As I was about to fall asleep the other day I had this idea to write an article about what I believe.  If it pleases you, I have left a space next to each item for you to check off those things that you believe as well.  Or you can X off those things that absolutely prove what a stark raving lunatic I am.  Without further ado, I believe…

___ that the universe has a designer, a sentient being that has always been in existence, who designed and created this place specifically for us.  I shall call Him God. 

           

___ that God put into motion specific laws that we call physics and chemistry that control the day to day workings of this universe.  While God may love us, physics could care less, so time and gravity subdues us all in the end. 

___ that this planet is unique in all the universe in its 900+ details of fine tuning that allow for advanced life to exist for a short window of time.  We are alone.  But unlike Carl Sagan I do not consider it a big waste of space for us to be alone.  Rather I think that it took an entire universe to make one place as unique as our earth.  Thank God! 

___ that the ultimate purpose of this universe is to completely conquer and eradicate evil.  Each of us has but a few years to show if he/she is worthy.  We all have a part to play. 

___ that each of us has a purpose.  You can choose to accept or choose to reject that purpose.

___ that it is one of our  prime responsibilities to care for the vessel (our body) that we were given.  It is through this vessel only that we can express God’s purpose.

___ that genetics is responsible for at least half of our health potential.  We inherit our ancestors’ strengths and weaknesses.  Time creates mutations.  Mutations are mostly bad, despite what X-Men and Heroes would have you believe. 

___ that our nerve system is the prime coordinator of all health.  The spine is fragile.  The nerve system is damaged by spinal injury and degeneration (enter time and gravity again)

___ that chiropractic adjustments partially but significantly improve our health by repairing spinal damage and reducing nerve stress and inflammation.  This is a good thing.

___ that my purpose in chiropractic is to get this message to as many people as I can and adjust as many people as I can while my body will perform this task.  So please help me.

And if that wasn’t enough, here are some more.  I also believe:

___ that you can’t take it with you.  There’s no point in trying.

___ that our planet is better off with you on it, and humanity is better off with you in it.

___ that we must strive to improve every day. 

___ that our minds do not know the difference between reality and what we tell it.

___ in Peter Pan.  Because I love peanut butter.  Old people get this.

___ that each of us has the power to change our future.  But only through understanding the past.

___ that our internal working paradigm from which our mind operates is always the limiting factor in our growth.  We need to change it.

___ that vaccination can be very dangerous.  If you do it, do so because you did the research and you think it’s a good idea, not because some bureaucrat or drug manufacturer tells you that you need to.

___ that the human body is made to sit a little, walk a little, run a little, eat a little, lie down a little, stand a little, and bend a lot in every direction every day. 

___ that Frodo lives, that the empire did strike back, and we could all use a bigger boat.

___ that happiness comes from contentment, and contentment comes from a balanced life, and a balanced life comes from a lifetime of well thought out good decisions and accepting the consequences of those decisions.  In other words, look at the cards you are dealt, dump the bad ones, try to get some better ones, and then play the hand out knowing that you did your best.    

___ that it is funny that we wonder why the years go by so fast.  They go by fast because every Monday we just can’t wait for the week to be over so that we can get to the weekend.  And on the weekend we race through it doing every bad thing to our body that we can, and maybe spend an hour on Sunday asking God for forgiveness for how little we are.

___ that ice cream is preferable to pizza, but just barely.

___ that you are the most important person in my universe while I am in the adjusting room with you.  Unless my wife calls of course.   

___ that what we believe, even if it’s wrong or stupid, is more important than what we know.  So whatever it is you believe, believe it smart.  Think it out.  Then hold your ground.  I may believe in lots of dumb stuff, but it’s my dumb stuff, I like my dumb stuff, it keeps me afloat.  So our beliefs are our own personal floatation devices.  Don’t go swimming without them.  And always wait 30 minutes after you are done eating.  

             

                        In the exam room, called Innate, you will see the cane that Jerry used to use to get around.  He had literally racked up his body working in the body shop industry on the alignment rack, having fallen off of it.  Add to this plenty of dirt-bike falls and you had a spine that couldn’t support its own body.  He gave me the cane not long after he began care when he no longer needed it. 

            In the front room you will find an empty bottle of antibiotics next to the tale of Andrew, the 8 month old whose chronic ear infections were conquered by chiropractic. 

            Then there is the asthmatic 2 year olds story in the computer room that was life changing for her.  No more inhalers or hospital ER visits.

            My favorite story is in Palmer, the story of Yolanda and her daughter.  Yolie had headaches 24/7 and she later confessed that without chiropractic care to control her headaches, she would not have been physically able to adopt her drug addicted niece’s baby.  This baby, born addicted to drugs, is now quite normal and academically advanced thanks to the love of a mommy and daddy that might not have been.

            But the real reason for this article are the case studies on the next page.  There are three.  Each of these is formatted the same.  I have scanned in a portion of the patient’s exam results showing the date of the exam and the TOTAL SUBLUXATION VALUE (TSV).  For example the top case study has a TSV of 108 on 10/21/05.  This number is the sum of the two smaller numbers at the top of the exam in the little rectangle, 62 and 46.  The 62 is the NERVE STRESS VALUE (NSV) or the sum of the little numbers on the left and right of the spine.  The 46 is the INFLAMMATION VALUE (IV) or the sum of the numbers in the little spinal boxes.  Remember that the little numbers vary from 1-4.  1 is tender.  2 is ouch.  3 hurts so bad that I can tell it hurts without the patient saying anything, and most 4’s are in too much pain to get to my office in the first place. 

            And also remember that the goal of Intensive Care is to reduce both the NERVE STRESS VALUE and INFLAMMATION VALUE by 50%.  So over time we see the reduction in the TSV as the patient progressed through Intensive Care to Reconstructive Care and then to Wellness Care when maximum correction had been achieved.  The first case saw a TSV go from 108 to 4 taking just over 8 months.  The second case took 15 months to progress from 148 to just 12!  And the last case went from a TSV of 135 to 16 in a year!  These are not exceptional cases.  They are very typical in time and results.

            But a finer look at case 3 shows that she discontinued adjustments for exactly 9 months.  The proof that subluxation is progressive and degenerative is that her TSV increased from 16 back to 81 over those 9 months, necessitating a short Intensive Care to regain control of the subluxation from the effects of time, gravity, and life. 

            So from these cases you can see that the goal of Intensive Care is to reduce the NSV and IV by 50%.  Once this is accomplished the goal of Reconstructive Care is to reduce the TSV by the maximum possible, usually to around 5-10.  And the goal of Wellness Care is to keep the subluxation from returning.  Each phase is necessary to complete correction/control of subluxation.    

            Some patients go through this process only one time.  They learn it once and stick to it.  Patient 3 will take at least twice through to learn.  But this is why we teach what we teach and offer the programs we do.  This is why our office is unique.  I hope you share this information with a friend.    

            So, last week’s article introduced the concept of the 6 million earths each populated by 7 billion people, with every person having a cell phone making calls to every other of the 40 quadrillion people at the same time, and all of this with no dropped calls.  That is something that no cell carrier could ever accomplish with all their amazing technology but it is something that is embedded in your nerve system.  Furthermore, you know the big portion of your brain that humans are so proud of called the cerebrum?  Well, that part has little to do with this story.  The cellular phone system in your head is in the brainstem and is about the size of your thumb.  That’s some amazing computer, and all by accident and coincidence as a process of happenstance and random evolution…notice the dripping sarcasm (but that’s for a different discussion).  So, as cell carriers are defined by the quality of their network, so is your health defined the same way.  Let’s look at dropped calls.

            Your automatic (or autonomic) nerve system is in charge of controlling and coordinating the actions of these quadrillions of cells every moment of every day for an entire lifetime.  And while it is so much more complicated than this, your health boils down to how well this communication system is working.  Let me explain.  Every cell in your body has what is called a basal metabolic function.  Whether it is a heart cell, a muscle cell, a digestive cell, or a liver cell, it has a basic function that it does all by itself.  Of course it needs nutrients from the outside to keep doing this job, but it needs NO outside commands or communication.  It is autonomous.  But what if the heart needs to beat faster, or the muscle cell needs to contract, or the digestive system needs to process a big meal?  That’s where our nerve system steps in.  It responds to the needs of your environment and commands the needed parts of the body to increase or decrease or otherwise change their activities.  When this occurs in harmony you have a state of ease or health.  And when there is miscommunication or a glitch, you have a state of dis-ease or ill-health.  And when you have ill-health or dis-ease goes on for a long enough period of time this will develop into a diagnosable disease.  We don’t want that. 

            The final player in this performance is, of course, the subluxation.  This damage to spinal movement/alignment always damages nerve function and communication and usually leads to nerve facilitation, which is basically nerve hyperactivity.  Nerve hyperactivity in turn leads to cell, then organ, and then system hyperactivity.  This is the neurological theory of disease causation and is the result of our own body’s version of the dropped call.  

            Are you in a relationship?  Depending upon how you define a relationship you might answer the above question differently.  But in point of fact you are in many many relationships.  As an example I have a relationship with God, my wife, dad, mom, sisters, son, daughter, son-in-law, brother-in-law, cousin, and on and on and on.  Some of our relationships are shallow and some are quite deep.  And the deeper they are the more rewarding they are.  This is why we must develop our relationships on a daily basis.  After all, when it’s all said and done, it is our relationships that we get to take with us, not all the stuff we accumulate throughout our short lives.  Relationships are important.  But there is one person not mentioned above that we each have a relationship with that is critical, for that relationship determines our health and our happiness.  And that person is ourselves. 

            For the sake of this article I would like to address two parts of this relationship we have with ourselves.  The first, perhaps most important, and the one that we will discuss the least is our mental or emotional relationship.  In short, each of us has a paradigm from which we process all information.  It is the context from which we think.  A fish does not reflect on the fact that it lives in water.  It just does, and, therefore, all of its decisions are made accordingly.  So as a fish is born to water we were born into a family and that family has had a large part in creating the paradigm from which we view our whole life, for good or ill, sadly too often for ill.  I would contend that this paradigm creates the backbone of our emotional relationship with ourselves.  It determines, to a large extent, whether we are happy or sad as well as our daily decisions.  With great effort that paradigm can be changed to a certain extent, but that is for another article. 

            The second part of this relationship is physical, or actually neuro-chemical to be precise.  It is the relationship of each cell in our body to every other cell, and this relationship is controlled and mediated by none other than our central nerve system, the brain, spinal cord, and nerves.  We have a whole lot of cells in our body.  I’ve heard billions, trillions, and even quadrillions, so for the sake of this visual lets use one number I have heard, 40 quadrillion.  So, the job of the nerve system is to connect every one of these 40 quadrillion cells with every other one, at the same time.  It’s kind of like each and every cell has a tiny little smart phone up to its little ear both talking and listening at the same time, connected to every other cell at the same moment.  Better than 4G that’s for sure.  Go Verizon.  This would be the mathematical equivalent of 6 million planet earths each with 7 billion people, each with a cell phone in hand, all talking to each other at the same time, and no dropped calls.  Definitely not Verizon.

            This is the relationship that your body has with itself and this is the relationship that subluxation interferes with by damaging nerve function.  It creates our next article’s topic... Dropped Calls.  Enjoy.

            
            Yeah, I know, the title sounds boring and technical, but this is an important topic for you to understand and an important distinction to be made.  Simply, qualitative is how good or bad something is, like this ice cream tastes good or bad (as if ice cream could taste bad), and quantitative is how much ice cream you have (more is better).  But when it comes to your spine and subluxation, qualitative is how I measure what needs to be adjusted today.  And quantitative is how much subluxation your spine has, as measured on your last examination.  I make this distinction because a common question I get is, “How is my spine today?”  That’s a good question, but not the right one for an adjustment visit.  The right question for adjustment day is, “What do you need to adjust today?”  “How is my spine?” is best saved for your examination visit.  Let me explain.

            Based upon the stories so many of you have told me over the years, my office seems a little unique, as compared to other chiropractors, in that we have a true quantitative analysis of your spinal subluxation on your first visit.  We do an exam that measures the amount of subluxation based upon its five components.  We measure your posture and quantify it on a 1-4 scale.  We measure your range of motion with an inclinometer to the nearest degree.  Our least quantifiable component is muscle spasm, which we can only really locate and quantify how tender it is.  Then we measure the inflammation, again on that 1-4 scale.  Finally, we measure your degree of subluxation degeneration in phase 1, 2, 3, or 4.  So at the end of the exam we have a bunch of numbers, numbers that have a specific meaning and then can be compared to later when we do the exact same examination.  As you know most cases of subluxation need 50% improvement in these figures to end Initial Intensive Care and qualify for Reconstructive Care.  And 90%+ is the goal to qualify for wellness care.  But if you have significant degeneration or herniation the threshold for qualifying for Reconstructive Care can be as high as 75%.  Anyway, this is true quantification and only during your examination can I honestly and accurately answer the question, “How is my spine today?”

            But neither of us has the time to do an examination on every visit so my analysis on your adjustment visit is different.  I am not quantifying anything.  I am qualifying.  I am using my palpation skills (both static and motion) and comparing them with your last examination and x-ray findings (your last quantification) and filtering this through 25 years of experience (over 1 million adjustments given) to decide what needs to be done today.  The purpose of this qualitative analysis of your spine is so I can answer the question, “What do you need to adjust today?” 

            In conclusion we do regular quantitative examinations to measure the health of your spine and then we do daily qualitative analyses to know what to adjust today.   

            As I was standing in the line at Rite Aid to buy batteries for our office clock I must admit that my eyes were drawn to the magazine rack next to the check stand, the ones that tell us how to have a sexy butt,  how to lose weight without dieting and exercise, and why celebrities love themselves.  One of the covers promised to tell me all I need to know about three teen mothers (now grown up I guess) and their failed romances with bad boys and drug dealers.  My immediate thought was that it’s so easy to make a bad decision and so hard to make a good one.  Good decisions are generally well thought out and therefore take time to make.  Bad decisions are quick and dirty and, therefore, are often fraught with unintended consequences.  The above referenced article explains it perfectly.  These teens made poor decisions on the spur of the moment and ended up as single teen moms.  Their children are the unintended consequences, and there will be more consequences as these kids get older.  No matter how you package it, it’s a mess.    

            So, do I want to go to the gym or go with my buddies to the party?  If I go to the gym I get hot and sweaty for a while but build some muscle, tone, and stamina.  Then I go home to a hot shower and a boring night.  If I go the party I get drunk and have a great time (so called) and then maybe crash and kill another driver because I’m going the wrong way on the freeway entrance.  Unintended consequences.  Do I want to take a drag on my buddy’s cigarette or not?  Do I want a drink or not?  Do I take vitamins or not?  Do I exercise or not?  Do I drink a gallon of water a day or not?  Do I graduate or not?  Do I take this job or that job?  Should I go to college?  Is this the right girl for me?  What do I want to do for a living?  Should I take this job?  Should I have a chocolate shake?  That was good.  Should I have another chocolate shake?  Should I lose weight?  Should I have that surgery?  Why shouldn’t I take Prozac?  It’s just pot.  How many kids should we have?  Moment after moment, day after day, our lives are a series of decisions.  We can think it out and make a good one, or we can take the short and easy route and make a bad one, or too often we just don’t bother to make one at all, which all too often is the same as making a bad one.  More unintended consequences.  You know I’m talking about.

            So, I spent thousands of dollars on that computer program to educate my patients and I spend a great deal of time with each new patient teaching about the spine and its relationship with health.  I do this because I fear the law of unintended consequences.  When I go to sleep at night I want to know that I have given you all the information and data you need to, firstly, know that there are important decisions that only you can make regarding your spine and nerve system.  Secondly, make well thought out good decisions today and in the future.  When you are in your eighties I want you to be the person we all point to and say, “Boy, I hope I’m as healthy as he/she is when I’m that age.”  

            In our last article we discussed your Innate Intelligence, your body’s ability to know what it needs to do each and every moment to keep you healthy, to utilize or harness the same forces in nature that would harm or destroy you in order to keep you healthy and alive.  That intelligence resides somewhere in your body, but we really don’t know where.  Some would say the brain, others the DNA, still others the cell membranes.  I believe they are all correct.  The intelligence that resides within each of us that keeps us healthy and alive is the cumulative total of all the little intelligences throughout our entire body, and is far too complex for this short article.  It is in each strand of DNA, in each nucleus, in each cell, within each tissue, within each organ and system, interacting and interconnected with every other system, organ, tissue, cell, and nucleus.  And interconnecting them all is one thing, your nerve system. 

            The nerve system is an amazing structure.  Its tiny fibers go to each and every single cell within the body (including moving cells like the blood).  In fact, if I were to magically remove every cell in your body except your nerve fibers I would still recognize you.  The ghostly shape of your nerves infiltrate every nook and cranny of your body.  And it gets even more amazing.  Let’s imagine there were not just one, but 7 million planet earths in the universe and each planet earth had 7 billion people on it (just like ours does).  Now let’s imagine that each and every person on these 7 million planets has a cell phone and that they all are communicating with every other person on every other planet at the same time.  And then let’s imagine that there are no dropped calls.  That pretty much describes what your own nerve system does every day.

            So, the force that your Innate Intelligence uses to communicate its wishes to every part of your body is the nerve impulse, a signal that travels from one nerve cell to the next and then to the next, and so on, until this command or that command is carried out successfully.  This goes on trillions of time a second throughout your body between the brain and the cells.  And when this happens without any dropped calls we have what we call health.  But what about dropped calls?

            That’s exactly what subluxation does.  Damage to the spine causes interference to the nerve impulse at the spine leading to dropped calls, commands and information that is therefore unable to get from one part of the body to the other.  So while your Innate Intelligence may be perfect, it is limited by the limitations of the physical matter that is your body.  It is limited by dropped calls due to subluxation.  This may be the major source of damage that subluxation does to your general health, but it is not the only source.  Next time the scourge of inflammation.    

            Chiropractic has three parts, the SCIENCE of the subluxation, the ART of the chiropractic adjustment, and a very well developed PHILOSOPHY of wellness.  Of the three we do not spend enough time in this office talking about the philosophy side of your health and wellness.  We spend a great deal of time discussing the subluxation, the 5 components of subluxation, and the 4 phases of subluxation degeneration.  You experience the adjustment every time you come to the office.  But what about this philosophy of wellness?  What is it and what good is it to anybody?

            When you get right down to it life consists of two things, physics and chemistry.  Physics is the science of the interaction of physical particles, gasses, liquids, and solids, heat and cold, gravity, dark energy, dark matter, and all the stuff that makes up the universe.  Physics controls how stars and planets are made and destroyed, how mountains are built up and then slowly eroded until they are small hills, how solar systems rotate around each other century after century.  Chemistry applies to the interactions at the molecular level, atoms and molecules, protons, neutrons, and electrons.  There is an order. There are rules that guide all of these processes.  But most importantly to our discussion is that these rules DO NOT CARE whether the things they build are destroyed or not.  They just act.  Gravity just acts.  Time just acts.  Thermodynamics just acts.  Molecular forces just act.  They don’t care whether you live or die.

            Well, you are made up of the same stuff as the planets and the stars and the comets and asteroids, the mountains and the rocks and the seas.  It’s just that all the stuff you are made of is in a different order, a much more complex order which gives you life, but also a much more fragile order so that life can be quickly taken away.  So in chiropractic philosophy the difference between you and a rock for example is that there is something that keeps you organized, something that cares about you, something that wants you to live a long and healthy life, and we call this something the Innate Intelligence. 

            It is the thing that each of us is born with that knows what to do in every instance to keep your body running smoothly on all cylinders.  Some call it the genetic programming, but it is more than that because genes are just software.  Some call it the soul but I think it is less than that.  But despite the disagreement as to what exactly this Innate is we do know one thing for sure, that the Innate uses the nerve system to control and coordinate all the systems in your body.  This coordination is health.  So when your nerve system is damaged (subluxated) this will reduce the ability of your Innate to do its job leading to a loss of health, sickness, and eventual death. 

            Next week, the link between subluxation and Innate.

            

            When I was a young child my parents took me and my two sisters on a trip to Yosemite.  My only real conscious memory was that of a small hole in the roof of the cabin in which we stayed.  My other “memories” are from the pictures that were taken.  My next trip there was on my honeymoon in 1980.  That’s when my wife and I fell in love with it…and each other of course.  So every couple of years since then we make our pilgrimage to absorb the beauty that is the America’s second national park.  The valley in particular is where 99% of visitors flock to in order to see the granite cliffs, domes, and waterfalls.  For me there is a sense of peace when I hike the trails of the valley as I study its beauty and wonder.  But at the same time I know that the violence, the amazing forces that made this wonderful valley are essentially still in action today.  Erosion. 

            First, it was repeated glaciers that formed the nearly mile deep, mile wide, four mile long valley that we all enjoy today.  Frozen water under the force of gravity slowly over thousands of years carved away at the weaker granite leaving only the tough stuff.  This is a tribute to edifices such as Cloud’s Rest, Half Dome, North Dome, Sentinel Dome, Glacier Point, The Three Brothers, and El Capitan.  These points were made of stuff so strong that they survived the glaciation process…survival of the fittest.  They had the luck of being made of stone that was denser than the surrounding rock that was eventually grinded down and carried away. 

            I see a chiropractic implication in this…of course.  Humans too are subjected to the survival of the fittest postulate.  But we are not solely dependent upon being made of stronger or denser stuff to survive, but we each have an additional ally on our sides that counters the erosive powers of time and gravity, and uses the forces of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics to create health and well being.  Without this ally we would quickly succumb to the same forces that destroy rock and create mountains and our lifespan would be short indeed.  This ally is what we term Innate Intelligence.

            Think about it.  There is nothing in the rock that cares about whether it is big or small, or whole or in pieces.  It is a rock.  But something in your body cares.  It is a something that loves you and cares for you and uses the same forces that wear down the rock, that wear down you, to build and continually rebuild your body for 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years.  It knows what to do each and every time.  It always makes the right decision.  It is perfect.  So why do we eventually die?  Despite the perfect Innate Intelligence that we all have our bodies will still succumb to the same forces that helped to create us.  In this universe, with these laws of physics, that is inevitable.  But for now we each have Innate.  So in the next article I will discuss the forces of Innate and how they act upon our body, and more importantly, how subluxation interferes with these life giving forces.  Stay tuned.    

pinal �
Xta`�Jx�Jegeneration and/or herniation.  And you know that the purpose of the chiropractic adjustment is to correct the subluxation as much as possible to help prevent the progressive degeneration that is subluxation.

            But as a medical doctor you only know to treat the symptoms with your pen and pad until the symptoms are so bad that surgery can be done.  What you don’t know or don’t care about is that with every pain med taken to cover or mask the pain, you are actually helping to accelerate the degeneration of the spine by letting your patient do things that he couldn’t do if he were in pain and shouldn’t do while he’s taking a drug that masks the pain.  This allows the joints to wear out faster and faster.  No one can stop the effects of aging, gravity, and life, but while chiropractic adjustments slow the process, pain meds actually accelerate it.  This information could save you or someone you love lots of pain, money, suffering and time.  I hope you share it. 

                        We all take over the counter (OTC) anti-inflammatory medication from time to time right?  They come in the form of aspirin, Tylenol, Motrin, Advil, Aleve, and several others.  And then there are the prescription forms that sometimes are just stronger versions of the OTC meds.  Sometimes they are chemical forms that may be more likely to cause “side-effects” so the FDA wants them supervised by your medical doctor.  And sometimes they are a new drug that will earn the company more profit as a prescription medication.  But for the sake of this discussion let’s just group them all under the title pain meds.  The last number I heard is that 1 in 6 TV ads are for a drug, and most of them are for pain meds.  Over time we have become immune to the side effects disclaimer that comes right after the ads, but we all know that for every “effect” of a drug, there are many, sometimes dozens, of “side effects.”  But today we are going to discuss a side effect that you will never see listed on the literature or ad of any pain med, but it is a most insidious one and the one that is most dangerous to you.  Kinda makes you sit on the edge of your seat doesn’t it?

            Let’s pretend that you are a medical doctor and your patient in front of you right now has chronic pain somewhere in his back or neck.  It’s 10:00 and when you came to the office you opened your little tool box on your desk and you extracted one of two tools that the box contains, your prescription pad.  Since you are a general practice medical doctor you rarely use the second tool of medicine that resides in that box, surgery.  Surgeons do surgery.  You write prescriptions for drugs.  And you write one for the back pain patient and send him on his way. 

            The drug works and the pain goes away, but in time it returns and so you prescribe more drugs, and over the years the drugs become stronger and stronger, as it takes more and more and stronger and stronger to cover the pain.  And then one day you realize that your prescription pad will no longer do the trick so you refer him to your surgeon buddy so that he can remove and/or fuse parts of the patient as if that is really going to fix anything.  You, the medical doctor, have participated in the tragedy of pain management. 

            As a patient in my office you know that the cause of the patient’s problem is subluxation.  You know that if left untreated the subluxation will result in spinal joint and disc degeneration and/or herniation.  And you know that the purpose of the chiropractic adjustment is to correct the subluxation as much as possible to help prevent the progressive degeneration that is subluxation.

            But as a medical doctor you only know to treat the symptoms with your pen and pad until the symptoms are so bad that surgery can be done.  What you don’t know or don’t care about is that with every pain med taken to cover or mask the pain, you are actually helping to accelerate the degeneration of the spine by letting your patient do things that he couldn’t do if he were in pain and shouldn’t do while he’s taking a drug that masks the pain.  This allows the joints to wear out faster and faster.  No one can stop the effects of aging, gravity, and life, but while chiropractic adjustments slow the process, pain meds actually accelerate it.  This information could save you or someone you love lots of pain, money, suffering and time.  I hope you share it.