Adults looking to naturally improve their overall health and wellness without drugs or surgery should get checked by a chiropractor who will ensure proper nerve system function that will allow the body to heal and operate at its best.
Go ahead and list the top 10 reasons that you think any adult should get up and go out and see a chiropractor and get started.
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Awesome. Thanks for the introduction there. One of the things, before I just let it rip into a top 10 list, is we always try to dispel the myths in chiropractic, because everyone’s common perception is that the only reason that they should see a chiropractor is what? If they have back pain or neck pain or headaches and things like that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy when Billy’s back pain gets better and Susie’s sciatica goes away and Nancy’s neck pain feels better. Those are all great things and I’m happy to help those people. But the reality is everyone thinks that we’re back doctors, but the truth is we’re really nerve system doctors, because when I explain what chiropractic is and I talk about the nerve system, your nerve system’s really just a communication center. That’s a fair statement, right, Liz?
RC: Yeah, definitely.
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Right. It’s a communication center. It sends messages from the brain and it goes down to the end user, which might be a tissue cell, it could be a muscle cell, it could be a heart cell, it could be a liver cell. Whatever it is, they’re all connected to the brain. They all get information, and then information goes back to the brain exactly what that organ is supposed to be doing.
Now, if I asked you, Liz, right now to think and tell me what should your liver be doing? Should it be producing more enzymes or less enzymes right now? You have no idea because you have an innate intelligence, an inborn wisdom that runs, regulates, and actually heals your body. What’s interesting to me is that intelligence. We can’t show it to you. I can’t cut open a body and show you the intelligence just like I couldn’t cut open a battery and show you the electricity.
But we can see the work that the electricity does, and I can see the work that that intelligence does, because it took two half cells, a sperm and egg, and 280 to 290 days later we got this perfect baby, which is absolutely incredible. It didn’t need to be told what to do, it didn’t need a doctor to tell it what to do or how to develop and assemble itself. It did it at all on its own. The second that baby is born, it knows how to make insulin every bit as good as someone who’s been on the planet 30 or 40 years, sometimes even better. Because when people develop diabetes, all of a sudden their bodies go into dysregulation, which, again, is controlled by your nerve system. If your nerve system isn’t working properly or without interference because the bones are misaligned and irritating those nerves, that’s going to have a deleterious effect on your health.
It’s so important to understand that it’s more about your nerve system and the functions. Yes, the spine is our avenue of approach, but what I’m always trying to affect, whether it be an adult or a child, is the nerve system. Now, every adult has a spine, and if you have a spine, you need a chiropractor, just like if you have teeth, you need a dentist, just like if you have a car, you have a mechanic. People use us when they’re in crisis, but really it should be more about healthcare and self-care, which is the prevention, right? Because there’s this healthcare hierarchy, right? We do the self-care, which for dentistry is brushing and flossing. For chiropractic, it’s like stretching and exercise. Right? And then the healthcare part is going to the dentist for your periodic checkups or going to the chiropractor for periodic checkups.
Then there’s crisis care, right? The person who’s bent over, they have so much back pain or they can’t move their neck, they’re coming in in crisis. Those are the easy ones, right? Everyone knows, oh my God, I’m in crisis. They know what to do at that point and they’re usually going to come in and try and get some relief care. But when they come in, I try to explain, “You know what? There’s a little more to chiropractic than just your back aches and neck aches.” As a matter of fact, if you use chiropractic for your back aches and neck aches, you’re really only getting 10% of what chiropractic has to offer, because 90% of your nerve system, Liz, doesn’t have anything to do with sensing pain or moving muscle. That’s what controls your heart, your lungs, your kidney, your spleen, your intestines. When you have a massive amount of interference or pressure on the nerve system, like Christopher Reeves found out, his organs didn’t work properly. There was nothing wrong with his legs, but he couldn’t use them because the connection wasn’t there. Now, I’m not saying chiropractic could have helped him. Once he broke that bone and it cut through some of those spinal nerves in the spinal cord, there’s no repairing that, right?
RC: Right.
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: But it just goes to show that when you interfere with nerve transmission, it has a really big effect on your quality of life and how your nerve system works.
Here are the top 10 reasons adults should seek chiropractic care:
- Remove Nerve Interference
Chiropractic is the largest natural healing progression in the world. The holistic approach to the body, removing nerve interference is so far-reaching in the body. Every cell tissue and organ in your body is controlled by that nerve system, and removing interference has a positive effect on your overall health and wellness. That is my number one.
- Relieve Pain Without Medication
Like I said before, chiropractic is often thought of as effective for back pain, neck pain, sciatica, and other painful conditions when people can’t take medications. The great thing about chiropractic, there’s no side effects to what we do. We don’t put anything into the body, we don’t take anything out of it.
- Alleviate Stress
It can help alleviate a lot of the physical manifestations of stress. We always talk about stress because it’s an imbalance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. Our sympathetic nerve system is fight or flight, puts us into overdrive, we get all wound up. If a gunshot went off, we’d be like, “Oh my God,” and we’d be all tense and our visual acuity and our pain acuity and everything goes up and our muscles get tense and tight. But parasympathetic, by stimulating the cervical and then the sacral area, that’s the area of the nerve system that’s more responsible for calmness and healing and rest and relaxation. So, when people are in sympathetic overdrive, by balancing the spine, we can get that neuro balance a more normal resting tone. Most importantly, it changes our hormones, because your nerve system tells your hormonal or endocrine system what to do, when to secrete this, when to secrete that. If that’s out of balance, then everything gets crazy.
- Slow the Progression of Osteoarthritic Change
The number four one I like because as we get older, we all get to see these degenerative changes in people’s spine, like that 75-year-old guy who looks like a question mark. He didn’t just wake up one day, look in the mirror, and say, “Oh crap. What happened to me?” That happened slowly over time, stress, tension, poor posture, accidents, falls. People who live in a repetitive stress world, people sitting at their computers for hours and hours and hours, or someone who’s a trash hauler, bending down, picking up bags, throwing them into the truck, lifting, lifting, lifting every day, all need to maintain that spine. The better the spine is aligned, the less friction there is, the less friction in the joints means less degenerative change, healthier cartilage, and less osteoarthritis. It helps slow down the progression and manage osteoarthritic change. That one’s a real big one there, talking about prevention of DJD by improving the mechanics of the spine.
- Improve Immune System Function
As I said before, there’s a lot of evidence in number five, that the immune system function is related to nerve system function. There’s a lot of research out there, and they did these horrible experiments where they would inject a rat with a pathogen and measure the immune response. Then they would use a laser scalpel and sever the neural connections to the immune system and inject another animal. They found there was such a decreased response in the immune system when the nerve system was cut out of the equation that they established that link right away. Bill Myers wrote a book, Healing in the Mind, and talks a lot about that.
- Regulate Blood Pressure
There’s some really cool evidence showing that upper cervical adjusting can have an effect on blood pressure regulation. How many people do you know that are on blood pressure medications? Right?
RC: Yeah.
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Once they go on them, they never take them off, Liz.
RC: Right.
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: There’s an opportunity to improve regulation through the nerve system since your nerve system monitors and regulates the blood pressure, by clearing out interference, it can optimize the way your body works and the control mechanisms to regulate blood pressure can be improved.
- Improve Digestion
Number seven on my list is improved digestion. Again, for the same reasons. If we irritate the nerves that go to the stomach that leave from the mid-thoracic spine, how do you think you’re going to digest food? Anytime you irritate a nerve enough and you create an increased amount of impulses, it’s going to cause spasmodic IBS type of digestion. Or if we dam it back, if there’s enough pressure on those nerves and we dam it back, it’s going to result in less nerve energy going there or less impulses, and then we’re going to have weaker digestion or no motility and that’ll lead to constipation. All these things can improve the function of the digestive tract, because, again, everything is neuro-regulated.
- Get Better Sleep
Better sleep is another one. Sometimes the most common thing that we hear after their first couple of adjustments, they come back and they’re like, “Doc, I’m actually sleeping better.” Or they tell me they have things like more energy or improved athletic performance.
- Increase Nerve System Functionality
The nerve system is your information superhighway. If it’s running like that cruddy dial-up internet that we had 20 or 25 years ago as opposed to a DSL or a T1 line, or now I think the latest rage is that fiber optic stuff, the faster it goes, the more efficient our computer is. Our computer in our body is our brain and it runs this machine, so that connection is so important.
- Manage Scoliosis
Then number 10 on my list here is scoliosis management, those lateral curvatures that develop, the prevention and management of disc injuries, because when you improve the mechanic of the spine and things are lined up better, there’s no uneven pressure on the disc which stops the disc from bulging, and that’s a real important part of it.
A lot of people with disc injuries respond well to chiropractic, not only because we’re lining things up and getting pressure off the disc, but the removal of the irritation to the nerve system optimizes the immune system that allows the body to heal, run, and regulate, because our bodies heal by replacing damaged cells with healthy new ones. But that’s all under the auspice of the nerve system.
By getting adjusted, realigning the vertebrae, keeping all the pressure off those delicate spinal nerves, it allows the nerve system to be optimized and work to its best ability, and then your body is optimized.
So, the number one reason is optimization of the nerve system and the body’s function holistically without using drugs or surgery. That’s really what I would have to say on all that. I absolutely love talking about this stuff. I know I just sounded like a big run-on sentence today, Liz, but those are my reasons that people should be getting their spine checked. Any comments or concerns or questions?
RC: No, I think it’s great. I think that people need to be reminded of all of these things. Like you’re saying, you may not feel sick, but all of these things are going on in your body. Why not get checked out? Why not talk about the effect of a properly aligned spine and what it can do to benefit your health and wellness? Not everybody talks about that every day, because, again, they don’t feel sick. Maybe nothing hurts or maybe one little thing hurts, and they’ve been ignoring it for years. Then why not get in front of it and get on top of it and set yourself up for the rest of your life?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: You’re right, Liz. I want to interject. It’s interesting, because people believe that they’re healthy if they don’t have symptoms. And we know that’s not true. Because there was a very famous runner, this guy Jim Fix. I don’t know if you remember him. He was a marathoner. What was interesting about him, I think it was in the late ’70s or mid ’80s or something, he goes out for a run one day and he just dropped dead from a heart attack. If you could go back in time and talk to Jim the day before his heart attack and ask him how he was feeling, he’s like, “Ah, I feel great. I’m going out for a run tomorrow, whatever.” He was seemingly healthy, but there was something wrong with his heart, and he just didn’t know because he didn’t have any symptoms.
People base their health on symptoms, which is totally wrong, because people can have cancer for six or seven years before that tumor’s ever big enough to cause any symptomatology. By the time symptoms come on, it’s usually pretty late in the game. It’s the same thing. People say, “Oh, I used to just have some stiffness and then it progressed to some sharp pain intermittently, now it’s just getting sharper and the episodes are lasting longer.” It’s so much more about prevention.
My hope and prayer is that people hear this and they understand that there’s more to chiropractic than just treating your backaches and neck aches, and just because you don’t have any symptoms, it doesn’t mean that you’re healthy. The thing is that you can have back pain or neck pain and you can take painkillers and your pain’s going to go away, but does that mean you had a deficiency of painkillers? Does that mean you’re now healthy because you don’t have any symptoms?
I always talk about if my house is on fire and the smoke alarm’s going off, I can pull the battery out of the smoke alarm and I won’t hear that blaring noise, but my house is still on fire, and you better do something or get the hell out of there. It’s really what I tell people.
It’s really an educational process that chiropractors need to take on and get it out to the public, and that’s why we do these talks. I know this one was a little longer, so I hope the people on the line have managed to sit through it and learn something.
I love and appreciate you, Liz. It’s been an honor to chat with you today. If there’s anything else, let me know. Other than that, I think we can wrap this one up and put this one in the books.
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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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