The Importance of Chiropractic for Stress Relief

In a world where people die every day from side effects and complications of drugs and surgery, it’s refreshing that there’s a natural and effective way to treat pain. It is called chiropractic.

Chiropractic is a healthcare profession that focuses on disorders of the musculoskeletal and nervous system. Doctors of chiropractic, or chiropractors, practice a drug-free, hands-on approach to treat anything from headaches to neck and back pain to pinched nerves to fibromyalgia.

Here’s what you need to know about chiropractic:

In order to understand how chiropractic works, you must first understand the natural function of the nervous system.

Your Personal Information Superhighway

The central nervous system is housed within the bones of the skull and spine, its delicate tissue being protected by bone. Messages start in the brain, travel through the spinal cord and then travel along the nerves that exit the spine.

Then the nerves continue to branch out to smaller nerves, just as arteries go to capillaries delivering oxygen to every cell. The nerves carry messages from the brain to every cell in the body including muscles, organs and glands.

Alternatively, sensory feedback is carried from the cells through the nerves into the spinal cord and into the brain. So basically the nervous system is an information superhighway allowing the brain to make commands as well as process sensory information as to how things are going in the body and then make necessary adaptations.

Stress Damages Our Bodies

This is a perfect system when all is well. However, we have mental, physical and chemical stress in our lives that burden our nervous system such as:

• previous injuries and traumas
• prolonged sitting at a computer
• chronic mental stress from work or a relationship
• all of the chemicals in our processed foods

These stressors can interfere with the proper function of our nervous system causing pain and even poor health.

How Chiropractic Helps

Chiropractic helps to remove interference and stress off of the nervous system using a hands-on approach to keep the spine moving and functioning properly.

Form and function go hand and hand. Misalignments of the spine, fixations within the moving pieces of the spine, inflammation around the discs or nerves, arthritic changes and disc bulges or herniations can have a negative effect on the nerve function causing pain, weakness, numbness or tingling or even poor health.

Using chiropractic to improve nerve function can help to eliminate the symptoms that result from nerve irritation.

Fascinating Facts

The American Chiropractic Association is a great resource for learning more about chiropractic. Here are some interesting facts from their website that you might not know:

• Doctors of chiropractic attend nationally accredited doctoral programs that have the same average classroom hours as medical doctors.
• Doctors of chiropractic are utilized by all 32 NFL football teams to keep their athletes performing optimally.
• An injured worker is 28 times less likely to have spinal surgery when their first provider seen for the injury is a chiropractor.

Recent studies revealed these great things about chiropractic:

• Chiropractic care for low back pain is 20 percent more cost effective than allopathic care.
• Chiropractic care outperformed all other treatments for low back pain including prescription medication, deep tissue massage, yoga, Pilates and over the counter medications.
• Doctors of chiropractic are the highest rated healthcare practitioners for treatment of low back pain above physical therapists, specialist physicians (neurologists, orthopedists, surgeons) and primary care physicians.
• Doctors of chiropractic provide a patient-centered whole-person approach to healthcare marked by greater interaction and better communication resulting in consistently higher patient satisfaction ratings than medical doctors.
• Chiropractors have an excellent safety record resulting in significantly lower malpractice insurance premiums as compared to other professions.

The bottom line: Chiropractic is a safe, natural and cost-effective treatment for pain with high levels of patient satisfaction and a record of great outcomes for the patient! If you’re looking for stress relief from daily life, try chiropractic today.

Dr. Sharman