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What Have You Done for Yourself Today?

“Self care is health care.”  This is a statement you will hear us say often in the office.  The purpose is to make people aware that they have to be responsible for their own health.  One has to make themselves accountable to the lifestyle choices they make each day.  A great leader in our profession, Russ Rosen, illustrates this perfectly in the following example.

 

A patient walks into my office, with a complaint of an ongoing headache.  Despite consistent chiropractic care for the last few months, the headache remains a challenge in this man’s life.  I check his spine and nervous system, adjust where indicated, and he leaves feeling as though his headache is gone.  He goes home and, as per usual, begins to his his head against the wall.  Over and over again.  Two days later he’s back in my office, complaining of the headache again.  I adjust as indicated, he feels better, and he goes home.  He starts to bang his head against the wall again.  The headache comes back, he returns to my office for another adjustment, he feels better, and he goes back to banging his head again.  This cycle continues until one day, as his Chiropractor, I ask what he does at home, in-between his adjustments.  He tells me that he bangs his head against the wall.  I suggest he stop doing that.  He stops and not surprisingly, the headache doesn’t return.  

 

It’s a metaphor, obviously.  But the question is…what choices do you make in your life that contribute to your health care issues?  So often, people expect the chiropractic adjustment to simply relieve them of their symptoms.  There are two challenges with this:

 

1)  The purpose of an adjustment is not to relieve symptoms, but instead it is to remove any interference in the brain’s ability to communicate with the rest of the body.  When this interference is removed, the body functions better and more appropriately responds to stresses in our environment.

 

2)  Ongoing lifestyle choices that do not support our health can work against the natural, innate function of the body, disallowing it to properly adapt to stress which will lead to creating symptoms that overtime will lead to a disease process.

 

Chiropractic is not the only answer to a body that is in dis-ease.  By choosing to go to a Chiropractor, or any health care professional, does not relinquish you from making better lifestyle choices that will build health from the inside, out.  It is not the responsibility of any health care professional to keep you healthy.  As Chiropractors, we are there for advice, for guidance, and for providing care to help support your body.  But in reality, we are there for less than .5% of your day….the other 95.5% of your day is up to you.

Chiropractic + Good Lifestyle Choices = Better Health