Chiropractic and your Nervous System

Your whole body is made up of microscopic cells.  The nerve cells that make up your brain are called neurons.  Neurons make up your brain, your spinal cord and all your nerves throughout your body.  It’s an odd fact, but you have far more neurons down in your body than up in your head.

If you add up all the neurons in your body and sort them based on their jobs, they would roughly sort out into the pie chart above.  Yes, there really are that many neurons dedicated to digesting your food and then, ahem, going to the bathroom.  Notice anything else surprising?  Would you ever have imagined there are so few neurons dedicated to feeling pain?

The different jobs above are in action due to signals being sent back and forth over your nerves.  If nerve signals are being sent back and forth, what’s sending them and what’s receiving them?  It’s your body and your brain, both sending and both receive signals.  It’s what keeps everything above working and it’s what keeps you alive.

Most of those signals are sent through your spinal cord and your spinal cord is protected by your spinal bones – what makes up your back and neck.  Can you move your back and neck? Of course, so that means that spinal bones can move too, which also means they can get stuck or move out of place.  That matters because it can affect those signals sent through the spinal cord or its branches of nerves in a bad way.

Where does chiropractic fit into this story?  It’s all based on that spinal anatomy.  A Chiropractor finds the stuck and misaligned bones and gently corrects them.  That is the chiropractic adjustment.

When someone gets chiropractic adjustments regularly why does it help their entire health so much?  It’s all due to that same anatomy.  All those functions from that graph need nerve signals to be full strength and right on time.  A misaligned or stuck spine will interrupt that.  Chiropractic adjustments correct it.  With chiropractic care your body works better, and your whole health will show it.

One last thing though, remember how few neurons are dedicated to feeling pain?  If nerve signals are disrupted by spinal problems, a huge variety of problems can quietly set in, yet not cause any pain.  Digestion, sleeping, concentration, balance and breathing problems, and many others, don’t necessarily come along with pain.  This is why getting chiropractic care, even without pain, is still so helpful.