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#45 What If I Were A Shark?

3/19/2014

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            As you may or may not know, shark skeletons are made out of cartilage whereas yours is made out of bone.  You still have plenty of cartilage in your body in places like your nose and your ear lobes.  But more importantly all of your joints are lined with ultra smooth cartilage and the discs in your spine are also made of out cartilage.  So what would be different if you were a shark?  The difference is that as an adult human your cartilage making days are essentially over.  Sharks make it and you don’t.  This is important because if you damage your cartilage it will never ever ever ever heal to 100%, never!

            What’s the big deal you ask?  This big deal is that once your joints begin to wear out that is forever.  Let me explain further.  Cartilage is a funny tissue in that it has no blood supply.  It has to rely upon passive diffusion to get the nutrients it needs to stay alive and healthy.  So let’s take the disc for example.  They are living tissues that need nutrients, water and oxygen to stay alive.  Since they have no blood source they have to rely upon the vertebrae that they are attached to for their life source.  This occurs through a process called imbibition, which is essentially a pumping action that occurs when the bones move through their range of motion.

           

            Now enter the subluxation.  Since you know that the subluxation is essentially bones in the spine that can’t move their normal range of motion due to physical, chemical, and psychological trauma, that means that the imbibition process is halted for that disc, so it can’t get its nutrition, water, and oxygen, so it begins to die.  As it dies it dehydrates, then cracks, and then the nuclear center of the disc, essentially a fluid marble, migrates out of the disc leading to herniated discs.  And it works the same for the little gliding joints in the back of the spine.  Without motion, the cartilage dies and cracks and become arthritic.  There are $20 names for this stuff like intervertebral osteochondrosis and spondylosis deformans, but they are all dying cartilage that you cannot reverse ever.

            Now if you were a shark this would not be a problem, but since you aren’t there are three lessons to be had here:

1)      Since you cannot reverse cartilage degeneration, if you have any visible degeneration (phase 2) you had better work hard to keep what you have from getting worse.  The tools for this are the adjustments supported by regular flexibility training (aka stretching).

2)      If you are young enough to still be in phase 1 of subluxation degeneration, then adjustments and stretching can help to prevent this disease.

3)      Taking shark cartilage probably won’t help unless it turns you into one.

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    Dr. Rick

    After writing an article per week for a year, I just kept going.  These are most of my collection.  They are written with my existing patients in mind, so some stuff may seem odd or unusual, but would make perfect sense to those who know chiropractic and who know me.  Enjoy and share!  For my personal blog visit: 

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     Hello, My name is Andrew and I am a happy, healthy one year old.  But I wasn’t so happy or healthy when I first met Dr. Rick a few months ago.  I had been having problems with my ears for four months, I couldn’t sleep at night and I was miserable.  We’d been to the doctor lots of times but nothing was helping.  In fact, all the medicines the doctor had tried seemed to make me worse instead of better!  Both the regular doctor and the Ear-Nose and Throat doctor said that if the antibiotics didn’t work, then they’d just have to put tubes in.  Now my Mom and dad weren’t about to let them do surgery on me, especially since they had been reading and learned that tubes can cause more problems than they solve.  My mom and dad did a lot of praying.  Then my mom heard that sometimes babies who have a traumatic birth like mine have ear trouble.  You see when I was born they used a vacuum extractor and forceps to pull me out.  I guess all that yanking on my head, hurt my neck.  She also heard that chiropractic care can be the answer.  Now she was skeptical because she couldn’t imagine a chiropractor helping ear infections!?!  But at that point she was willing to try anything!!  Happily, a few weeks of adjustments and my ears were all cleared up.  In addition, I no longer had a stiff neck or shoulders and my whole personality was happier.  I have to tell all babies who have ear troubles, don’t let them give you tubes until you at least try chiropractic care first.  After all, it can’t hurt and if you’re like me, you could be perfectly well with no drugs and no surgery.  In my family, we thank God for Dr. Rick, because I feel better, my mom and dad are happier and sometimes, I even sleep through the night.