“Back Popping” Help So Much?
How Does Chiropractic Help So Much?
When I begin treatment on a patient new to chiropractic, they are often surprised at how much better they feel and how quickly the treatment works. In fact, many are feeling much better almost immediately after I perform a chiropractic adjustment on an area that has been painful for weeks, months, or even years.
Many of these patients ask how it is possible to get such dramatic results from just “popping” their joints, especially when other treatments they may have tried have failed to bring much relief.
Even more surprising for some patients is that other health complaints will often resolve after they begin chiropractic treatment. These include things like chronic sinus problems, asthma, infertility, high blood pressure, digestive problems, and many other common health issues. While the results of chiropractic treatment for such conditions are less dependable than for musculoskeletal pain, they do occur for quite a few patients. How is it possible for popping spinal joints to create such effects?
Some chiropractic skeptics insist that any symptomatic benefits from chiropractic adjustments are strictly due to the placebo effect – in other words, because the patient expects the treatment to help, the improvement they notice is “all in their minds”.
Yet many of the patients who report these benefits were themselves skeptics before being treated. They did not have a predisposition to believe that the treatment would help them. On the contrary, many of my skeptical patients tell me before I begin treatment that they know I can’t help them – they only came at the insistence of a family member, a friend, or some other person they just want to leave them alone. These former skeptics often become my most enthusiastic supporters.
While there may be some instances where the placebo effect is in play, there is obviously more going on than the improvements being all in the patients’ minds.
So how can chiropractic adjustments relieve pain so quickly, and how could chiropractic treatment have any effect whatsoever on conditions involving glands and organs?
The answer lies in the connections of the spine to the nervous system. The nervous system monitors and controls the entire body – all the organs, glands, and tissues, as well as the musculoskeletal system. Much of the nervous system is housed within the spine and there are numerous complex interactions between the spine and the functions of the nervous system.
Many chiropractors use a somewhat over-simplified model of the spine’s interaction with the nervous system to explain things to patients and this model is technically inaccurate. Because of the inaccuracy of this model, critics of chiropractic have rightfully dismissed it as being unscientific.
But there is a vast difference between the oversimplified model of a displaced spinal bone “pinching” a nerve (which critics correctly point out as being anatomically impossible), and the current understanding of how the spine interacts with the nervous system.
The complete explanation is complex and beyond the scope of this article, but the simplified model is that the effects of chiropractic have to do with the nerve receptors contained within the spinal joints. When the spinal joints are not functioning properly due to trauma, repetetive stress, poor posture, inflammation, or other causes, the firing pattern of the nerve receptors inside the joints is altered.
In essence, a sort of interference is created in the nerve signals coming from the joints. This interference creates alterations in how the central nervous system interprets conditions in that area of the spine and the parts of the body it relates to neurologically. The central nervous system in turn may alter its control signals based on the interference. The result can include reactions such as excess resting muscle contraction (often a source of pain) and alterations in organ and gland function.
When a chiropractor performs an adjustment on the abnormally functioning joint, there is an immediate change in the firing pattern of the joint nerve receptors. For the patient in pain, the result is often a rapid relaxation of tight, sore muscles, and an almost immediate reduction in pain. For patients with other health issues, if that health problem was due to the abnormal nerve signals from the spinal joints (obviously, any health problem can have a number of other causes not related to the spine), the health problem will often resolve very quickly – within a few days or weeks depending on the condition.
So does this mean that chiropractic can help with just about any health problem? Potentially yes, but it is far more reliable in the treatment of musculokeletal pain than in the treatment of organ dysfunction.
