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How Stress is Affecting You

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April is National Stress Awareness Month. Have you ever wondered why stress affects everyone differently? How is stress affecting you?

It is well documented that high levels of stress can contribute to heart disease, cancer, headaches, ulcers, backaches and nearly every condition known to mankind. How can stress cause so many unique problems in different people especially since the stress reaction is the same for everyone?

Stress is a nerve system reaction that causes your heart to beat faster, your muscles to be tense, your stomach to tighten, and your hair follicles to stand up, all as a way to prepare your body for an emergency. When you interpret a situation as stressful, whether it truly is or not, your brain triggers this reaction by sending a signal over your spinal cord and nerve system to every cell of your body. In prehistoric times, this would have been the perfect reaction to escape from a hungry dinosaur, but in today’s stress filled world and no Tyrannosaurus Rex, this chronic reaction can cause pain, sickness and disease.

Where your body breaks down from stress may depend on whether or not you have a condition in your spine known as vertebral subluxation. A vertebral subluxation is a spinal injury that interferes with the normal function of your nerve system which can affect your health on every level. If you have this condition in your spine, your body is already pre-stressed.

Many people deal with stress through meditation, exercise and healthy food choices. These are all very good things to do as part of your lifestyle, but if your nerve system is pre-stressed, the slightest deviation from the perfect stress management plan can send you into a frustrating, uncomfortable, or painful tailspin. Removing this pre-stress causing subluxation can improve your resistance to daily stressors dramatically.

Research shows that it only takes the weight of a dime to reduce nerve transmission. Additional research has found that nerve compression can exist without pain and can cause deterioration within two weeks.

In this pre-stressed condition, your body becomes more vulnerable to outside stresses. The location of the subluxation can determine what types of symptoms, if any, you experience. For example, someone with nerve interference in the upper part of the neck might feel headaches, have allergies, or a stiff neck. Because the nerve fibers that come out of the upper neck also go to the entire body, pressure here can literally cause or mimic nearly every symptom or disease you can name.

Interference to the nerves in the lower back may cause a backache, leg problems and also affect ovary, prostate, bladder or bowel function. Interference in the middle of your back may affect your heart and lungs or cause tension, stomach problems, and digestive disturbances.

Like most serious conditions, vertebral subluxations can cause stress for decades without any symptoms. The birth process, childhood falls, sports injuries and poor lifestyle habits are just a few causes of subluxations. Rather than getting to the cause and removing this underlying problem, many people attempt to chase their symptoms away with drugs, or another type of quick fix, and then wonder why their condition returns. Removing the cause and optimizing the function of your nerve system is a better immediate and long-term plan.

Regardless of your symptoms, a chiropractic examination can locate pre-stressed areas in your spine that may be affecting your health on every level. Don’t wait for a crisis.

Lifetime Effects of Birth Trauma

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Birth Trauma May Occur Frequently
Traumatic Birth Syndromes are more common than you might think. A German medical researcher discovered that over 80% of the infants that he examined shortly after birth were suffering from injuries to the cervical spine, the neck, causing all types of health problems.

Believe it or not, there are 44 countries with a better infant mortality rate than the United States according to the 2012 CIA Factbook.

Dr. Abraham Towbin, from Harvard Medical School and the Department of Pathology found that ‘the birth process, even under optimal conditions, is potentially a traumatic, crippling event for the fetus.’

“Spinal cord and brain stem injuries occur often during the process of birth but frequently escape diagnosis.” Dr. Towbin continues, “In severe instances death may occur during delivery or, in cases where respiratory function is depressed, a short period after birth. Infants who survive the initial effects may be left with severe nervous system defects.”

Symptomatic vs. Asymptomatic
What about the babies that don’t show immediate signs and symptoms? What if the signs and symptoms don’t appear until later on in life? What is the effect on that infant’s potential to express itself completely and wholly as a human being? What kind of symptoms and diseases could it cause later on in life?

The neck is an area of the body that cannot afford to have an injury remain uncorrected. Since injuries here can affect the brain stem, all the vital functions of the body are inhibited. This can occur whether there are symptoms present or not.

Neck Injuries Can Affect the Entire Body
Do you remember what happened to Christopher Reeve, the actor who played Superman in the movies? He was riding his horse and fell on his head, breaking a bone in his upper neck.

In interviews after his injury, it was clear that he was unable to breathe without the use of a ventilator machine. He also was unable to control his elimination system. Many of his other bodily functions were altered. “How could this be?” you might ask, “He didn’t hurt his lungs, his bowel, or his bladder. He hurt his neck.”

This is precisely the point. When the neck is injured, the entire body is affected. When there is an injury to the spine, the organs and systems supplied by those nerves become dysfunctional. These injuries, which are very often vertebral subluxations, can alter the course of a person’s life if not immediately corrected.

A healthy spine and nervous system will ensure your baby’s development during every stage of their life. Don’t wait for a crisis. Make an appointment to have a spinal examination performed by a chiropractor who is trained to find and correct these injuries whether they are symptomatic or not.

A Picture Worth 1000 Words

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These x-ray pictures are worth 1,000 words about how people age that every person should know.

The three pictures represent neck x-rays of three different individuals who are in their mid- fifties with a very similar history of trauma over the years including mild sports injuries, car accidents, and head trauma.

The x-ray image on the left is of a person who has never received chiropractic care prior to the film being taken. The x-ray in the middle represents a person who has received chiropractic Crisis Care only at times when he was in acute pain. The person on the right has been receiving chiropractic Lifestyle Care for over 30 years. Here’s what we can learn from these images:

No Care: Notice the deterioration of the bone and the disc between C4, C5, C6 and C7. These segments look like a much older person because of the localized bone and joint decay. On the other hand, the segments above look fairly healthy as representing a much younger appearance like you might see in a healthy 20 to 30-year-old person. Yet this healthy and unhealthy appearance is within the same person who has had no chiropractic care to ensure a healthy alignment of his spine and proper function of his nervous system. At times of crisis, this person has resorted to medication and pain relieving treatments such as ice, physical therapies and exercise that masked the symptoms temporarily.

Now, unfortunately, this person has really limited range of motion and organic health problems related to the nerve deterioration and the bone deterioration in the affected areas.

Chiropractic care is providing relief and increased function and mobility, but a long-term correction may never occur. The symptom-based treatments have contributed to this person deteriorating more comfortably. It only takes one area like this to severely limit your life.

Crisis Care Only: The middle x-ray represents a patient who has had Crisis Care only. At times of injury or pain this person would mask the symptoms with medication and only go to a chiropractor to get relief from their condition that the adjustment or other modality would provide. The areas of decay are confined primarily to two segments, C-5 – C6. This person responded so quickly to his Crisis Care adjustments that he never followed through on correcting the underlying structure. This has allowed this patient’s spine and nervous system to deteriorate more comfortably over the years. The deterioration is limiting their function and can be affecting his health on organic levels even while no symptoms are present.

Lifestyle Care: This person is showing proper alignment with no decay and a near normal neck curve. This patient has no history of organ dysfunction and no limit in his range of motion or activity levels. The intensity of his Lifestyle Care varies based on the intensity of his lifestyle and can range from one visit per week to one visit per month.

We’ve known as early as the early 1900s through the Windsor Autopsy Study that spinal nerve deterioration can cause organic disease and dysfunction. We now know that the impact can be even more significant as it can affect the brain. Research has shown that 90percentsign of the stimulation to the brain comes from movement of the spine. A healthy spine and nervous system is vital to healthy aging on every level.

We are getting the advanced notice that our parents and grandparents never received that, whether we like it or not, we will probably live longer than we ever thought. Let’s learn from our grandparents’ generation and make the health of our spine and nervous system, chiropractic Lifestyle Care, a priority during every stage of life and not just wait for a crisis.