What are some of the more Central Neurological Effects of the Chiropractic Adjustment?

The nervous system is often referred to as the master system because it regulates all areas of your body.

A brief look at how the brain and nervous system works is necessary in order to explain the mechanism by which the Chiropractic Adjustment can effect the system.

The brain and nervous system require 4 things in order to function…

• Fuel
• Oxygen
• Activation
• Supplies

Each of these factors are critically important. They are also all inter-related.

In this post, we’ll focus on the 3rd area, activation.

The first principle that will help better understand is that the brain and nervous system is a sensory driven system.

The way we’re designed is that environment fires off various receptors in our body that result in signals entering into the nervous system. This is the origin of activation.

The brain then processes the input and produces output that includes everything from motor control to control of hormones, the immune system, and even thoughts. Anything that we do has some effect on our nervous system through these receptors in our bodies.

Most people are familiar with the 5 senses we are taught in elementary school:
Smell
Sight
Hearing
Taste
Touch

This fails to recognize 2 critically important sensory systems.

The vestibular system and the proprioceptive systems are absolutely essential drivers of brain function.

These systems tell your brain where your head and body are in space so that you can coordinate appropriate movement and neurological activity.

The proprioceptive system drives brain function in a big way.

We’re wired this way to take advantage of the only constant source of environmental energy, gravity.

If you think about it, all other sensory information from the 5 well known senses comes and goes.

Gravity does not. It’s always present.

Our nervous system and brain require ongoing activation in order to continue functioning and to survive.

Proprioception provides ongoing information to the brain telling us where our muscles and joints are… the length of the muscles and the angulation of the joints.

If our brains are deprived of some measure of activity from the proprioceptive system then it, the nervous system, essentially begins to break down. 

It will, to varying degrees lose some of it’s ability to tell where the body/bodypart is in space.

Large losses of proprioception can be seen more globally, like in the case of a traumatic quadraplegia where the individual can not move their limbs.

It can also be seen in a more limited sense if a joint is put in a cast or splint to allow healing of a bone for example.

It gets more interesting when you consider other implications though.

What happens when a joint or a couple of vertebral segments are surgically fused?

The fusion results in a loss of proprioceptive information to all areas of the central nervous system including the brain.

The statement isn’t talking about whether the fusion was necessary, just the fact that it does change the nervous system to some degree. It has to change it.

This loss of drive, the loss of activation, will result in the neurons that recieve that information to no longer be necessary. They begin to change and possibly even die off.

This results in a loss of activation of the neurons that recieve that information also, thereby resulting in a further loss of the next neuron in the series.

These ‘downstream‘ effects depend on how well functioning other areas are in the brain that receive the information.

What if a person loses motion of a couple of segments in their neck, back, or some other joint due to sudden or repetitive trauma?