Chiropractic Care, An Interview With Dr. James Brown: Understanding Why It Works
Read some introductory excerpts from our interview with Dr. James Brown, Chiropractor, Rocket City Chiropractics, Huntsville, AL
Listen to our Interview! Chiropractic Care: Understanding Why It Works
Chiropractic is centered around identifying, locating and correcting what we call subluxations. A subluxation is a damaged or injured spinal joint which puts pressure on a nerve. A subluxation is similar to a pinched nerve, except that it can affect everything along the path of that nerve. For example, if I’ve got a subluxation or pinched nerve in my mid-back, my mid-back may hurt, but there’s also a branch of that nerve that may affect the stomach and cause indigestion, heartburn or acid reflux. And, if you’ve ever heard stories like, “I went to my chiropractor for ear infections,” or “I went to him for PMS,” that’s exactly how it works — again, addressing a subluxation can affect everything along the path of that nerve positively.
A lot of people have heard of pinched nerves. You can have a pinched nerve in your neck that runs down into your shoulder and hand and arm and causes pain and numbness and weakness. You may experience all those symptoms even into your lower back or feel it down your leg.
Subluxations usually have five different factors and that’s what we look for when someone comes in as a new patient. It doesn’t matter if they come in for a big toe pain, or if they have indigestion or heart burn or headaches or some other symptom. The first of the five factors is usually pain or tenderness. While the patient may have aches or pains, the specific sign we are looking for is tenderness or pain caused while palpating (or feeling) along that spinal area. For example, someone may come in with a low back pain, but we check their neck and find a sore spot, which is an indication of a subluxation even though the patient may not have noticed anything there.
The second factor is to look for swelling and inflammation in the areas with pain or tenderness, because if a joint’s not working properly, it will be swollen or inflamed. We will also be looking for tight muscles.Whenever a joint is not working properly, the muscles have to compensate and become tighter to try to protect that area because it’s weak. Muscle spasms are our third factor.
The fourth factor is how well the joint bends and turns. For example, if you can look farther over one shoulder than you can the other, that is an indication of subluxation.
As the fifth factor we also look for a temperature difference. The nerve temperature on both sides of the spine should be identical — maybe not from the top of the neck to the bottom of the rear end, but from the left side to right side, within a couple inches of that nerve, the temperature should be the same. If there is a sudden change in temperature, that is an indication of a subluxation.
There are two different instruments which help us identify the location of the subluxation by measuring nerve temperature. One is called a thermoscan and employs computer based imaging. We also have what we call a nervoscope, and I really like that one better, which is not linked to a computer. The nervoscope has been around for probably 60 years or more and has been refined over time and is very accurate. It indicates the temperature difference by a needle deflection, similar to the gas gauge on your car.
In chiropractic, we find out which bone is mis-aligned, we work on correcting that in a particular line of drive and corrective mode so it allows the body to heal up as best as it can.
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