Image showing a person receiving conventional chiropractic adjustment

Why Chiropractic Adjustments Don’t Hold

Anyone who has experienced chiropractic treatments likely knows that sometimes the “adjustments” just don’t seem to stay in place. Even chiropractors admit that and attribute it to the lack of exercise or some muscle or nerve issue. In this article, we’ll explain why this phenomenon occurs.

But first we need to bring up one very important feature of the human body. At any given time, regardless of how injured, bent-up or crooked a body is, it’s always trying to balance itself such that your eyes are in line with the horizon. It does that by counter-balancing the forces that are trying to throw it off due to structural injuries. In essence, your body is a self-balancing machine when it comes down to its mechanics. This is significant, so remember this as your read on.

The chiropractic approach

The central theme of chiropractic is identifying the vertebrae that go out of place, called subluxations, and then manually moving them back to their natural positions, called adjustments. However, the assumption is that a vertebra that’s not lined up with the spine needs to be pushed back into place so it’s aligned with the spine. Hence the emphasis on misalignments and why they need to be fixed.

In the video below, a conventional chiropractor demonstrates how a typical adjustment is performed along with its perceived benefits.

 

What this profession has been missing all along in its 125 years of history is that some bones in the body can be out of their natural positions due to the self-balancing feature of the body mechanics. Which means that they don’t just go out of alignment, but are pulled away by muscular effort in order to compensate for a prior injury.

This is not another chicken-egg conundrum, the exact reason behind it has been scientifically observed, documented, and applied to fix bodies for the past 3+ decades. Let me explain.

Two types of bone misalignments

As it turns out, there are two types of bones that go out of place: those that the body can self-correct and those that it can’t because there are no muscles available to pull them into place. The bones, and this goes for more than just the vertebrae, that the body can self-correct but does not are displaced to compensate for the out-of-place bones that can’t be self-corrected by the body. For vertebrae, for example, this would be a forward position since there are no muscles directly behind them to pull them back in place. You can verify that by running your fingers down your or someone else’s backbone.

The actual problem that takes place in the body is a bone goes out of place in one part of the body enough to throw it off and, in an attempt to keep you upright, the body’s self-regulating mechanism kicks in. The body triggers necessary muscles to pull and hold a bone or set of bones in order to compensate for the injury that just took place. Note that, almost always, the compensations will occur at areas away from the actual injury. The bones that actually need to be corrected will not be completely locked up because that’s not where the body compensates.

As this compensatory pattern develops, the muscles that are contracted to balance your body off, begin to work overtime eventually developing inflammation that you perceive as pain. This usually happens promptly after an injury, within moments of you trying to get up and function normally, although your symptoms may develop over the following days or weeks. The body needs this compensation in place before it can resume routine activities. Because of that the bone also gets locked up so the counter-balancing measures can’t be thrown off easily.

The biggest oversight of the chiropractic profession is that they perform adjustments indiscriminately. Rather than detect and fix the forward bones, they look for areas of tension and inflammation and decide that the bones near those areas are the ones causing problems. Yes, that sounds too simple, but that’s how institutionalized chiropractic is performed!

Body’s response to chiropractic manipulation

Graphic showing results from a Spinal Thermography scan
Graphic showing results from a Spinal Thermography scan

In a typical chiro exam, the doctor palpates your spine and feels for the locked up bones and tense muscles in the surrounding area. Or they may run a spinal thermography scan to detect the area of subluxations usually indicated by inflammation markers as shown in the left image.

What they are really looking at are the bones that are displaced by the body to counter-balance the effects of an injury. Even though it may cause symptoms and, potentially, impaired muscle and nerve function, these bones must be left alone. These vertebrae were put in their subluxed positions by the body for a reason. When you “fix” such vertebral displacements, it almost always puts the body in a more compromised position until it manages to reset that compensation.

If the body can’t reset the compensation immediately for any reason, you feel horrible and notice that the treatment harmed rather than helping the body. Even if you feel better because the adjustment took away the tension and pain for the time, breaking a compensation as in a typical chiropractic treatment is perceived as trauma by your body and always worsens, mechanically. Regardless, you’ll almost always develop the same symptoms again in the same area or elsewhere due to body having to reset and shift the compensatory pattern.

Below, Dr Jutkowitz explains using computer animation how a conventional chiropractic manipulation can worsen the body mechanics.

 

This explains why chiropractic adjustments either don’t seem to hold or present a completely new set of symptoms that you never experienced before. It also explains why your visits to the chiropractor never stop. That’s because the treatments never fix your structure but only keep you on a treadmill of treatments. It’s not uncommon for folks to be regularly visiting their chiropractors for decades until finally attributing their poor structure to old age.

Most chiropractors admit that there’s only so much you can do for people with chiropractic. That’s not the case with ABC™ because the technique goes to the bottom of structural issues rather than performing adjustments that are palliative at best and damaging at worst.

Does you health practitioner look healthy?

Probably the most ironical point it explains is why most chiropractors themselves have collapsed posture. They either appear to be uptight with straight backs or slouch with their head in a forward position – the classic gooseneck effect of having misaligned cervical bones, particularly, C7.

Some get frustrated with the lack of consistent results within their practice and either change profession or diversify into other services like nutritional supplements, acupuncture, tissue work etc. Meanwhile, they continue their struggle with own symptoms – these are the stories of most of the chiropractors who finally found and started practicing Advanced BioStructural Correction.

Summary

The truth is that most chiropractors are compassionate people who are doing the best they can for their patients. But the reality is that they are limited by their training in what kind of results they can achieve. This regularly comes up in conversations with chiropractors who have adopted ABC™ as their preferred technique for treating structural problems.
ABC™ practitioners routinely help those who were told that they couldn’t be helped anymore by their chiropractors, physical therapists, osteopaths, and neurologists.

This article is not a criticism and it is not my intention to make anyone wrong. What anyone deems to be right or wrong is relative to the reality they live in. My goal is to make you aware of the possibilities that are available so you can make an informed decision to chart a course for restoring your health. What reality you’d like to be a part of is, of course, entirely up to you.