Chiropractic can have many definitions depending upon who you ask. For example, a chiropractic student may have a completely different definition than a practicing doctor, who’s definition might be different to a medical physician or physical therapist. So what actually is chiropractic and why are there so many “versions” of what it is.
Let’s start with the basics, what every student learns day one… chiropractic is the art, philosophy, and science of manipulating a joint to have an effect on the body’s nervous system to return the system to a homeostatic point.
So now let’s break that down- chiropractic started as a philosophy just like most medical practices on how the body can be influenced by the physical world and what we put our bodies through. This is how there are so many definitions… Each philosophy can develop into its own definition. Eventually this philosophy and the many other philosophies that developed from the original slowly became a science with trials and evidence-based research. From that research, techniques to adjust the joints turned into an art form that took many years to develop and took on many different forms. This is why no one adjustment is the same from chiropractor to chiropractor. The foundation of the movement and the research behind each adjustment is the same, but it certainly does not feel the same.
On to the “manipulation” part of our definition. When you hear a chiropractor talk about “manipulating,” “adjusting,” or maybe even “cracking” your joints, what they are saying in a much shorter way is that we are using your body’s original biomechanics to reposition the joint to its optimal position. The reason we do this is because by placing that joint into its optimal position, the body can reset the nerves and muscles associated with that joint and begin the healing process and ultimately decrease inflammation.
So why does the nervous system have such an important role in chiropractic? If you think about how the brain and the spinal cord run almost the entire length of the body, you can begin to equate that to the body’s central highway system. As much as we try to avoid busy roads or highways in our personal lives, ultimately it is vital to each aspect of daily life- same goes with the body. The brain controls everything and in order to get its messages out, it uses the body’s “highway” or spinal cord. And just like our real life highways, there are exits that take us to different places. Now take these exits and think about that Halloween skeleton sitting in your basement or attic. Ever noticed how the spine is made up of segments? Each one of those segments move and sometimes, they move too far out of place. Essentially this is like closing an exit on a highway… so much chaos, from the traffic to rerouting to the construction trying to reopen that exit. Same thing happens in the body: que the inflammation, pain, and lack of movement in that area and the areas that highway exit goes to.
This is where chiropractors come into play! When these segments are too far out of alignment and the body can’t return itself to its optimal position, we use the manipulation to bring that highway exit to a calmer state so that the brain gets those messages out to the rest of the body like it normally would, i.e. homeostasis.
Ta-Da! You just completed your first 3 months of chiropractic school in this post. If you have more questions or want to know more on a deeper level please let us know – we nerd out to this stuff and love to share our knowledge with anyone that is interested. Contact us to deep dive more into how Dr. David and Dr. Paige’s definitions of chiropractic can help you and your highway exits. 🙂
