Written on the 30th of June 2010 by Dr Andrew Bartlett
When under chiropractic care, the chiropractor is not trying to heal your body. Your body heals itself! Your nervous system, once unleashed with spinal adjustments, re-organises you into a healthy state again.
This process of reorganisation can take months to years and it is thorough and true inside-out healing from the core of your master system.
What this means is that you will experience a journey of unparalleled change. This journey can produce many and varied feelings from “not much different” to “heaps better” to “I feel worse.” The journey is also very undulating, which means that after some adjustments you may experience relief and freedom, while after others you may experience pain and stiffness. The chiropractor doesn’t produce these feelings, your system does. A severe cold or flu is not an uncommon response from a chiropractic adjustment – a mechanism your body uses for detoxification and purging (hence coughing, sneezing, and aching joints).
Something else that I find sometimes occurs during the healing process, which is one of the most profound and powerful healing mechanisms that the body uses, is the healing inflammatory crisis. Here, while under the process of spinal correction, a simple maneuver at home or at work can trigger a severe inflammatory reaction, which is very painful for several days and obviously makes a patient very miserable. The upside however, is that what the nervous system is doing is letting go of ingrained and improper neurological patterns, letting the body go into a state of total chaos for a few days, inflaming everything so the patient is forced to rest, and then like magic, re-organising the system into a new and proper function, from which the patient never looks back. It’s awesome for me as a chiropractor to feel the profound change that this process creates in a body and it re-iterates to me just how much innate intelligence our body has.
Another interesting phenomenon with healing that is driven from the brain and nervous system is ‘Retracing’ of old layers of neurological patterns. Here, as the layers and layers of neuro-spinal malfunction patterns that developed in your body over many years progressively come undone with adjustments, old symptomotolgy can recur for short periods. An old type of head ache, or an old chronic cough that disappeared years earlier, some ringing in the ears that hasn’t been noticed for ages or an old constipation can return for example. We call this retracing of symptoms and it is seen commonly. It lasts for a short period until that layer is rectified and another one is entered. It’s due to old neurological memory.
If you have any questions in relation to your patterns of healing please feel free to ask any of our friendly team.
