Chiropractic – A Little Thing for Big Problems and a Big Thing for Little Problems

By: Lake Erie Spine & Injury Center

Chiropractic corrects old trauma – the kind that comes from dramatic accidents like car crashes, falls, crushing football hits – and also, the kind that occurs daily in modern life.  From our post-modern lifestyle of mobile phones, long commutes, and e-sports marathons.  

In short, chiropractic is a near-necessity in modern times that has become a mish-mash of sedentary life interspersed with high-speed collisions of all sorts.

Here is how healing works – trauma creates tissue damage.  Ligaments are stretched from their attachments as forces pull joints and other tissues in unnatural directions.  The body’s natural response to soft tissue damage is inflammation – a fluid mix of chemicals and cells that start the healing process (and that can also cause harm itself in the process).   

This inflammation – aka swelling – brings vital cells into the damaged area to begin repair.  Without these immune cells, soft tissue repair cells, etc, repair wouldn’t occur.  And while they may seem straight out of high school biology…

…Oddly enough, the body only heals one way.  It has cells, these tiny little powerhouses to do the work.  And they can do amazing things.  Heal broken bones, repair ligaments, rebuild soft tissue.  But how much sense does it make to ask these microscopic cells – immune cells, tissue cells, etc, to fix something that is thousands of times bigger than themselves?

Ironically, the hidden parts of trauma aren’t necessarily these small, invisible cells or biochemical doo-dads they produce.  But instead the more subtle changes to the big pieces.  

Such as the (sometimes subtle) loss to your underlying mechanics.  And here is what so much of chiropractic is correcting.

The underlying mechanical change created by 1.) your life stresses combined with 2.) your bigger traumas.  These two are accompanied by the acute pain and inflammation of damage, but also degrading biomechanics.  Read: worsening alignment and loss of movement, and distorted postures. 

And these biomechanical changes in turn can create bits of chronic low-grade inflammation associated with overall worsening movement, alignment, and increased breakdown over time not to mention nerve system stress.

When the big obvious symptoms of trauma or breakdown resolve, the disruptions in your biomechanics may remain hidden in plain sight.  All dependent on if you know what to look for.  Exactly what chiropractors train daily to do – find the big problems that are hard to see, and the little problems that are in fact bigger than they appear.