What are subluxations? What do they have to do with your spine, organs and overall health?
In this transcribed video interview, Dr. Jeff Echols explains how the health of the spine affects the organs of the body, what a subluxation is and how chiropractic adjustments can fix it. A chiro can fix much more than just back pain. Do you need a chiro? Dr. Echols has been a been a chiropractor for more than 20 years and practices in Austin, Texas. Contact him at 512-447-2422.
Hello, I am Dr. Echols and today we are going to talk a little bit about spinal health. We’re going to review the basic anatomy of the spine and see how that anatomy affects the function of the spine as well. Now when we start talking about, I mentioned to you before. Now when we start talking about chiropractic care, chiropractors actually work with you nervous system.
When I say nervous system I am talking about the brain and all the nerves that are in the body. Now if you look at this plastic model here, where looking at the spine from the side now. This is where the brain sits here. The spinal cord goes down through the spine. It’s actually inside the spine and it goes all the way down to about to the top of the lower back here. These are the nerves and these nerves are actually like extensions off of the brain. The brain is actually sending itself as a spinal cord down through this spine here and then they branch off and they go to every single cell and every single tissue and most importantly ever single organ in the body. Now as long as the brain can communicate with these organs through the nerves, we have a healthy situation there.
But, let’s say for some reason the spine was to get out of its normal alignment and it started to actually put pressure on one of these nerves. There was a research study done at the University of Colorado and they would place very small amounts of pressure on a spinal nerve. I believe it was 10 millimeters of pressure, which is about a much pressure you can barely feel your touch on your eyelid. Ten millimeters pressure on a spinal nerve. They found that much pressure would actually decrease the amount of electrical energy across that nerve by 60%.
So let’s say for instance this nerve was going to your heart and we got a little bit of pressure on that nerve, just a little bit, now we only got 40% of the energy the information and the intelligence being transmitted across that nerve going to your heart. That’s not a good situation. So our definition of health then would be when every single tissue, cell, organ of your body is when your body is receiving 100% potential nerve flow that’s there.
Ok, just to reiterate we got a spinal column here. The brain is in communication with all the different organs via the spinal cord and spinal nerve. There are 33 pairs of spinal nerves and each one goes to a certain organ and controls that function. Let me give you an example, this top vertebra up here, these nerves that come out of here radiate back up into the head. They also go behind the eyes and they also control the sinuses. So if we have a misalign vertebra, we call that subluxation, if we have nerve that is being pinched there its actually going to block the signal coming off that nerve and somebody can get one heck of a headache as a result of that. They can also start to develop allergy problems or sinus issues because their sinuses aren’t being innervated (supplied by nerves) properly by those nerves.
As we move down in the spine a little bit further into the base of the neck, these nerves go to the thyroid gland. And somebody who has ever received a blow to the neck or has been involved into an automobile accident, it can often effect the nerves that go to the thyroid and the person can start to develop thyroid disorders, like hypothyroidism or hyperthyroidism. As move down into the spine a little bit further, we encounter the nerves that innervate the lungs and the heart and when these have a problem there, a pinched nerve in that area a person may develop breathing difficulties, such as asthma or heart problems such as heart palpitations, murmurs and that kind of thing.
As we move down into the spine even further, into the middle portion or what we call the thoracic portion, these nerves control the stomach. And a lot of times, a lot of my patients who had terrible heart burn and reflux actually ended up having a subluxation or pinched nerve in this part of the spine. Once we took that pressure off the nerve, the nerve flow is restored back to the stomach and it can actually function at 100% instead of the 20% it was functioning at. As we move down lower in the spine, we get a whole another group of organs that are involved, the colon, the kidneys, the bladder and the prostate in men, ovaries in women. The whole reproductive and the whole eliminative system is definitely controlled by these nerves that come out. And again when there is pressure on those nerves it can end up causing problems. A lot of my patients have had great results with digestive disorders simply by just taking the pressure off the nervous system.
Now to drive home this point even further, the point of the nerves coming out of the spine and controlling the organs, I would like to tell you about a study that was done at the University of Pennsylvania. This was done by Dr. Henry Windsor, he was a medical doctor, he was actually a pathologist. And he didn’t understand why chiropractors were saying that these nerves problems could affect the organ.
So what he did was, he would take cadavers, a deceased person, their body, he would find out what was the cause of death. He would cut them open and examine the tissues of the body and for instance let’s say he found out this person had died from liver disease. He would then trace the nerves from the liver all the way back through the body to where they exited the spine and he did this time after time. He would find people with heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease he would trace the nerves back to the spine. 97%, almost 100% correlation there was a subluxation present at the spine at the same level that innervated the organ.
This is a fantastic reason to be under chiropractic care whether you have back pain or not. Because quiet frankly fixing back problems and back pain is only a very, very small portion of what chiropractors do. We are entrusted with keeping your nervous system functioning at as close to 100% as we can. And as we said before your nervous system is what controls your whole body and it’s what controls your immune system. So by keeping that nervous system free from interference and pressure or subluxation on the spine, you are doing everything you can to keep your organs and your body functioning at a top level.
For your chiropractic questions or concerns, call Dr. Echols at 512-447-2422, or schedule an appointment online here:
