English
The Definition of a Condition
A condition is the result of an event or process, to which your body cannot adapt. Despite its amazing processing power and ability to adapt to stress, there are still things that your body cannot adapt to. A fall from a 20-story building. Ingesting poison. Being struck by a bolt of lightning.
These are all severe forms of stress that are likely to kill you. Just because there may not be any broken bones does NOT always mean that "smaller injuries" did not cause damage that requires attention.
Now imagine something less traumatic but still enough that it will seriously damage you. A broken bone. A stroke. A cut through your skin.
All of these represent events (or processes) that your body was not able to adapt to, the result is a negative impact on health that may impair the body’s future ability to process information (i.e., lowered processing capacity).
In these instances, it is entirely possible that you survived the initial injury BUT that you never addressed or fixed the underlying problem, which has since interfered with the normal function of your body and similarly has been leading your down an accumulative destructive survival pathway.
This is not a case where you are doing the wrong thing. This is a case where something is interfering with your body’s normal ability to do the right thing! And this is the process collectively known as dis-ease, or as I prefer from traditional chiropractic lexicon “incoordination.” Incoordination is the process of dis-harmony resulting in a pathological state due to the presence of an abnormal condition interfering with the body’s normal physiological functions.
The Purpose of Chiropractic
There are many potential types of conditions. When it comes to physical injuries, the most severe is a broken bone. Less so is a dislocation, and less so again is a minor sprain. Somewhere between dislocation and sprain is the type of injury that is addressed by a chiropractor and that is called a subluxation. In the type of chiropractic work that I do call Blair Upper Cervical Care, we take custom-tailored x-ray images that reveal physical joint misalignments that are not apparent on standard x-ray views.
A subluxation is the condition of a vertebra that has lost its normal alignment (but not a full dislocation), that the body is NOT able to re-align on its own and that is now interfering with the normal function of the nervous system and the body’s ability to process information.
In the case of a condition, there is no medication, dietary change, exercise regime, or meditation retreat that will resolve the problem. In the case of a fracture or dislocation, this is when you need a skilled surgeon or orthopaedist.
In the case of a muscle strain, this is where you need a physiotherapist or massage therapist. In the case of subluxation, however, here is where you need the chiropractor … and if its subluxation affecting the upper neck, that is where I fit in as an Upper Cervical chiropractor.
And pay very close attention here: the purpose of a chiropractic adjustment is not to make you feel good. It is not to stimulate, inhibit, or make your body any healthier than it already it. The purpose of chiropractic is to restore the normal condition of your body by making an adjustment that corrects the alignment of a subluxation, which is interfering with its normal function ... and by doing so allows you to fulfill your optimum potential.
What's in a Name?
Especially when it comes to the common use of medical jargon, many terms have been used so interchangeably that they no longer accurately describe what is going on. A few examples:
- Parkinson’s Disease - Parkinson’s is NOT a disease. It the result of a condition where a portion of the brain does not produce adequate amounts of dopamine (a neurotransmitter). It is no
- Meniere’s Disease - Meniere’s is NOT a disease. It is a syndrome characterized by vertigo, tinnitus and a sense of “fullness in the ear
- Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - This one IS named correctly. It is a collective of symptoms with no solitary reason to explain why people experience them (I believe a combination of a disease process and a condition further inhibiting normal body function)
I fully acknowledge that many people - both medical doctors, chiropractors, and other healthcare professionals - may not fully agree with the definitions or even the purpose of chiropractic that I’ve laid forth in this article. I remain steadfast in my opinion that words have specific meanings.
And when it comes to matters of medical and healthcare, if we substitute one word for another without an appreciation of the difference, we have the potential of making errors that may manifest in the method we take to address the cause of the disease or condition. Certainly, I am open to elaboration and further definition in a better effort to clearly define what’s going on in people’s bodies and how it relates to health.
In Closing
To summarise these articles, both health and disease are normal and natural processes. The differences between them are 1) the type of stress that you are exposing your body to (eustress or distress) and 2) the type of adaptation that your body makes to that stress. Gold in, gold out … but garbage in, garbage out. It is a fairytale to believe that you can put garbage into the system and that you will get gold on the other side.
Your body is powerful beyond measure. It is designed to win, and its natural state IS health. We simply need to learn how not to interfere with its normal function. However, if you are 100% certain that you are putting gold into the system but not experiencing the expected outcome, the only logical explanation is that some type of condition is interfering with your body’s normal ability to express health.
The end result of this process is a state of general dis-ease due to the body’s inability to fully coordinate the 38 quadrillion processes that occur every second. And over time, a pathological state similar to disease may develop … but for a completely different reason, thus requiring a completely different solution! And if that condition is a subluxation - misalignment of a vertebra affecting the function of the nervous system - that is where chiropractic may be the solution you need.
Ultimately, health is the normal state of the body. All we have do is learn to know what our body is telling us - identify whether or not it is doing the right thing based on what we are doing to it - and then take appropriate action.
Leave a comment