What is Chiropractic

How can a Cherry Hill Chiropractor help you live a healthier and happier life?

What is Chiropractic Care All About?

Chiropractors are physicians that treat patients in a holistic approach, looking for the cause of their symptoms. There are few basic principles to Chiropractic. First, Chiropractors recognize that your body has the ability to heal and regulate itself. If you were to get a cut on your finger and put a bandage and Neosporin on it, what would actually be doing the healing? Is it the band aid? Is it Neosporin? No, it is your own body. The speed of your recovery is determined on how healthy you are and how reactive your body is to the task at hand. Healing occurs from the inside out. You might be saying, “yeah, well that is obvious”, but believe it or not this is often overlooked in our society today. We are constantly being exposed to an outside in mentality of healing. How many times in one day do you read or see an advertisement for another pill, lotion or procedure to correct you? This is a fundamentally different approach to health. It is an outside in approach. One that focuses on crisis (symptomatic) care vs. health care. When you look up the definition of health (Dorlands Medical Dictionary) it is defined as a state of optimal physical, mental and social well being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Basically it is saying that health has to do with how well your body is functioning, not necessarily if symptoms are present. A good example of this would be people that are not aware that they have a heart disease until they have a heart attack. Their body was unhealthy and malfunctioning before they had any symptoms.

The body also has the amazing ability to regulate itself. As you are reading this article you are not thinking, heart beat, digest food, produce red blood cells or any of the automatic processes that occur in our body. At any one moment there are tens of thousand of processes that are occurring in our bodies. This is a very, very involved orchestration and requires complex system to handle it. This is were chiropractors help the nervous system to come to the rescue. Chiropractors understand that our nervous system controls and coordinates all the muscles, organs and glands in our body. The nervous system is mainly composed of the brain (central processor), spinal cord (information highway) and the nerves that branch out to the rest of the body. As long as the nervous system is free of interference, we can function at our peak potential.

Our nervous system is not only complex, but also very delicate. We have evolved boney structures to help protect our brain and spinal cord. The brain is fully encased in bone for protection, the skull. The spinal cord is surrounded by a spinal column. Unlike the skull, our spinal column is flexible and able to move in many ways. We have 24 individual bones, of which each can move in 6 different directions. Because of this movement and the intimate relationship of the spinal cord passing through the spinal column there is a chance for nerve interference to occur. When a spinal bone (vertebrae) moves out of alignment, has abnormal motion or degenerates it can lead to what chiropractor call a vertebral subluxation, most often referred to as just subluxations. Chiropractors are the only doctors trained to detect and correct vertebral subluxation.

Chiropractors utilize chiropractic adjustments to correct vertebral subluxations. There are many different techniques to do this. Some may be done manually by the doctors hands other may be done using specialized instruments. Regardless of the technique your chiropractor uses, the chiropractic adjustment is a highly specialized procedure that is non-duplicating from any other profession. The chiropractic adjustment has many benefits; restore proper biomechanical motion of the vertebral joint, stimulate mechanoreceptor activity, reduce proprioceptive activity, reduce mechanical stress that leads to spinal joint degeneration, improve blood flow, help balance autonomic nervous system control, improve spinal range of motion, to just name a few. In a nutshell it is good for your overall health and well being.

For more information about Chiropractic Care Center contact Dr. Cassara, Cherry Hill Chiropractor, Conveniently located 4 blocks from Ponzios Diner. 856-857-0018