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#82 Abnormal Normals 

4/14/2014

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If you or someone you know has ever been a higher level athlete, then you know the importance of muscle memory.  And if you aren’t familiar with this concept, muscles actually have a memory of movement that can be learned and unlearned.  In fact it is the muscle memory that is a major reason why athletes have to practice so much and why they have coaches for every aspect of their game.  If you want to be at the top of your game you want to develop the right muscle memory the first time you do something because it is a lot easier to learn it right the first time than to re-learn it.  Hack golfers know exactly what I am talking about.  It is far easier to learn to golf properly from the beginning than to correct a wicked slice and re-learn proper mechanics.

Every aspect of body movement is guided and controlled automatically by systems such as:

1)      Muscle length. A muscle can be shortened by scar tissue, by exercise, by injury, by surgery, and by genetics.  It can be lengthened by stretching and deep tissue work.

2)      Muscle memory. This is a stored memory pattern in the collective memory of your muscles.  It controls what muscles fire and how they fire, in which order and how much.

3)      Cerebellar memory.  The cerebellum is a lobe of your brain that is in the very back of the skull.  It is in charge of fine motor coordination which means that the messages of muscle contraction that originate in your cerebral cortex are filtered and refined in the cerebellum to produce very fine and very well coordinated contraction of the muscles that are necessary to do the job at hand. 

So, how we move every part of our body is controlled by these automatic memories that have been programmed into us over our entire lifetime.  The older we are, the deeper the programming, the harder to change.  And that brings us to subluxation.  By definition subluxation is when these patterns of motion are damaging to the health of our spine and our nerves, and increase the wear and tear on our joints, and accelerate the degenerative processes of time, life, and gravity.  So, while these motion patterns may appear “normal” to us they are actually very abnormal.  Therefore, we call them Abnormal Normals.  Another term we use is negative neurological habit patterns.  But abnormal normals is simpler. 

The main purpose of chiropractic adjustments on a weekly basis over a long period of time is to be able to identify these patterns and provide an interruption to the patterns, and to encourage new and healthier patterns of motion to the subluxated spinal joints.  It is a very complex process that took years or decades typically to get to the way it now is and, therefore, will take some time to correct. 

This is why we have Initial Intensive, Reconstructive, and Wellness Care programs.  It may only take a few visits to help someone feel better, but without a corrective program, the same abnormal normal patterns will just keep returning.  As always it is your choice what we do, but as always, the best results are in the correction of the cause rather than just the treatment of the symptoms.  After all, it takes time to make abnormal normals just normal again. 

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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.