Welcome to my VERY FIRST chiropractic blog! After about a decade of dreading the jump into cyberspace, my daughter Rachel (who is also my office manager) successfully dragged me kicking and screaming into the 21st century. And so what better way for me to begin this ultra-modern method of communication than to talk about an amazing thing that happened before the internet, before computers, and before we even had the radio!

The birth of chiropractic dates back to the final years of the 19th century. It was 1895 in the little Iowa town of Davenport on the banks of Mississippi River where a very unique and ingenious man named Daniel David Palmer tested a very unlikely theory. A janitor in his building told Palmer that he had lost his hearing after lifting a heavy bucket and feeling something give way in his upper back. At the time, Palmer was practicing something called “magnetic healing”, and was very well schooled in human anatomy. He found what he thought to be a misaligned vertebra in the man’s upper back and was compelled to “rack” the bone back in place with his hands to see if it might restore his hearing. Lo and behold – it worked! This successful act of intuition gave birth to the world’s largest drug-free healing art, built around the concept of what Palmer would call “subluxation”.

A subluxation is a vertebra in the spine that has lost its normal alignment with the other vertebrae. Palmer theorized that such a misaligned vertebra could interfere with the normal “tone and tension” of the spinal nerves that branch away from the backbone to conduct vital electrical messages originating in the brain to all of the body parts. This was how Palmer accounted for the fact that “racking” the janitor’s spinal bones back into place produced the seemingly miraculous result. Palmer believed that somehow the man’s nervous system was being short-circuited by an out-of-place spinal bone – and putting that bone back in place “turned the power back on” in such a way as to restore his hearing.

Shortly thereafter “racking” became know as the fine art of adjusting the spine. Within a few years of Palmer’s discovery he launched the chiropractic profession – one that was designed to help restore normal function to the human body by restoring normal tone to the nerves. A wide variety of ailments were attributed to subluxation, depending on the level of the spine where the misalignment had occurred, and which parts of the body were served by nerves emanating at that level. Though today much of what chiropractors are identified with has to do with complaints in the back and spine itself, the adjustment of the spine can and does have positive benefits for the entire body by restoring normal nerve function.

Palmer planted his chiropractic profession within a philosophy that recognizes the self-healing properties of living things, and the idea that the doctor should work to free that self-healing property as a means of healing the sick. He believed that disease was not caused by the presence of a germ, but rather the absence of what the body uses to heal itself and remain resistant. He was a vocal critic of drug therapy, however his voice was obscured by the force and momentum of the industrial revolution, and the fledgling chemical companies that would morph into today’s gigantic pharmaceutical industry. The ramifications of how pharmacology took control of the political and economic healthcare landscape back then are profound, and will be explored in up-and-coming posts!

Though so may Americans today take medications thinking they somehow restore body function, it is in fact the nervous system that is the Big Kahuna where function is concerned. No other organ system plays as important a role in keeping you from “achieving room temperature” (a casual expression coroners use for those who are no longer in the land of the living).  The bulk of the nervous system is found in your skull (brain), in your spine (spinal cord), and believe it or not, in your gut! In facto-mundo, there is so much nerve tissue in the abdomen that some researchers in the field of neuroscience are talking about the “brain of the stomach!”  Gut feelings aside, the human spine houses the lifeline between the brain and the rest of the body, and problems with the structural alignment of the spine can be imparted to the nervous system. This is turn can reduce your level of function and give rise to health problems. One of the more powerful and telling bits of modern evidence for this was published in 2004 in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society. In a study that looked at a variety of lifestyle factors that effect lifespan, having significant postural distortion (misalignment) of the spine was associated with a shorter lifespan! Of course one of the many goals of chiropractic care is help individuals improve and maintain good posture.

In up-and-coming blog posts I will use this modern communication method to expand on the chiropractic model for health – one that is as valid today as it was when it was founded over a century ago by D.D. Palmer.

.