Chiropractic and Pain Relief

What is Chiropractic?

Depending who you ask, you will get a different answer, but in a nutshell, Chiropractic is a system of healthcare that places major emphasis on the (structural and functional) relationship between your spinal column and your spinal cord and brain. Simpler still, chiropractors believe the primary system that effects your health is your nervous system as it connects your brain to every muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, joint and organ in the body.


How and Why it Works,

Originally chiropractors had the simplistic notion that a bone out of place in the spine will trap spinal nerves, therefore if you take pressure off the nerve by moving the bone health is restored. Chiropractors call these ‘bones out of place’ subluxations.

Looking at the anatomy of the spine, this seems a reasonable assumption, but more modern research into neuroanatomy and neurology suggest it may be more complicated than that. For instance one of the most puzzling episodes in chiropractic history where the apparent effectiveness of the Chiropractic Asylums in treating psychological disorders. One psychologist who examined records of the Palmer Chiropractic College Asylum discovered that people who would today be labelled as schizophrenic where being completely cured without drugs in as little as two weeks!

Now, thanks to some pretty invasive brain research we can understand why. Electronic stimulators were placed in a part of the brain normally stimulated by movement (especially spinal movement) – the vermis - in 11 psychiatric patients who had illnesses of 6 to 23 years duration. After initial treatment 10 were functioning without medication or any other treatment, except the vermis stimulation. [Experiment quoted by James Chestnut in The 14 Foundational Premises, more info available at http://www.thewellnesspractice.com]


The chiropractic asylums used regimes of daily physical exercise, social interaction and multiple spinal adjustments – way ahead of their time!

This also explains why often people feel so good after chiropractic treatment, even if they came in feeling fine!


Why is Chiropractic Effective in Treating Pain

It seems to be this double whammy of directly moving joints, improving the mechanics of the area and the effects in the brain that make chiropractic so effective.

The research to supporting it's effectiveness

http://painrelief.wbp-bedford.co.uk/Lower-Back-Pain.asp

http://wbp-bedford.co.uk/users/23925/downloads/SH%207%20%20%20What%20Science%20Says%20about%20The%20Spine.pdf

Any particular types of pain it is effective in helping with

The most typical types of pain are low back pain, neck pain, headaches and nerve entrapments. Due to its prevalence in society the most research has been done on low back pain, though a large study on headaches was conducted in the states.


Any good anecdotes of it's effectiveness.

Any chiropractor will be able to supply you with miracle stories, here are three of mine

Mr X came to me having suffered severe whiplash injuries to his low back and neck from a car accident he had several weeks earlier and was not improving. The first treatment Mr X came in on two crutches, the second treatment 1 crutch, the third a walking stick, and by the fourth was walking normally. This impressed the elderly neighbours who had been watching his daily struggle from his car to our office ease with remarkable speed.
Ms Y came into see me a few days before her birthday having suffered with severe headaches and migraines for a number of years. Ms Y suffered some kind of pain daily, and would often have to resort to morphine based drugs. 3 treatments and 5 days later years of pain and drug use ended. Ms Y has needed a few ‘top-up’ treatments over the past 4 years, but has never had a return of such crippling or long lasting pain.

Mrs Z is less of a sudden success, but is a great example of persistence. Mrs Z, in her 50’s was on morphine patches for neck, shoulder and back pain, of 2 years duration. X-rays revealed arthritis in the neck, but not severe enough to offer an operation. The doctors and specialists were doing all they could, but the pain was worsening and ever more drugs were needed. Apart from continuously wearing morphine patches, Mrs Z was also on gabapentin, and paracetemol. Repeated chiropractic adjustments over the course of 3 months saw an end to the morphine use. Another 3 months and goodbye to gabapentin. Another 3 months and off the paracetemol and discharged by her pain specialist. Mrs Z is now more active, has more energy and is looking forward to getting older instead of dreading it!

Quackbusting the Quackbusters

Part 1 of possibly many!

The (not so) Amazing Randi

Well for my first blog post I thought I’d kick off with something that ‘gets me ranting’ and hopefully controversial, and that is alternative health and the various sceptics and ‘quakbusters’.

So who are the quakbusters? Well they are a group of supposedly conscientious doctors and scientists who have our best health interests at heart, who demonstrate this by stamping on any form of non-conventional medicine and labelling it as dangerous, and anyone involved in it as unscrupulous; while at the same time ignoring all the dangers, bad science and fraud within their own industry.

Now before I have a bash, I should make my position clear – modern medicine is great in very many ways, and I am very grateful for the thousands and thousands of researchers, GP’s and surgeons who are dedicated to improving the human condition and saving lives.

The people I have a problem with are those not really involved in health, badmouthing safe methods of health care and proclaiming they are using science and critical thinking. One of the top sceptics is the Amazing Randi, and another is our very own Mr Stephen Fry. Both are very intelligent, great entertainers, I would love to meet them both, and would certainly listen to them as authorities on many subjects, but both have some kind of bee in their respective bonnets about ‘alternative health’, are often outspoken on the subject, yet I would wager a packet of Mr Fry’s ‘weasel coffee’ that neither of them have spent much time studying the complexities of the immune system, the nervous system, emotions, biochemistry, biology, electromagnetism and their interactions.

They might of, but I doubt it.

So why do I frown upon their behaviour? Well they claim to be scientific but

1) neither have any evidence of healthcare qualifications

2) Having witnessed them on TV ignore the evidence put right infront of them of something ‘strange’, and dismiss the subject as poppycock, despite the evidence, I have a low opinion of their truly objective scientific thinking.

I put my case before you

All incidents happened on an Amazing Randi TV show here in the UK some years ago. None of them involve health, but draw attention to ignoring things they don’t want to see.

1) This involved a demonstration designed to show how inaccurate astrology is. Now I myself am not a big believer, but I do find it interesting, and I was fully expecting something along the lines of ½ the audience identifying with the horoscope that was prepared and read out by an astrologist. Now at first most people had their hands up, but as the reading went on more put their hands down. Sitting in the audience were Stephen Fry, and his comedy partner Hugh Laurie (now of massive House fame). Basically the horoscope sounded to me like everything us commoners know about Stephen Fry, and indeed he was one of the last few. Then at one particular point he put his hand down at a comment that most of us would say was true about him. In the end only 2 or 3 people had their hands up, one was Hugh Laurie. So even though to the listener it sounded exactly like Stephen Fry, and even though his hand was still up towards the end, just because he put his hand down Fry and Randi used it as conclusive proof Astrology is nonsense.

Now whatever your views on astrology, it was hardly a big win for the Randi camp. Personally I feel that if the moon and planets have an effect on the tides of the planet, and we are 70% water, it must scientifically have an effect, I just don’t think we know what it is yet!

2) Now this for me is the real clincher of the (not so) Amzing Randi’s powers of delusion. He set out to disprove pendulum dowsing. Again, I really think I’m a true sceptic, but when I see proof of something weird, I want to learn more about it, not fob it off just because I can’t explain it. The experiment was quite simple, a map was laid out on a table top, but with all labels, roads, nameplaces and other identifiers removed. What the dowser had to do was locate the site of an ancient monument. Within a couple of minutes the dowser had located 2, and let Randi know. Randi said that on the map there was only one, so the dowser replied that one of them was probably undiscovered yet, and pointed to the one that he thought was on the map.

Well can you guess what happened? The dowser actually went and got it right! Amazing, I couldn’t believe it. What did Randi do? – swiftly move on to something else and probably never tried to investigate further.

So as you can see Randi is hardly objective, so when he comes to write about chiropractic and its effects on the flu he tries to disprove it by waffeling on about some trial that showed chiropractic created a 400% increase in immune function, but said that it was a poor study and he couldn’t find any details on it. And that was that. All he had to do though was a) ring the college that did the study b) google “chiropractic flu” and he would have got this –

So I put it to you Randi found these sites too, but ignored them like any good brainwashed man would.

OK, I think I’ve had enough now. Please leave your comments, or ask questions on my clinic’s discussion forum http://www.drchrisonfacebook.com