Chiropractic focus – Posture is a mirror to your health

“As the eyes are the mirror to your soul… so is your posture the mirror to your health.” Sounds like a prophetic statement but it is a practical concept to understand and because it’s so true!

To put things into context let’s figuratively make a comparison list by placing everyone you know who has great posture on the right side of the page all the people you know who have bad posture on the left side of the page. Now rate how healthy each person really is. Easy to notice that people with poor posture suffer poor or bad health. Therefore, a healthy spine equals good posture and that equals good health. A simple but true message.

Good posture  =  good health
Poor posture  =  affected health
Bad posture  =  bad health, in most cases

But WHY is this true?The simplest way to explain this is to look at a diagram of the nervous system. Notice the central role of the spine as it provides for the conduit for the nerves leaving the brain to reach the rest of the body. The chiropractic profession discovered in 1895 that when spinal segments of the spine malign ever so slightly, they may negatively impact the nerves. Sometimes this causes an obvious neuritis or neuralgia with pain radiating from the spinal nerve root along the course of the nerves leaving that level of the spine. Sometimes it creates enough instability to the spinal segmental motor units that it in turn irritates or facilitates hyper / excitability of the nerves or a hypo / suppressive conductivity of the nerves affected.

Sympathetic fascilitation is more than just a pinched nerve, since studies have shown that the spinal misalignments don’t actually pinch the nerve, but locally alter the ideal conditions that permit the nerves to exit the involved spinal segment without being negatively affected. Its like the nerves undergo a cumulative or ramping response that increases abnormal nerve conductivity the more the irritation is sustained.What does this mean? It means that health problems we don’t ordinarily attribute to the spine take place more commonly than we think.

Why don’t medical doctors look into this? That’s a very good question but over years of regular collaboration with medical doctors I found that problems that don’t have a drug-based solution are not well understood by my medical colleagues and in fact there is a lot of mistrust about how simply correcting spinal problems can produce so many health benefits. That is about as simple of an answer I can offer.

Over the past 120 years, people have just had to find this out on their own; but when they do it is such a blessing to them. In the meantime, you can start on some easy Posture Exercises designed to improve anyone’s posture.