How do you respond to a fire alarm...take out the batteries or put out the fire? 🔥

1. Blog Home
2. How do you respond to a fire alarm...take out the batteries or put out the fire? 🔥

Imagine you woke to the sound of a smoke alarm going off in your house and when the fire department arrived then went straight to the alarm and pulled out the batteries. While it solved the problem of the noisy alarm the fact is there is still a fire that needs to be dealt with.  

While this sounds utterly ridiculous, we do the same thing all the time when it comes to our health.  

The symptoms we experience are almost always the result of something else going on in our body and when we focus on the symptoms only, we don’t actually take care of the true problem.  

Take high blood pressure for instance.  Nearly half of the US population over 20 years old has high blood pressure (yup, you read that right HALF THE US POPULATION HAS HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE). There are many causes of high blood pressure but one of the most common risk factors is stress.  

Stress triggers a fight or flight response in our body, basically it prompts our brain to instruct the body to prepare to stand our ground and fight or start running for safety.  

The result is quite impressive, our body responds brilliantly by increasing our breathing so that we are bringing in more oxygen while at the same time our heart rate and blood pressure increase to prime our muscles for the task ahead with oxygen rich blood. At the same time our body starts to increase the cholesterol in our blood to help thicken it up so that in case of injury we don’t bleed out. While the brain is focusing on regulating the systems that will help ensure our safety, less vital systems like reproduction, digestion and the immune system are less regulated, which is brilliant in and of itself as survival is our goal at this time.  

Our body is designed to respond like this to stress and, after the stress passes, it is designed to return to a baseline where the nervous system returns to giving equal attention to all systems, not just the ones that will keep us safe in times of danger.  

This brilliant response is also the cause of our poor health. The reason is despite its brilliance, our body can’t tell the difference between a true life threat and just a life trigger that leaves us feeling stressed like being stuck in traffic, a bad day at work or any other source of stress you can think of.  

When we stay in a state of chronic stress our body doesn’t get a chance to return to that normal baseline and the result is our body stays in a state of preparedness to fight or flee. The result of long term stress.... high blood pressure, high cholesterol and heart disease. 

This is where chiropractic comes in. Regular chiropractic care impacts your nervous system in a way that helps to restore ease to the system which allows your brain to better be able to differentiate true threat from a minor inconvenience. 

Please don’t take this as me saying that chiropractic alone is how you should treat high blood pressure. As a registered nurse I have seen all too often the results of leaving problems like blood pressure and high cholesterol untreated. The point I am trying to make here is that medicine alone will not fix the problem any more than only adjusting your spine will.  

The truth is we are complex beings and I believe the best way to approach our mental and physical health is by having health care providers work together to improve your health by multiple angles. For instance, have a medical doctor to help control your blood pressure with medication while you are under the care of a chiropractor to improve the mobility of your spine and ultimately improve how your nervous system is able to adapt to the world around it; with the ultimate goal being not to have to rely on medication and to get adjusted on a periodic yet regular basis (which will vary depending on your level of daily stress) as a means to prevent problems from arising.  

Posted In: Chiropractic Chiropractor