If you’re wondering what that means, let’s talk a bit about the history of chiropractic medicine. It was invented about 120 years ago by D.D. Palmer, who came to believe through experience that everything wrong with the human body could be traced back to a problem with the spine.

He believed that the body had what he termed ‘innate intelligence’, and could heal itself from almost any problem if it were allowed to do so — and further believed that the only thing keeping a body from healing itself was a problem within the spine called a ‘subluxation’. Today, very few chiropractors are anything like D.D. Palmer. We call those that still believe that subluxations are the source of all bodily problems “straight” chiropractors.

Chiropractic medicine outside of the “straights” has evolved and matured into a deep medical art that examines and corrects neural, muscular, and skeletal problems using only non-invasive, non-drug treatments that tend toward simple manual manipulation of the body. The chiropractors that follow this philosophy are called “mixers” because they recognize the necessity of non-chiropractic approaches to most physical maladies.

Even the “mixers”, however, tend to believe that the body ought to be put into a position to heal itself and then left well enough alone. Guiding a body to it’s optimum state of physical health is better than tearing it down in order to eliminate a problem that could have been solved less destructively.

The next time you find yourself the victim of an unexplained neck, back, hip, leg, shoulder, or head pain, consider a Vancouver chiropractor as your first resort. You’ll find you’re back on your feet sooner, paying less, and quite happy that you did.

Alternately, you could go to your Vancouver chiropractor and get an adjustment. Will it help? That depends on precisely what is causing your headache. Ninety-five percent of headaches fall into one of three kinds of headaches: migraines, tension headaches, and cervicogenic headaches.

Migraines
Migraine headaches are one of the great mysteries of the human body. No one knows exactly why they happen. But we do know that one of the major defining events of a migrane is a wave of vascular constriction that cuts off blood to the rear part of the brain. This constriction is followed by a dilation in the blood vessels in the scalp, which can reach such proportion that the blood vessels themselves become so thin that blood will leak out of them, triggering the pain receptors in the skin around them in a manner that pulses with each heartbeat.

Chiropractic medicine has been proven in several case studies to be effective in treating migraines. Because we don’t know precisely why migraines happen, we don’t know precisely why chiropractic works, but for many people, it does.

Tension Headaches
Tension headaches are typically thought of as best combated with aromatherapy and a good masseuse, but it turns out that chiropractic can be just as effective. One study proved that a chiropractor can reduce the number of tension headaches and the duration of each headache by half — cutting the amount of time spent in pain to one quarter of what it was before.

Cervicogenic Headaches
Cervicogenic headaches are a chiropractor’s bread and butter. These headaches are directly caused by the nerves and muscles in the neck. Anyone in the Vancouver chiropractic community would love you to come see them with a cervicogenic headache, much like a mechanic loves to hear the sound of a squealing timing belt — it’s a quick, easy, almost sure-thing fix.

The median nerve serves the thumb side of the hand, and it exits the wrist through a narrow opening between bones that is called the carpal tunnel. When any amount of inflammation affects the carpal tunnel — such as that caused by long-term pressure — the nerve is impinged upon and cannot function properly. Common symptoms are weakness in the hand, tingling, loss of sensory perception in the thumb and fingers, and pain. Without treatment, the damage can be come permanent.

The most obvious form of treatment for carpal tunnel is to stop doing whatever it is that’s causing the pressure, but if your job is as a typist, sewer, painter, or otherwise involves putting pressure on your wrist for long periods of time, that might not be an option. Your doctor will generally suggest surgery as the logical next step, but Vancouver chiropractors disagree.

While chiropractors are most known for spinal adjustments, they study the skeletal structure and nerve paths of the entire body. The standard chiropractic response to carpal tunnel syndrome is to attempt to adjust the bones in the wrist to allieviate whatever inflammation is causing the problem in the first place. The treatment is quick, non-invasive, and much less expensive than surgery.

Furthermore, many doctors don’t realize that a small percentage of ‘untreatable’ carpal tunnel syndrome has it’s origin in the upper back, not the wrists at all. After all, the same nerves that pass through the wrist also pass into the spine before connecting to the brain — and pressure in the wrong spine joint can cause symptoms that fairly precisely mimic carpal tunnel. Vancouver chirporactors will, to address that potential, usually adjust your spine as well.

In short, while not every case of carpal tunnel can be conquered by a Vancouver chiropractor, it’s almost always worth the effort to talk to one. If you can get fixed without surgery, you can save yourself a lot of time, money, and pain.

The brain essentially has a continuous unconscious picture of where you are in relationship to yourself, what we used to call a “kinesthetic” sense. The modern name is “proprioception”, or “the ability to perceive yourself”. So what does all of this have to do with Vancouver chiropractors? Simple — the vast majority of the information that gets into the brain gets there via the spinal cord, and the spinal cord is the demesnes of the chiropractor.

Vancouver chiropractic medicine is based on the theory that a significant number of the problems we experience with our body are caused by miscommunication between the brain and body, which are in turn caused by problems with the spinal cord. The spinal cord can be impacted by many things, from infections and injuries to the very bones of the vertebrae themselves.

When your proprioceptive ability is out of whack, for example, the problem is almost always either in your brain itself, or it’s with your spinal cord. If you’re having trouble because you feel pain in your lower extremities that doesn’t seem to have any cause, it may be that the nerves that run to your legs are being impinged upon by a vertebra that isn’t quite where it’s supposed to be. If the sensitivity of your fingertips seems diminished, it might be because of a swelling somewhere in your upper back that is causing the nerves leading from your fingertips to your brain to malfunction. In both of these cases, a Vancouver chiropractor can be helpful.

They will feel your back and spine, and upon finding an intervertebral joint that isn’t correctly aligned, they will use their hands (or on occasion some simple tools) to realign the joint. The results are often immediate and can include everything from the disappearance of the original symptoms to a more general feeling of relaxation and well-being as inflamed muscles and tissues in the back begin to unwind.

• Migraines: Migraines are mysterious in their origin, and the success of the various treatments leveraged against them by modern medicine is almost entirely a matter of luck because of it. Chiropractic adjustments were studied against a common anti-migraine drug called amitriptyline, and were found to be equally effective — and there aren’t any side effects to an adjustment!
• Bedwetting: Some kids are bed wetters. There are a lot of theories as to why, but like migraines, no proven reason. What chiropractors have found, however, is pretty compelling. The tailbone begins life as five separate bones which fuse together sometime at the beginning of puberty. The nerves that control the bladder run through that area, so a minor misalignment of those five bones might cause the bladder to miscommunicate with the brain, causing the child to fail to wake up in time to urinate. A chiropractic realignment may help to alleviate this problem, according to The Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.
• Tinnitus: Another medical mystery, tinnitus (ringing in the ears) is not a disease, but it is a symptom of several different conditions. Not all tinnitus can be solved through chiropractic manipulation — if it’s caused by damage to the eardrum or impacted earwax, for example, no amount of adjusting will help. But it turns out that many cases of tinnitus are caused by compression of the 8th cranial nerve — and that is a fairly basic thing for any skilled chiropractor to address.
• Colic: We generally don’t think of infants as needing or even benefiting from chiropractic care, but one study that compared the effectiveness of chiropractic manipulation to the effectiveness of an anti-gas medication (colic is frequently thought of as a problem with gas) found that chiropractic manipulation was more than twice as effective at getting a colicky baby to stop crying and relax.