well welcome my name is dr jonas mary from family first chiropractic or back for another season of life elements family wellness show they we're going to be talking about the nervous system as usual but we're going to break it down a little differently today today's topic is neurologically based chiropractic a lot times people are under the impression the chiropractor is about bones and really it actually has nothing to do with your bones we talk about spines a lot so that's where that i guess that thought comes from but what we're really discussing is the neurological component within th the spinal cord your nervous system controls and coordinates every cell tissue and organ in the body and i say that a lot and it carol's off my tongue quickly and i think people kind of miss sometimes the significance of that statement every single part of your body is under that direct control of nervous system so whether it be your liver or your kidneys your lungs your digestive system your muscles your glands your skin there's even nerves going in your bones that's why you can feel a fracture when there's a painful so being aware of that and then using that understanding to move forward as far as we understand our health is really important and so today we're going to talk about chiropractic from a very neurological base or a central neurological theory in other words we're going to talk about how those nerves are directly impacting each of the structures before we do that though i brought along a chart so we can get a better understanding of exactly what it is that we're looking at there are three parts to this process the first part being a balance nervous system if we have a balanced nervous system and we have a body that's functioning properly and the body is very capable of adapting it easily moves from one direction to the next if you're if you're in a situation where it calls for you to speed up or increase your activity or increase your level awareness the nervous system will help you do that and all do it in a matter of seconds sometimes less than a second if it's time to slow down say you're going to better it's just time to relax are taking a break in the nervous system controls the body's ability to to down regulate that means lowering respiration rate lowering heart rate not putting additional stress on the body we run into a problem and we lose that ability to adapt so really healthy people are highly adaptable in fact the russian cosmonaut program which we don't hear a lot about because it was the soviet union actually was very advanced in their approach to how they chose cosmonauts and they looked at this very information to determine who was the most adaptable person for certain situations because they knew they'd be under tremendous stress so tests have  equipment gives the ability to look at the entire autonomic nervous system in your autonomic control all those things we just talked about there also something you don't have to think about it just happens that light takes care of metabolic state digestion respiration cell function  it's going on in the background almost like a computer has certain programs running in the background but if that system should begin to bog down or not function properly that's when we run into some of these other issues and we're going to move into a place where the nervous system moves into an unbalanced state that unbalanced state means we're going to actually there be over ralph's use me under ralph unstable or over or else if for unstable then we're bouncing back and forth between the two and usually that's a place we get to when that stress has been there for quite some time because stressors actually or what produce this problem and everybody has stressed the thing is most people think stress is a mental event only chess is not just mental it's physical because anything that acts on the mind which is the nervous system the brain specifically is directly impacting the rest of the body through the spinal cord which is why we as chiropractors look to the nervous system first before anything else because it's controlling how you produce hormones what chemicals you produce how your body digests and all the rest of the topics that we discover if we're in an under state however we're stuck in that down regulated mode and so one of the things that we can see is poor digestion or impulsive behavior either being easily distracted or disorganized well also c b people who are depressed or who lack  motivation lack of the ability to concentrate spaciness feeling constipation you can see low pain threshold difficulty waking warry that person can also be very very irritable and they'll be low energy now people on this side are stuck in a part of that autonomic or automatic nervous system that's called a parasympathetic that's that under state they just don't have the energy to get up and move very often these people are depressed that's one of the main things we see but that poor attention especially in early childhood we see with children who get diagnosed with attention deficit tension deficit is a neurological imbalance it's not a chemical or hormonal it will manifest itself through certain chemistry in the body but that's not where the where the issue originates it's originating in and under  our nervous system with that diagnostic equipment that i spoke of earlier we have the ability to now finally really look at that and address it correctly from a full perspective looking at that whole nervous system so it's important we understand that under aus nervous system creates very specific issues that often times if they get treated especially for doing self care we tend to self medicate for these things and we have to be very careful doing that because if it really is a neurological issue in your self medicating whether that be  depressed and so we decide to do something whether it's natural or not to try and stimulate that nervous system it's not always the best idea we can't work from chemistry up we need to work from their ology down or even that core attention parents oftentimes are talking to me about their children and their inability to focus on the institute certain parenting issues or pairing parenting approaches which aren't always effective because it's a neurological issue it's not the child just being disrespectful or being hardheaded so understanding that's really crucial by the same token if they're over aroused we have a similar issue we're just on the other end of imbalance so now we have people who may have cold hands cold feet that's a really big when people have that more often than you think but they chalk it up to cold hands warm heart and isn't actually how that works cold hands is a clear indication of the body's under stress now you may think well big deal for my hands are cold it's not really a huge issue and it isn't but what it is is an indicator that the body's in a huge state of imbalance so that autonomic system is feeling energy from one part of the body to place into another when we see this level of imbalance we're in a state called fight or flight that fight or flight state or that fear based state is is a place where we start to redirect blood flow we redirected into our core muscle groups the first place we put it is in the heart and lungs so we can speed up their activity but we speed that activity up we push that blood now into the large muscle groups and so you get a lot of blood flow to the neck and also into the low back because the fight flight response means i have to be able to do battle or run away so we're going to put the blood into those muscles the problem with that is if you're taking blood from other areas specifically you're taking blood from the organs in the organs or in the process of wrapping up their activity if you're in that state with any kind of frequency then you're using up tremendous amounts of energy which lead us into that back into a low energy state also cause the body to break down because the immune system cannot work when the body's over roust it shut off and it shuts off because if you're in the process of running from the bear you don't have time to fight a cold you need every bit of energy you have to be put into the place where you can take the most of damage of it so there are big changes when we see cold hands and feet what's going on inside not just the fact that your hands are cold we'll see tight muscles or teeth grinding really really common again will send a lot of blood to this area because as you clench the teeth if you were to take a blow it stabilizes the brain from concussion that's why we put mouthpieces in athletes anxiety heart palpitations restless sleep i hear about restless sleep on a regular basis again a real simple concept if we're under threat we're not going to go to sleep because the chance of us being attacked or something occurring while we're not paying attention is much higher so that sleep mode is definitely  interrupted now the thing people really need to understand is that this state of activity or over or is a result of a threat that's either real or perceived so very rarely are we being chased by bears but we may have deadlines we may have stuff to for school we may have things that need to be done for work and these things we bring home with us and we worry about them and we've got to get the kids where they need to go and you've got to balance you know five different activities at the same time there's just not enough you to go around that's what drives that change so rarely is it that external environment that's our issue anymore because of our lifestyle it's the internal so all those activities which are weighing on your mind are directly changing your physiology for expression of emotions outbursts just angry all the time again we can see this a lot of little kids and this can happen in kids and i get the question all the time it was my kid i have to be stressed about kids have stresses just like adults and they're different because they're age appropriate for them but the things that go on in their world is just as important to them as they are for you so they understand that process but they don't always understand how to express it or how to communicate it and so we can see this changes even in young children you know the thing is if the household as a whole is under stress then the child is going to be in that same boat and they're going to be feeling this things as well again or just not mixed recipes or be able to verbalize it maybe like somebody a little older with a poor immune system we just talked about the immune system has to shut off you're going to be pushing that energy into a different direction in order to get the body to perform at its maximum level for what should be a very short time there's a great book on this called why don't the rich get ulcers if you think about it a zebra is a prey animal it's constantly under threat from a variety of big cats so why aren't they chronically falling over due to this high stress and the answer is because they learn how to shift gears if there really is a lion chasing them then they're on full alert and you can see this in any nature show you'll see the whole herd take off and head in a certain direction to try and remove themselves from that immediate danger but once that happens they go back down to their previous mode of balance nervous system and go back to their activities if they don't they won't be able to feed properly they won't be able to digest properly anything that they are feeding on and they'll lose the ability to heal and grow and reproduce because these stress patterns also turn off the body's ability to reproduce both in men and women so if we see somebody having a hard time getting pregnant there's absolutely a correlation and we actually see those people in the office get not because we have a correction for inability to become pregnant but we do have a correction for balancing the nervous system and it controls that system so absolutely will see those changes a racing mind high blood pressure accelerated aging arable bow there is a study not that long ago and unfortunately very rarely do you see on mainstream media the benefits of chiropractic even though the research is going on on a regular basis but high blood pressure actually made it to the i think with the today show about three years ago their very specific receptors in the neck inside the arteries and their neurological receptors even though they're in an artery they control blood pressure to the brain and actually to the rest of the body as a whole by feeding constant updates and information up to the brain so that you don't have too much pressure on the brain if you did there's chance of stroke so that part of the direct neurological control and if it's off we're going to see high blood pressure if we're over here on the inner outside we're going to see low blood pressure just like we would see a low metabolic state women will say to me constantly you know i'm exercising i'm eating right i'm not losing weight the problem is the body's in this state of imbalance and because it is it's holding on to whatever happens if i were truly in a threat environment i wouldn't want to be losing weight because i need that because it's an energy source while we don't view fat as being a good thing and certainly being overweight is unhealthy fat is a phenomenal source of energy and it's the way we store it the way we store energy very effectively for long term so being in this under overall state will not allow you to burn lots of it off because you may need it remember the body thinks it's in a stress these states are allowed to continue for any length of time then we're going to continue to down regulate and will move to an exhausted nervous system we're not under or over us anymore we're not unstable we've actually dropped down here which is exhausted if a nervous system exhaust begin to see much more severe issues and that's where we get into cancers and chronic fatigue rheumatoid arthritis diabetes especially type two who are primarily type two fiber mileage or m s a l s both neurological issues depression and epstein barr syndrome and that's just to name a few even though there's a lot on here this by no means is all of the information that's in there which is what we could fit on here but we see much more severe issues and what that tells us is if we see somebody who shows up in this category this person has been like this for quite some time and so what i constantly am talking to people about is get checked takes two seconds get checked get your kids checked if there's something going on we'll catch it and will correct it it's very simple to do if it goes on for a really long time then we're going to move into these other states and they take much longer to correct it's a very big deal now here's the issue and this is where people miss it and it's understandable that they do very often the the answer that i get from them is but i feel good or yeah everybody has stress but it's no more than usual the problem is you wrote you lack the ability if it's been long term you lack the ability to become aware of it there is actually some very good research out there want to stanford university study that shows what people had to self report their stress levels one hundred percent of the time they got it wrong so when they self reported and we actually did the evaluation the correlation was one hundred percent in inaccurate and the reason for that is this same process this middleground the body goes into survival when it goes into survival it stops reporting things that you're either not addressing or deemed inconsequential at the moment so if i am running from the bear and i stub my toe i'm not going to stop and deal with my toe in fact i won't even know it i'll just keep going and later on if i don't get eaten i'll feel the toe pain if people do this all the time while we're there for has come from within even though i had it or especially and unfortunately in situations of combat people will be wounded continue on with their activities and only later realize that they've been shot or there's a piece of shrapnel that's affected them or they've been damaged in some way because adrenaline kicks in in the mind takes over it desensitize you to those issues and if it didn't you would be able to survive because if you did stop to feel your toe the bear would catch any chin so it's important we understand it's desensitisation process because if you don't you're not going under stand that this could be things going on in the background that are affecting you so i like to really liken this to a computer a computer that's running properly has enough memory has been off speed and it's doing what you want to do in the time frame you want to do it but computers very much like us have a have a hard drive that runs that system and that hard drive stores information sometimes that hard drive though will get additional information on it it's either outdated or incompatible with the new system that you're running if that happens then you get lag time is that is the computer is scanning through that hard drive looking for what you want to have to go through these deleted areas or these spaces are gaps or all programs and as it does it slows you down your nervous system is exactly the same way because a lot of the information that's affecting you it's up conscious that means it's below your level of conscious awareness and that's where that desensitisation comes in the mind brings it up and says hey here this is what are going to do with it and if we don't address it it just puts it on the shelf in the background for later when you do have time to address it used to see a lady years ago who is actually a teacher always her montrose i don't have time to be sick she'd get a cold or something else in the middle ear and it would be gone in a day or so initially she thought she had this incredible them but the real thing that was going on and she was really putting it on the shelf and people think that's impossible but there's actually quite a lot of research that shows how this very process works out in our physiology come summer almost the very first week of her having summer vacation she would be sick and she'd be sick for two or three weeks this went on for three years it wasn't until she began to understand this process that we're able to get her to begin processing those issues when they came and be able to develop an understanding about how she needs to take a little time off and there's one or two days they would make a huge difference they wouldn't stack up those issues when it came to her break because that attitude of i don't have time for that right now would just eventually catch up to her and she would be a lot sicker than she normally would have she just taken the time to do the self care necessary which is just a little dish and rest maybe change or provide a little bit maybe have a day off of work which she was able to do she just wouldn't do it she's a workaholic and she couldn't understand that process so getting people to that place is really really crucial if we can help them begin to understand how their bodies working they can start taking ownership of this and really change how their body's going to perform and how it's going to work on a day to day basis as well as if i put it into a big situation where there is high stress because maybe you're an athlete maybe you just have something coming up and you have a deadline you have to meet there's nothing you can do about that we want you to be able to perform there but we also want you then to be able to down regulate if we can get that system to shift gears and be highly adaptable the body can stay in that place of balance it'll do what you want to do and then they'll settle back down a big topic that i use or a big example i use for a lot of our patients is think of it as a race car race cars run one hundred two hundred miles an hour around the track and they're able to do that because they take pit stops often the car you drive in day to day you can go weeks months finding out how much you drive on them the year before have to really change the oil however if you're driving your car that hard like a race car and that's ok to do you can be a high end athlete or a really driven person you have to take more pitstop of the simple as that you have to give the body this chance to adapt if not we'll continue to break down we'll continue to break it down because we use up resources that replenishing that's all that simple it's about creating balance so it becomes really critical to understand this balance process and begin to implement it if you see that you're experiencing some of these issues don't just treat the symptom get the evaluation find out what the nervous system is doing so that you can come at it from the correct direction otherwise all you're really going to do is treat that symptom so you have a little bit of improvement and then you'll drop off again you have a little bit of improvement and drop off again this this this correlation isn't a lot more places than we think like i said it's in the areas where we perform but it's also in our day to day lives even just how we think about how we're going to plan our day if that mind is racing constantly over here on this over outside it's really tough to schedule things accurately and so people begin relying on notes and and phones and all the rest these are fine for for keeping ourselves organized but if your brain can't process that you have all that information like you said on the computer running in the background and it's really go slow you down it may not be a big deal you forget a loaf of bread at the supermarket or something like that that happens to me on a regular basis i think but if we get to the point where we have a lot of that information the brat background that subconscious mind is running and you're not aware because you've been desensitized then it will start to impact a lot of other areas because you have to steal energy to get your body working up to the level that you want to it's only gonna be able to for so long so think about that if you have any questions please feel free to e mail us or call you're welcome to stop by the office we have these in the form of a handout and we do regular discussions on this on monday nights they're open to the public there's no fee and almost my about three mondays a month something like this is going on on a regular basis or very very focused on education we want you to know why we're doing what we're doing and how it's affecting you so you can begin taking stock of how this affected is impacting your day and i can change it because there's some real simple things if you're in the over rao's group deep breathing it's phenomenally effective huge it's the fastest way to change what's going on your nervous system after an adjustment adjustments are first they have a tremendous impact on brain function but deep breathing is free you got to breathe all day anyway if you learn to do that with just your stomach when people deep breathe a very awful raised the chest this actually causes the body to work in the opposite direction of how we want it speeds it up you want to move just the abdomen when you take that breath it lowers blood pressure it aids in digestion it clears the mind  and it lowers heart rate if you're in this overall state excuse if you're in the under all state then you can do that breathing you just speed up to the frequency with which you do it that's all you just do it a little faster you're having the same similar benefit to the  body and it's easy to do like i said we cover a lot of this information on a regular basis we have these handouts in the office if you're wondering if one of these things is affecting your what you can do about it feel free to give us a call appreciate your time we'll be back this year for several more of these