office unless I know where they are.

For us to reach a destination of good health, which should be the objective of every patient in the office, we must first determine where you are. Your location, both physical and mental are important. Physically, you are probably subluxated. One or more vertebra may be out of its proper position, cutting off the vital life energy to your body, inhibiting your ability to be healthy, to work, to play, to sleep and to reach your potential in every aspect of your life. What’s more, these subluxations have probably been present for years and may well have been reducing the quality of your life experiences since childhood. Further, they are not going to go away overnight or with one or two adjustments. In the beginning, most people need quite a few adjustments and everybody needs to be checked regularly for their entire lives and adjusted whenever the chiropractor finds vertebral subluxations.

Perhaps more important, is realizing where we are in our thinking. We have more than likely all been raised with a distorted view of life and health. We are taught that germs cause disease and that treating the symptoms of a disease while ignoring the cause is okay. We are taught that health comes from somewhere outside ourselves rather than coming from within our bodies. We believe that taking something from a bottle or in the form of a pill will actually make us healthy, rather than just treating the symptoms. We are at a place where we put our confidence in some doctor to get us well rather than the inborn wisdom of the body. We are not interested in maintaining our health but only in getting rid of the illness when it comes. We think that getting sick is a matter of bad luck, rather than doing the wrong things or failing to do the right things.

Until we realize that our perspective is wrong and want to change, we are never going to find our way to a healthier, more productive life. We will either stay where we are in our thinking or worse, we will wander off in the wrong direction trying to find health and a better life in the same old ways that have not worked for the last 5,000 years. Chiropractic offers a new perspective and a new direction. It involves a radical change in our way of thinking, even our way of looking at life and the world around us. Investigate its philosophy. It could change your direction and life.  

Chiropractic offers a new perspective and a new direction.  It involves a radical change in our way of thinking, even our way of looking at life and the world around us.

Have You Defined Your Philosophy?

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a Philosophy.  Your only choice is whether you define your Philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation – or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel Philosophy and fused into a single solid weight:  self doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.  – Ayn Rand

Are You Present or Future Focused?

Have you ever asked yourself where you want to be with your life in the future?  In these instant-gratification, quick-fix, drive-thru days in which we live, people tend to focus on what is happening and how they feel right now.  Not feeling good?  Pop a pill to ease the pain.  Hungry?  Grab some fast food.  Bored?  Turn on the television.  Tired?  Get a cup of coffee.  So many people make decisions and take actions based on a current event, without looking at the possible consequences.  Let me ask you, have you ever known a very happy, healthy and successful pill-popping, fast food-eating, 10-hour-a-day television watching person on a constant caffeine high?  Me neither.  Quick fixes maybe comforting in the moment, but they rarely provide long-term solutions.

I am asking you to think about what you want to be, not in the present moment, but in the future.  Let’s take your health as an example.  Your health is based on many factors: exercise, diet, nerve supply, rest, genetics, etc., but the key thing to understand is your health today is the result of actions you took (or failed to take) in the past.  You may think that how you are today is just a current event, but in reality it is the result of a process.  This may sound elementary, but if you take this concept to heart and put it into action, it can literally be life changing.  Everything you do today is going to determine how you will be in the future.

This concept of looking at life as a process and not just a single event has been discussed in chiropractic for decades.  In chiropractic there is a concept of “survival values.”  Things that we do each day are either positive or negative towards our health and function in the future.  Positive activities, such as having a proper nerve supply, eating nutritious foods, resting, etc., are known in chiropractic as “constructive survival values.”  On the other hand, negative events like vertebral subluxation, injuries, drugs, toxins, emotional stress, watching 10 hours of television a day, eating fast food, etc., are known as “destructive survival values.”  In this model, your life and health are determined by the accumulation of both constructive and destructive survival values over time.  When you look at things such as health as a process and not merely an event, you begin to realize the importance of constantly and continually striving to add constructive survival values to your life.

Since health is just one aspect of human performance and human performance is in large part regulated by the nerve system, chiropractic plays a key role in your health over time.  By having vertebral subluxations adjusted (spinal misalignments that interfere with nerve function), you allow your body to better express information through the nerve system.  This leads to better performance and better health.  Each time a vertebral subluxation is corrected, you accumulate a constructive survival value towards your life and will be better for it in the future.

If you want to be better in the future than you are today, one step in the process is regular chiropractic spinal checks.  Having your spine checked only when you have a symptom simply shows that you are not interested in improving your life in the future and that you are only looking for a quick solution to a current event.  While it is true that the adjustment may provide you with a quick-fix, that is not the intent behind chiropractic.  Chiropractic is about adding constructive survival values to your life so that you will be better in the future.  Why not avail yourself of that unique and priceless benefit?

If you want to be better in the future than you aretoday, one step in the processis regular chiropractic    

spinal checks.

“Anything Can Cause Anything”

Some years back a well-known doctor wrote a book with the above title.  While his title would lead you to conclude that there is no specific cause of something, a conclusion that most people would reject, there is some truth that we often overlook.  When it comes to the human body and its proper and improper function, the good doctor was not far off track.  He would have been more correct to say “Everything Can Cause Anything” or “Everything Contributes to Anything.”  That may very well be the key.  We do not have single causes to something like disease, we have many factors.  The latest so-called cause among members of the health care community is heredity.  Yet many times members of the same family, even identical twins, do not “get” the disease that is supposed to be hereditary.  There is no doubt that heredity is a factor but it is not the cause.

            Stress is another so-called cause.  Yet two people can work at the same “stressful” job and one ends up with ulcers and the other doesn’t.  Or one has a heart attack the other does not.  Is stress bad?  Sure.  Is it the cause of heart attacks?  No.  At best it is a factor.  No one would say that smoking is not harmful.  Yet, there are heavy smokers who do not get lung cancer and there are those who never smoked a single cigarette that die from the disease.

            Bacteria and viruses are probably most commonly thought to be the cause of disease.  Yet even in epidemics, the vast majority of a population does not manifest the disease.  We say they had a “higher resistance.”  So, it is either a high or low resistance that is the cause and not the germ.  Or is resistance just another factor?  What about the causes of resistance: diet, exercise, and/or rest?  It all tends to be very confusing, especially when you are trying to prevent the cause of disease.  “Don’t do this.”  “Don’t eat that!”  Butter increases cholesterol and cholesterol is supposed to cause heart disease.  Margarine causes cancer.  Choose your disease on your morning toast!

            Perhaps we need a major change in our attitude.  Perhaps we need to focus on what causes health, what causes proper body function, what causes increased performance on a mental, physical, and emotional level.  It’s really rather simple: eating right, getting regular exercise, maintaining a nerve system free of interference (regular visits to your chiropractor) and having a positive mental attitude.  In fact, it is so simple that most people in the health care/scientific community would rather look elsewhere for something they can do.  You see, the “causes” of health are the responsibility of each individual person.  And frankly, a health care provider cannot appear important turning the responsibility of health back over to the person.  So science muddles along trying to find a new cause, one that they can treat.

            Do you want to be healthy?  Do you want to be all you can be in life?  Then you must take the responsibility.  Someone can grow good wholesome food but you must eat it everyday.  Someone can build a health club or gym but you must be disciplined to work out two or three times a week.  Your chiropractor can provide you with the opportunity to have your spine checked regularly and adjusted when necessary but you must bring your spine into the office on a regular basis.  Take control of your life instead of waiting for “Something to Cause Something.”

Alternative Medicine

 

Here’s a term that we are hearing quite a bit of lately.  The President actually formed a commission to study alternative medicine.  That has happened because of its popularity.  More people visit the alternatives every year than they do the allopaths (medical doctors, M.D.s).  Alternative medicine is a large umbrella that covers just about everything that is not part of orthodox medicine (drug and surgery) so you can see it is a pretty broad area.  It covers such therapies as acupuncture, naturopathy, and nutritional therapy to name a few.  Unfortunately chiropractic has been lumped in there with these therapies.  When you understand chiropractic, you realize clearly that it is not alternative medicine.  An alternative is a different way of reaching the same objective.  Alternate Route 1 is a different road which eventually joins up with Business Route 1.  Tylenol is alternative medicine, an alternative to aspirin.  Aleve is an alternative to both of these.  All have the same objective, treating a symptom.  Acupuncture is an alternative to drugs or surgery as is naturopathy.  They are all attempting to accomplish the same objective, treating a disease, a condition or the symptoms of one.  Like Tylenol, Aleve and aspirin, different therapies work better for different people and for the same people under different circumstances.  Everyone is different, that is why there is a market for all these alternatives in the treatment of disease.

So, what makes chiropractic not truly an alternative to medicine?  It’s the objective.  The objective of chiropractic is not to treat or to cure any disease.  It is to allow the body’s own inborn healing ability to be expressed more fully by removing interference in the nerve system due to vertebral subluxation.  But even that is a small part of chiropractic.  This same innate healing ability is the intelligent activity that normalizes body chemistry, allows one to think, sleep, work and generally function at a higher level.  That is important to people whether they have a disease or not, even when they feel good.

When it comes down to it, chiropractic is not an alternative to anything.  No one else corrects vertebral subluxations, at least not intentionally as their objective. The only real alternative to chiropractic is the same alternative to eating…not doing it!  Neither of which is beneficial to your life or health.

It is a shame that chiropractic has been lumped in the category of alternative medicine.  The fact that 37% of people who use alternatives are going to a chiropractor helps to give these therapies some credibility by having chiropractic associated with them.  But it also gives people an incorrect perception of chiropractic, that it is for the treatment of some condition.  And in doing that, it causes all the people who have no diseases as well as people who are satisfied with medicine or one of its alternatives to miss out on the great benefit that chiropractic has to offer to the entire population.  Get your spine checked regularly regardless of what else you do. The alternative is a dead end.

The objective of chiropractic is not to treat  cure any disease. It is to allow the body’s own inborn healing ability to be expressed more fully by removing interference in the nerve system due to vertebral subluxation.