Healing Yourself

                Whether you are a regular utilizer of chiropractic or not, you likely have figured out over the course of your life that your body heals itself.  If you’ve read previous blog posts, I’ve alluded to that fact a few times.  Our bodies are, in the vast majority of situations, capable of healing without outside aid.  I wanted to expand on that a little bit this week.

                First, this ability is dependent upon severity.  While a cut will heal, and a broken bone will even join back together over time, once tissue is dead, there’s not bringing it back.  The question of severity applies to all three types of stress that I’ve discussed before too.  You can be scared to death, ingest too much poison or suffer too severe a trauma and die.  No amount of self-healing will help you.  Time is also a major factor, as it may take 6 weeks for a bone to be strong enough to function again, once broken, a nerve regrows approximately 1mm a day once the trauma is corrected.

                Want to know a secret?  Your headache isn’t due to an ibuprofen deficiency… or acetaminophen…  In fact, most of your herniated discs (a chiropractor’s specialty) will heal itself over time without any intervention.  Oh, how about this… you currently have cancer cells in your body.  Yep, it’s true.  It’s just that your body is able to identify the aberrant cells and get rid of them before they proliferate and become actual cancer.  Your body is amazingly skilled at healing itself, but sometimes it’s necessary to find what is causing the issue before healing can begin.

                Your headache may be due to lack of sleep; or dehydration; or caffeine dependency; or a misalignment in the spine.  A broken bone might fuse back together but keeping it immobile and ensuring the bones are as aligned as possible is important.  Even though your herniated disc will resolve on its own, chiropractors can speed healing and ensure that the disc itself doesn’t dry up and become arthritic.

                Which brings me to why chiropractic.  We are concerned first and foremost in removing the stress on the system, allowing the body to do what it does at its best.  The other main thing with chiropractic, is we aim to find the cause.  Your headaches may need to be addressed solely with chiropractic care, but maybe not.  Maybe your diet is causing your body to react in such a way that it is causing you headaches… cutting dairy or peanuts or avoiding a certain animal may be required to rid you of your headaches.  And I’m not saying don’t ever use an over-the-counter medication to mask a symptom, I’m just saying if it’s something you’re dealing with regularly, let’s solve the issue. 

                Most Doctors of Chiropractic are great at identifying the cause and helping come up with a solution for the actual problem, rather than masking the symptoms.  It is for this reason that Minnesota recognizes chiropractors as primary care providers, additionally, more and more people are finding that their chiropractor is the best choice for their primary doctor.