The most common question i get in my practice is “WHY”?\u00a0 “Why do I get headaches”? “Why does my back hurt when I get up in the morning?”\u00a0 “My fingers are numb.\u00a0 Why?”\u00a0 I do my best to explain biomechanically and chemically what’s going on, but that rarely answers the question “Why?”\u00a0 The exception, of course, being direct trauma — i.e. ” Your back hurts because you fell off a ladder onto your back and injured the tissues of your back.”\u00a0 The causes of most back problems, however, are not so simple to explain.\u00a0 You can have back pain, headaches, morning stiffness, etc., etc., even though you’ve never fallen out of a tree or been in an auto accident.\u00a0 Then the logical mind will just assume that it’s “genetic.”\u00a0 Plenty of people are satisfied thinking that they have “bad genes” and there’s nothing they can do about it, so might as well just stay high on narcotic pain killers and avoid exercise at any cost.\u00a0 Some people are just not satisfied with that verdict and sentence. (Not to diminish the importance of genetics, but genetics are only PARTLY responsible for the fate of your musculoskeletal system).<\/p>\n
So here’s a possiblilty.\u00a0 We were born to walk barefooted on the soil, and we almost never do that. <\/em>Think about it.\u00a0 Why do we have flexible feet and controllable toes?\u00a0 If we were made to be on concrete all day, shouldn’t we have wheels instead of feet?<\/p>\n When we walk on a soft surface such as a grassy field or a sandy beach, two things happen.\u00a0 1)\u00a0 We leave a footprint, and 2)\u00a0 Our bodies have to use their sense of balance to keep us from falling over.<\/p>\n We leave a footprint.\u00a0 Footprints are evidence of a compliant surface, meaning that surface absorbs shock or impact as the force of our bodies lands on that surface.\u00a0 Every time we take a step, the force of that motion must be dissipated, or cushioned somehow.\u00a0 On a softer surface, a great deal of the force is dissipated externally, or outside the body.\u00a0 Blades of grass bend or break.\u00a0 Grains of sand separate.\u00a0 A slight indention is left in the surface.\u00a0 On a non-compliant surface, however, nothing changes.\u00a0 Concrete granules do not move farther apart.\u00a0 No indention is apparent.\u00a0 The question is, then, “where does the impact go?”\u00a0 The answer would be YOU.\u00a0 That’s where the impact goes.\u00a0 The ligaments and joint cartilages absorb most of that extra impact — which is exactly what they were meant to do.\u00a0 However, they were meant to have some help from the ground we walk on.\u00a0 All of this extra stress leads to tears in the fibers of these connective tissues. (references to come)\u00a0 Years of the abnormally high impact can lead to a high volume of these “micro-tears” which can have a negative impact on the integrity of the tissue, and thus lack of joint stability and strength.<\/p>\n On a softer surface, our bodies have to work harder to stay balanced.\u00a0 This is where a good dose of neurology is appropriate.\u00a0 It take quite a network of nerves and brain-firing patterns to keep us upright.\u00a0 Compare it to chewing food.\u00a0 How do you know when it’s safe to bite down without biting off your tongue?\u00a0 There are thousands of nerve endings in your tongue, called proprioceptors, that alert your brain as to the exact location of your tongue.\u00a0 The signals are processed in the brain, creating the proper motor signals to bite down and move your tongue out of the way at the same time.<\/p>\n We stay upright by a similar process.\u00a0 The muscles of our back, particularly the deepest layers of muscle that are fitted snugly against the spinal column, are heavily embedded with these proprioceptors.\u00a0 When we move, constant signals are generated by these nerve receptors and sent through the spinal cord to the brain.\u00a0 This way, your brain has a good “picture” of the exact location of your back based on the length of certain muscles and minute changes in the length of these muscles.\u00a0 These signals are processed by several areas of the brain and spinal cord to produce motor messages from the brain that coordinate the motions of the larger muscles that control gross movement of the spine (and other joints).<\/p>\n When we are on extremely stable surfaces, such as concrete and most flooring, that system no longer has to work very hard.\u00a0 As we all know, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”\u00a0 The small, unexercised proprioceptive muscles in the deep back lose their tone.\u00a0 As a result, we lose CORE STABILITY. [ “Core” is such a buzzword and quite misused these days.\u00a0 That is for another blog.\u00a0 Stay tuned.]\u00a0 We are essentially left with weak & injured, lazy backs that have lost their ability to move correctly.\u00a0 There are even professional athletes with weak, lazy backs –they just don’t know it.\u00a0 Yet.<\/p>\n So how does a chiropractor “fix” this?\u00a0 These poor motion patterns cause certain segments of the spine to either “lock up” or move abnormally.\u00a0 A good chiropractor will pick out these joints, and through a series of “adjustments,” re-establish proper motion into these joints.\u00a0 (Beware of the chiropractor who just “pops” every bone in your spine.\u00a0 It feels good for a few minutes, but you certainly don’t want to introduce too much motion into joints that don’t need it).\u00a0 Once we start to get the dysfunctional joint moving again, we have a series of exercises to help build the “core strength” of that joint (Core strength training does not mean doing 4000 crunches, by the way).\u00a0 It involves mostly some stretching and balancing techniques that we teach you in our office and encourage you to continue doing them at home or at work.\u00a0 In my practice, we refer to this process as Spinal Reconditioning.<\/p>\n Alternatively, you should pack up (and get rid of) 96% of your “stuff” and move to a quiet sandy beach somewhere and live barefooted.\u00a0 Keep a garden to grow your own food, plus the exercise of bending down (a heavy-user of core strentgth) to pluck weeds.\u00a0 Probably not much need for a chiropractor in that environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The most common question i get in my practice is “WHY”?\u00a0 “Why do I get headaches”? “Why does my back hurt when I get up in the morning?”\u00a0 “My fingers are numb.\u00a0 Why?”\u00a0 I do my best to explain biomechanically and chemically what’s going on, but that rarely answers the question “Why?”\u00a0 The exception, of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n