Your Innate Healing Ability

How Does Chiropractic Heal?
Why do so many people with so many different health problems benefit from chiropractic? How does chiropractic heal without drugs and surgery?

An Experiment
What would happen if you cut your hand? You'd bleed of course, but almost immediately afterwards the blood around the cut would begin to clot, sealing off the wound and preventing further blood loss and infection. The act of clotting is made up of nearly fifteen different chemical reactions! Your blood, however, will clot even if you haven't studied biology.

Further, any dirt or bacteria and other germs that got in the cut would be hunted down, attacked and gobbled up by a vast, natural, antibiotic army made up of white blood cells, neutrophils, eosinophils, leukocytes, mast cells, killer cells, antibodies and others that constantly patrol and protect your nooks and crannies. But you don't have to know their names, what they look like or even know they exist for them to work.

A Cancer Patient?
If you cut the hand of a cancer patient they would also heal. If they can heal their cut, why can't they heal their cancer? They can. The medical journals contain many stories of recoveries from "incurable" diseases. Something woke up their natural "inner healer" and the cancer began to dissolve. Can you awaken your "inner healer" before you get a chronic disease?

The Practice Of Healing

Much of the practice of so-called "healing" today is the suppression of symptoms with drugs. That rarely deals with the cause of the problem. Does taking antibiotics raise the resistance of the person who was so weak and rundown that the germs in the air found his body fertile soil? Does removing the tumor correct the metabolism that caused cancer to grow in the first place? Does the taking of antihypertensive for high blood pressure correct the malfunction causing the blood pressure to raise? Does giving children drugs to pacify them correct the cause of their poor behavior?

Walking Medicine Cabinets

Now, while there is undoubtly a time and a place for medical care, we must understand its strengths and limitations to use it wisely. Swallowing drugs while your general health deteriorates is not the way to live your life. We all know of people who are walking medicine cabinets, who take many drugs for their "health" but are not healing. If the drugs could heal, they wouldn't be needed after a few doses. Further, the side effects of medicines can and do cause considerable damage. Why aren't other approaches explored?

Where Does Healing Come From?

Chiropractic is founded upon a single, basic premise: all living things have an inborn or innate wisdom or healing ability which constantly works to maintain us in health and heal us if we are injured or diseased. This quality of life has been described in philosophical, scientific and spiritual terms: "the wisdom of the body," "innate intelligence," "the collected lessons of evolution," "the God within," "homeostatic adaptatory mechanisms" and our "inner healer" among others. It is constantly striving to maintain our health our entire lives.

This is echoed by Lewis Thomas, M.D. in The Medusa and the Snail: "[There is] a kind of super intelligence that exists in each of us, infinitely smarter and possessed of technical knowledge far beyond our present understanding."1

And Deepak Chopra, M.D. in Quantum Healing states, "Although medicine has spent several centuries trying to hold on to the idea that the body runs itself alone, like a self-motivated machine, there must be a driver here, too. Otherwise our body's chemistry would be a jumble of floating molecules instead of the incredibly ordered and precise machinery that is so obviously is."2

Vertebral Subluxation Complex

There is a physical condition which interferes with the expression of your inner wisdom, preventing you from expressing your utmost healing potential. It is called the vertebral subluxation complex. This condition irritates our nervous system, distorts your physical structure or posture and drains your energy, weakening you and causing dis-ease. This dis-ease blocks up your natural healing energies or vitality, lowering your resistance to disease and your ability to adapt to the physical, emotional and spiritual stresses of life.

The Chiropractic Adjustment

The goal of chiropractic care is the correction of the vertebral subluxation complex, this major interference to healthy life expression. The doctor of chiropractic locates the vertebral subluxation complex in your body and corrects or relieves it with a special procedure called a chiropractic spinal adjustment. This begins a process that unlocks your energies, balances your body and awakens your "inner healer."

The Mosaic That Is Health

Many things can affect your healing potential: diet, weight, exercise, cigarettes, drug use, vaccinations and surely the strengths and weakness inherited from your parents. New research is revealing that emotional health can strongly affect physical healing. Toward that end a new branch of health studies has emerged--psychoneuroimmunology--which explores how our minds influence our immune systems. Bernie S. Siegel, M.D. studied "exceptional" patients who recovered from terminal cancers to learn what qualities they possessed that led them to recovery: "Exceptional patients refuse to be victims. They educate themselves and become specialists in their own care. They question the doctor because they want to understand their treatment and participate in it. They demand dignity, personhood and control, no matter what the course of the disease.... Physicians must realize that the patients they consider difficult or uncooperative are those who are most likely to get well."3

But the most important factor that influences health is ourselves. As John Upledger, D.O. has written: "The secret something that is shared by all effective healing methods can perhaps be best characterized as the process of leading the patient to an honest and truthful self-discovery."4

How Chiropractors Heal

The chiropractic spinal adjustment relieves the vertebral subluxation complex that interferes with your nervous system thus allowing your "inner healer" to revitalize your mind and body providing nourishment, strength, flexibility, balance and the potential of awakening to your process of self-discovery and inner healing.

Get your spine checked by a doctor of chiropractic. It could make the difference between sickness, disease, pain and suffering and health, vitality, growth and strength.

References

1. Chopra, D. Quantum healing. New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 36

2. Thomas. L. The Medusa and the snail. New York: Bantam Books, 1983, p. 96.

3. Siegel, B. S. Love, medicine & miracles: Lessons learned about self-healing from a surgeon's experience with exceptional patients. New York: Harper and Row, 1986, pp. 24-25.

4. Upledger, J. Self-discovery and self healing. In R. Carlson & B. Shield (Eds.), Healers on healing. Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1989, p. 67.