What is chiropractic?

Infomation

Did you know that Chiropractic is the third largest primary health care profession in the western world after conventional medicine and dentistry?

How can it help you?

Chiropractic approaches health care focusing on how people can attain and maintain a healthy neuromuscular-skeletal and mind utilising a natural, drugless form of therapy.

Chiropractors are best known for helping patients with effective relief for a wide range of conditions that affect the neuro-musculo-skeletal (NMS) system. These conditions manifest themselves in many ways such as aches and pains in the head, neck, back, arms and legs. The way you feel from one day to the next and your ability to perform all your activities of daily living and sense or experience the world around you comes down to how well your NMS system is functioning. A poorly functioning NMS system can have a profound effect on the way you interpret yourself and your interactions with the world around you. Just ask anyone who suffers from chronic pain.

Our understanding of how these physiological events occur and manifest as symptoms has become increasing clearer over the past two decades with continual advances in research within the neuroscience field. This research has provided us with the concepts of Neuroplacticity and Neurogenesis. Pre dating these hypothesises, it was thought that we all had a certain number of nerves in our brain and there is a continual reduction of these with age, trauma, infection and other various pathologies. However Neuroplasticity means that nerves have an ongoing need for stimulation whether it be afferent (sensing or feeling) or efferent (muscle activation or doing) to keep them functioning at a level sufficient enough maintain contact with the central nervous system (CNS) or with local neuronal pathways. It is also possible to develop new neuronal pathways or connections with the CNS or other nerves by a process known as neurogenesis.

Now in short and simplified terms what does this mean and how does it apply to me?

If you don’t use it you lose it! This simple concept applies to nerve and muscle function.

Joints and their surrounding muscles are both innervated by nerves and have numerous afferent (sensory) receptors within them. There are by any means a large number of ways these receptors can be activated and cause pain or focal point tenderness. Again in very simplified terms what Chiropractors aim to do is get the muscles that aren’t working enough to work more! And to release tension in those muscles that are working too much. Now this alteration in biomechanical load created by either posture or the way our body withstands gravity or faulty biomechanics as a muscle joint complex can result in a decreased range of motion as a whole muscle joint complex itself or as a hypomobile joint locally.