Chiropractic adjustments restore proper nerve communication by correcting spinal misalignments, helping the body adapt to stress, improve mobility, and ultimately enhance overall quality of life for patients of all ages.
Could you give a brief explanation of how chiropractic care works and how adjustments help alleviate common back and neck pain, ultimately improving a person’s overall quality of life?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: That’s a good question and I love to always get back to basics. And one of the first things that I always like to share about chiropractic, because the common perception, honestly, if you went out on the street and you asked nine out of 10 people what a chiropractor does, sadly, the most common answer I get is like “crack your back” or “pop your neck” or something like that. And I wish people didn’t speak like that about what we do. Don’t get me wrong. I understand that we play a pretty large role in druglessly helping people with their back pain and neck pain, but chiropractic is a heck of a lot more than that.
Chiropractic care honors the fact that your body is really smart. There’s an innate intelligence or this inborn wisdom that you’re born with, and it’s contained in your DNA. And it’s always obvious to me that the body’s intelligent because when a sperm and an egg came together and 280 to 290 days later this perfect baby comes out. It doesn’t need a doctor or anyone to tell it what to do. It just happens automatically under the guidance of this intelligence. And that same intelligence is really what allows a baby to go through every stage of growth and development and grow into a full-on adult. And in the adult, it’s that same intelligence that heals, runs and regulates your body and it controls your heart, lungs, kidney, spleen, and intestines. Nothing happens in your body without the nerve system telling it what to do.
So unfortunately, stress, tension, poor posture, accidents, falls, all these things can alter the proper positioning of the vertebrae. And when these misalignments or what we call subluxations occur, they pinch or irritate the nerves. And that’s pretty significant because when a nerve is pinched or irritated, it doesn’t fire correctly and it interferes with the communication between the brain and the body. So, when you alter that communication, the body doesn’t execute the brain’s orders perfectly. And that results in basically what we would call disharmony or discoordination in the body. And over time, that can lead to pain, ill health, and all kinds of other problems.
So, a chiropractor’s job is to simply correct the alignment of the spine, get the pressure off the nerve, open up the nerve channel, and let the body return to normal physiology. When the body functions correctly, obviously we’re going to feel better. But people always say like, “Oh, it’s a miracle. You’re a miracle worker.” And I know that the miracle is truly life and I just want to make sure that the energy flows properly from the brain to the body so everyone experiences their best day every day.
Everyone experiences some form of stress in their lives. So how does chiropractic care help the body adapt to and manage stress?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: I love the fact that you chose the word adapt to, because the body really does adapt. We talked a little bit just a minute ago about the innate intelligence. And what’s interesting to me is that innate intelligence’s primary function is to allow your body to adapt to its environment. And the only reason a body doesn’t function properly, or a person would get sick is an inability of the body to adapt to its environment.
Now there’s tons of stressors in the environment. There’s chemical stress, there’s physical stress, there’s emotional stress, and how well your body responds and dissipates that amount of stress really dictates how healthy you are. Most of the time when people are under stress, no matter what the cause, whether it be physical, chemical or emotional, their muscles tend to be quite a bit tighter in the body. Their systems become out of balance because what happens is we become what we call sympathetic overdrive, and that’s when your sympathetic nerve system, which is like fight or flight, increased tension, and all those things are dominant. Our pain acuity is stronger and the body is less capable of healing in that state because the body really doesn’t want to expend any energy to heal when it’s in fight or flight. It’s really only on survival mode.
I’ve said it many times before, it’s very metabolically expensive to run the immune system and it takes a lot of energy. So, if the body is in fight or flight, it won’t spend the energy on healing. It secretes cortisol, which makes sure the immune system is shut off. And when the immune system is shut off, you’re just going to keep getting sicker and you’re going to have trouble fighting off these health issues or adapting to the environment. All chiropractic adjustments do is reset the vertebrae to a proper position, get the irritation off the nerves, help relax the muscle, and restore the normal chemical balance to the body to a healthy level where the body can then heal, run, regulate itself and pretty much adapt to all the stress that comes our way.
How do chiropractic adjustments help improve range of motion and allow people to become more mobile and lead more active lives?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: That’s a pretty cool question that you ask there. What I like about that is, we talked before, briefly, that chiropractors deal with when the vertebrae are primarily out of alignment. And when things are out of alignment, fixed or stuck and they’re not in their normal positions, they will start to irritate the nerve system. When a vertebrae or a bone is fixed or stuck, it doesn’t move completely through its range of motion. So, you’re going to see a restriction of the range of motion and maybe even some pain associated with it. And again, when those bones are misaligned, they’ll irritate the nerves, which make the muscles tighter, and then the muscles also can restrict their range of motion.
By making the corrective adjustments and getting the vertebrae moving properly through its normal range of motion, that’ll restore a better range. You’ll be less susceptible to injury because the body will be more flexible. And when you have that full range of motion, it’s also helpful in sports performance and it keeps the spine more resilient and less likely to get injured.
What are some of the benefits you see when families from infants to adults include chiropractic care as part of their wellness routine?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: That’s really kind of a great question as well and obviously, the biggest benefit of a family coming in is really that kids learn what you teach them. If you teach a child at an early age that they need to take care of their spine, just like you teach them how to care for their teeth and they brush up and they go to the dentist and if they take care of their teeth, their teeth will be healthy. But the spine needs to be cared for too. It’s made of similar stuff and it degenerates in a similar fashion.
Kids really just want to be like their parents. I see it all the time in my office. And what their parents usually do for health is what the kids will do because that’s where they learn it from, right? So, I love it when the office is full with families coming in and there’s a family and three kids arguing over which kid’s going to get adjusted first.
And there’s a famous quote by Frederick Douglass that says, “It’s much easier to raise healthy children than to repair broken adults.” And like I said before, if you never brushed your teeth, you never flossed or you never went to a dentist, by the time you were 16, 17, or 18, your mouth would be in pretty poor shape. And it’s not any different with the spine. It’s made of the same stuff. It degenerates in a similar fashion, and if it’s not cared for, it will degenerate. So, kids who grow up in a chiropractic model tend to be healthier, more active and more adaptable as we talked about before. Learning about spine care, doing exercise and good posture become part of their daily routine.
And most importantly, we need to teach kids about proper function in front of the computer using their cell phones and their tablets because now we have something called tech neck, which is basically forward head posture. And that’s really blowing up and I’m seeing a big part of that in my practice. Almost every child coming in now has this forward head posture. And me and you, we probably didn’t grow up with cell phones and computers. I didn’t have my first cell phone until I was 30. So, think about what this does to the kids.
Could you share some other ways that chiropractic care helps improve a person’s overall quality of life?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: As a chiropractor, I consider myself a quality of life specialist because when people are sick and suffering and in pain, obviously their quality of life is poor. Now, chiropractic can naturally help strengthen your immune system, strengthen your spine, and keep that information flowing from the brain to the body and back to the brain so the brain can run, regulate, and work on the body and monitor everything that goes on. Your body heals simply by replacing damaged cells with healthy new ones. Since the nerve system is what controls that and tells it what to do, if you remove those subluxations or those misalignments and improve communication, you’re going to see better nerve flow, better communication in the body. And that’s really when the brain functions optimally and orders the body perfectly, and that’s what results in optimum health. And it’s really just that simple.
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To speak with Dr. Gregg Rubinstein, visit www.ChiropractorMidtown.com or call (212) 977-7094 to schedule an appointment.
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