Creation Chiropractic Blog - Eden Prairie MN

The nerves in your body are designed to communicate information from your brain to your body, and then back again without interference. In chiropractic, this circuitry loop connected by your nerves through your spine is called the safety pin cycle. This cycle works optimally when the nerve channels are clear to express the messages they carry. Spinal bones often misalign and put pressure on nerves, which irritates or pinches them. These are called spinal subluxations. They distort the signals transmitted through the entire body, causing the body to lose its ability to adapt well. A pinch isn’t just a pinch.

By the time we think we have a pinched nerve, we have probably been in a pinch for much longer than we thought. This is because it takes very little pressure to affect a nerve, and usually starts before we might feel anything abnormal as a result of it. Studies show that just the weight of a dime can decrease nerve function from 40-60%! That’s pretty amazing, considering the kinds of forces the body must deal with on a regular basis. The spinal bones, called vertebrae, normally protect the delicate spinal cord, which is made up of about a half billion nerve fibers and has the consistency of soft cheese. When these same bones malign, they can cause interference to the very structures they usually protect. This quickly makes a hard bone on a soft nerve, truly a rock in a hard place.

Since less than 10% of all our nerves are designed to transmit any pain at all, discomfort and pain are not good indicators of when a true problem has started anyway. When we do feel a pinch somewhere, we don’t even know if the problem is where the pinch is actually felt. Many times the problem causing the pinch is in a completely different place than where we feel it. That’s a heck of a pinch to be in!

There is only one way to know for sure whether your pinch is coming from a spinal subluxation. Get checked by a chiropractor who is uniquely trained at analyzing your nervous system to specifically find and adjust your nerve interference, pinch or not, so your body can get back to doing what it needs to do.

TMJ Syndrome:  “Temporal Mandibular Joint Syndrome.” Quite a mouthful for a jaw condition, isn’t it? Everyone has a TMJ on either side of their jaw, because it is a normal joint in all of us. The syndrome part comes in when the TMJ is not functioning properly. This can produce things such as jaw pain, headaches, abnormal wear of your teeth and even less obvious conditions like sleeping problems. Therapies may or may not be needed to treat this condition, but what people don’t know, including dentists and even TMJ specialists, is how important your neck function is to your jaw function.

So many functions of the body can be better understood by learning how these structures develop in the first place. After two cells come together at conception and the nervous system becomes the very first tissue to form in your body, your jaw descended from your head and neck. And since the nervous system is involved from the very beginning, your jaw depends on proper nerve supply for proper function. 

Your jaw works like a drawbridge, opening and closing on hinges with the coordination of muscles surrounding your entire face and neck.  These muscles are controlled by nerves coming from your head and spine, as well as the alignment of all the attached bones.  Your jaw itself can misalign, but what many don’t realize is that your neck alignment plays a huge role in jaw alignment and function. Often times, your jaw could have all the symptoms but your misaligned neck may good enough that you would never think to go to a chiropractor to have spine checked as well as your jaw.

When the bones of your neck misalign and interfere with nerve function, which they often do, it causes the muscles of your jaw to work abnormally. This can cause your jaw to open and close abnormally, changing the feeling of your jaw directly. These neck misalignments are called spinal subluxations and can only be checked by a chiropractor. Even if you are seeing a TMJ specialist, they are not trained to analyze the spine for this connection to your jaw problem. Many people are getting treated for what seems like a difficult jaw problem with ongoing jaw therapies, sometimes over years, and yet the very thing that could be complicating or even causing the problem isn’t even in the jaw. And because the neck often feels fine, no one knows to check the spine.

Jaw problems can begin any number of ways. Sometimes with a direct blow to the jaw, sometimes with a general injury to the upper body and sometimes jaw symptoms come on with no history of injury at all! Regardless of how your jaw problem started, it is very important to get your spine checked by a chiropractor to make sure your condition is not complicated, or caused altogether, by this vital connection. Otherwise, you could end up on an endless road of therapies that may lead to nowhere because they are only treating the effects of your jaw problem. Many people with a jaw condition will get unnecessary dental work and surgery in a desperate attempt to feel better. Many therapies are based on the changes seen as just effects of the real problem, effects from somewhere else, often the neck and spine. Don’t take the chance of having spinal subluxations run off at the mouth! See a chiropractor today.

Did you know that you are sitting on jelly sandwiches?  We all have them. They are stacked up in our spine, so the lower down the spine the bigger the sandwich.  Our jelly sandwiches are made up of bone bread and disc jelly and are perfectly normal and needed for us to function properly.

The jelly between our backbones allows us to absorb shock and move in many directions.  They are designed to take a lot of stress, but when the pressure is too great for too long, the jelly starts to come out of your sandwich and can ooze all over your nerves!  They call this oozing jelly a disc herniation and although it can result in pain over time, most people have the oozing long before they ever know there is something wrong with the sandwich.

That’s why when people do an activity that shouldn’t normally cause enough stress to force the jelly out of the sandwich, they might think that the oozing started with the pain.  But in order to understand better what exactly is going on, we have to take a look at the conditions that set us up for a messy spine.

So what makes the jelly leave the bread in the first place? The jelly inside your sandwiches works perfectly as long as the pressure from gravity and activity is spread out evenly along the bread.  Most oozing doesn’t happen from a single stressful event, it happens gradually over time and you have no idea it is going on until it is too late.

When the spine twists for long periods of time, it puts more pressure on one side of the sandwich and the jelly is forced to leave the bread.  It doesn’t have a choice.  The same forces that hold the jelly in place will force the jelly to move out of sandwich if the spine twists out of shape because the jelly can’t move itself.  It has to go wherever the forces in the spine go.

When there is nerve interference (subluxation) in one place in your spine, usually in your upper neck, it forces the rest of the spine to compensate by twisting around the subluxation.  Imagine grabbing a snake by the neck; what happens to the rest of the snake?  You’re right; it coils around your arm!  Your spine does the same thing.  So what do you think happens with all those jelly sandwiches in a twisted spine?  Right again! You end up with a messy spine, sometimes with many places where jelly has oozed out of place.

The most common places for oozing jelly are in the lower neck and the lower back.  When they see this on an MRI, they might want to blame the jelly and try to treat it with drugs or surgery to numb it up, or cut it out, but this does nothing to fix the sandwich itself or prevent the jelly from coming out of the sandwiches around it.

The good news is that most jelly problems don’t require any of these extreme treatments.  If we look at the real cause of the problem, we can take the pressure off the sandwiches and allow the jelly to ooze back into place again.  Your Chiropractor is specifically trained to find the interference in your spine, remove it, and allow your spine to untwist again, letting the jelly move back between the bread again and off your nerves.

Even better news, is that the interference is usually not where the oozing is so the spinal adjustments usually don’t have to be done where the pain is. Many people are surprised where their interference actually is because they became convinced that their problem must be where their pain is, when in fact the pain is usually just where the effects are, not the true cause of their problem.   With time and repetition, not only does the pain usually go away, the underlying disc issue resolves as well.

The best news of all is that none of us has to wait until we feel pain related to oozing jelly or the illusions that come over the years of thinking we don’t have a problem until we have pain.  We can all get checked for nerve interference today to reverse the effects of a twisted spine and the oozing jelly that leads to worse problems tomorrow.

Some myths are almost as timeless as the truth.  A truth that is often misunderstood is the chiropractic principle that all processes require time.  This isn’t a new concept to any health care profession, but it is a reminder that time is involved with everything we do. There are several popular but timeless myths that are wrong no matter how appealing they are.  Many people watch late night infomercials and intuitively know the claims can’t be true but order the questionable products anyway.  In order to truly understand our health, we need to understanding of how time relates to it so we are not misled.

The first myth is that time is instantaneous.  There is no such thing as instantaneous healing because it takes time to get sick and it takes time to get well.  However, when interference is removed with a spinal adjustment, your body is just waiting for the opportunity to function better.  Healing can feel instantaneous because the intelligence within you is perfect but the matter it moves through in your body is not. For example, your body can send a nerve signal from your toes to your nose in about 1/50 of a second.  To put that in perspective, this is faster than movie images shown in 1/24 of a second to give the illusion of motion.  When we no longer have illusions about time, we can have a better idea and therefore make better decisions about our health.  Even with modern day technology moving at the speed of light, healing your body takes time.

The second myth is that time can be speeded up.  While we may not buy this fallacy in other aspects of our lives, many tend to believe it when it comes to our health.  We see lots of things suggesting that the problem is “slow healing” and that treatments could speed that up somehow.  The truth is, there is only healing or not and it can’t be hurried.  This means you are either healing without interference to the intelligence that does all your healing or you aren’t healing as you should be.  You can look at spinal interference affecting your healing like having your foot on the gas and the brake of your car at the same time.  Adjusting your spine takes your foot off the brake and when your car takes off again, it can look like we sped your car up, but only the innate intelligence that runs your body is in charge of your gas pedal. Healing happens at the right speed.

The third myth is that time can be reversed or stopped.  The anti-aging ads are everywhere, but we all know this just isn’t possible.  All the treatments in the world will not make your body go backwards in time or stop it somehow from moving forward.  The truth is, we need to learn how our body really works so we can move forward the way we are designed to be.  When we go from interference to realizing the full expression of our true potential, it can seem like we are younger because we are just working that much better.  It is said that history repeats lessons that are not learned, so take this opportunity to stop living a lesser version of your self.  Get your spine checked today so you can move forward the right way tomorrow and make your health issues history.

Sleep counts.  Studies show even those who say they don’t need it…still need it. And it’s not just about the amount of sleep; it’s the quality of recuperative rest we get that really counts.  It’s more than feeling refreshed; it’s about healing up from all the demands when we are awake. And although many are aware of various factors that affect sleep in one way or another, did you know that your spine affects your sleep too?

Whether you have back pain or not, most of the feedback to your brain is coming from spinal nerves.  It’s just how we are all made.  These connections affect the entire brain but it specifically affects your awake and rest cycles, determining how good you actually sleep.  The spine is so important, that you can’t get a good night sleep without it.

Interference to spinal pathways to the brain can cause interruption of normal processing that is a prerequisite for normal sleep patterns, no matter how long you lay in bed.  Subluxations, spinal bones that misalign and interfere with nerve function, are a common cause of abnormal brain function that is critical to sleeping.

There are basic levels of sleep that everyone visits no matter how well they are able to sleep.  We slip in and out of them at different times during the night, but a key difference is the amount of time we spend at each level.  Children, for example, sleep deeper than adults in general but a good night sleep requires uninterrupted time in the deeper levels.

In the beginning of the night, it is easy to wake up during this lighter level.  While we may be technically asleep, if we don’t progress to the next deeper levels we won’t have the restful sleep required for the day ahead.  There is normally increased involuntary muscle contraction during this time and is an essential way for the body to make any muscle tone corrections it couldn’t do when you were awake.  However, interference to this first phase of sleep can cause muscle symptoms, such as charlie horses and growing pains.

The deeper phases are associated with a more restful sleep, including deep muscle relaxation.  If there is interference to this crucial part of sleep, there can be a loss of normal muscle control, resulting in conditions such as bedwetting.  This is a coveted level of sleep that is easily lost if the body is prevented from going there.  It is a main reason why we can be asleep for 8-10 hours but still be exhausted in the morning.

REM is another important deep level associated with active mind processing and dreaming.  This is a time when the brain works out much of the mental stress from the day.  If there is interference here, issues like night terrors and sleepwalking can result. Spinal interference will affect your state of mind, even when you are unconscious.

No matter how our brains need to prepare for sleep, there is no aspect that isn’t negatively affected by spinal interference. When any of the bones of the spine misalign they can interfere with how the brain works and sleep.  Many times the problem can look like the bladder or a scary movie or exercise, when actually it is the body’s ability to communicate with itself through the spine and nervous system.

Stop counting sheep and start counting on a good night sleep.  Get your spine checked today to make your night right.