A Logical and Reasonable Fact...

 "The obvious is the last thing we think, see, or do" - Elbert Hubbard

Look down at your arm for a moment, please.  Make a fist.  Now, pump that fist.

A lot of things just happened in your body...and they were all muscular.  That puzzled look on your face when you read those instructions - that was muscles in motion.  When your eyes moved down to look at your arm - muscles at work.  The breaths that you took while you decided to follow those instructions - muscles contracting and relaxing.

Muscles make things in the body move.  The digestive system is lined with muscle to push through food and fluid.  The diaphragm is a muscle that helps you talk or cough or sing or laugh.  The kidneys are powered by muscle to filter and process, the heart IS A muscle, the liver uses muscles for all its various functions, etc.  The skeletal muscles, of course, give your body motion and keep you balanced.  There are muscles everywhere in every part of your body.  These muscles are powered by electrical impulses from the brain sent along the nerves, the quantity of which is regulated by the brainstem.

This is another one of those obvious things that we ignore when we think of our health.

Your muscles, internally and externally, have a vitally important job to do and they need to be able to do that job not just adequately, but optimally.  Muscles need a normal power flow.  I was at the store the other day and I wandered into the toy section.  I was once an avid fan of the Transformers and there was this (very cool) action figure that moved by pressing a button.  I decided to give it a try.  I pressed the button and the figure began moving and talking....but then it slowed its movement and its words.  Apparently, the button had been pressed so many times that the power was running low.

Well, your muscles cannot afford that to happen.  Reduced power flow means reduced muscular motion and reduced muscular activity.  Reduced motion and activity means reduced organ function.  Reduced organ function means SICKNESS and DIS-EASE.  Interfere with the power supply to the kidney muscles and urine gets backed up, meaning that toxic waste builds up in your body that subsequently causes fluid retention, swelling, and a contaminated system since what needed to be filtered out didn't get out.  Interfere with the power supply to the heart (that's bad) - muscles paralyzed, meaning heart failure, aka the heart fails to pump...that means death.  Interfere with the power supply to the liver and you get a back of bile, meaning jaundice and eventual gallbladder (which processes bile) problems.  Interfere with power supply to skeletal muscles (of arms, legs, back, shoulders, neck, hips, etc.) and muscles can no longer contract and relax in normal rhythm and frequency, meaning spasms, pulls, and tears.  Examples are endless...this analysis is applicable to all dis-eases and conditions in the body, no matter the severity.


It would be wise to identify if that power supply is being disrupted and correct the cause of that disruption, would it not?  Would it not be wiser to I.D./remove the fundamental obstruction to the power supply rather than treat the effects of reducing the power supply?  Does not the former take precedent over the latter?  Of course it does...



No microscope or test tube is needed to verify this fact; it's a fact; it's a Law of Life. 

The Missing Piece of the Healthcare Puzzle

One of the great things about BJ Palmer is that he studied health based on natural law.  There are so many theories out there, some touching on naturally sound principles (but ultimately missing something) and others just way out in left field.  Yet, Palmer studied the body relentlessly, learning what made it work.  He boiled it down to A) this is how the body works and, subsequently, B) here is what happens when it doesn't work that way.  Once he learned how the body worked, he could understand how it stopped doing so and how it began to break down. 

We can learn everything we need to know about health from studying the body, its anatomy, and its physiology.  In past blogs, we detailed the basics - the brainstem, brain, and spinal cord forming, with the spinal column forming around them for protection; followed by the nerves branching off the cord thru tiny openings in the column to connect organs, muscles, and tissues to the brainstem/brain generator/power supply; the brain generates electrical impulse for all bodily processes, while the brainstem ensures proper relay of those impulses to appropriate body part below.

Taking it a step further, realize that if one organ receives less of than 100% of the impulse from the brain - any less energy than normal - then muscle activity slows, organs slow, motion slows, chemical reactions slow, communication slows, and unbalancing occurs...ALL BECAUSE OF REDUCED POWER SUPPLY (b/c of reduced impulse from the brain to that body part).  Everything in the body is connected.  If one part breaks down, the rest is affected in some way. 

Usually, we look at the body as a bunch of unrelated parts.  So, if one breaks down, we don't make the connection that it would affect everything else, as well.  It's just like the assembly line example we've used - if one part of the line gets less power and makes inefficient parts, then whole gets affected.

The difference between life and death is literally about the expression of that internal energy.  100% of it and you're 100% alive; 0% of it and you're 0% alive, or dead.  Life lives through nerves.  Look at your pointer finger right now.  Take away the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments, the nail, the arteries, and the veins and that finger is still alive.  Take the nerves away and it's dead. 

Life is motion.  Motion is created by energy.  Energy comes from the brain thru the nerves.  Death is absence of motion.

Sick people are those that have smaller percentages of the expression of life - that internal energy, innate intelligence (call it what you will) - less than 100%.  Dis-ease is some degree of decline between life and death.  25% life, for instance, is 75% closer to death (25% remaining life).  As life declines, dis-ease inclines and death creeps closer.  As death inclines, life declines as dis-ease fades in.  Dis-ease - a declining stage between life and death.  Health - an inclining stage between life and death.  WHICH ARE YOU?

Life = 100% expression of innate, mental impulse, electrical energy.  If that impulse decreases, then so does life and you're in a state of dis-ease (hello symptoms and conditions of every variety you can imagine).  However, when that impulse increases, then so does life and you're in a state of health.  Look at this way - if you decrease electricity then you turn down the light and darkness fades in.  If you increase electricity then light returns and darkness fades away.  Every part of your body is dependent upon electrical energy.  Normal is 100%.  Health is heading from less than 100% up to 100%.  Dis-ease is heading away from 100%.  Death is 0%. 

That's the missing piece of the puzzle in HEALTH care. 

Hey America - You Don't "Get" Health...

Dr. Palmer compared the human body's inner workings to an assembly line.  Like an assembly line, the internal function of the body is brought into action by electrical power.  The assembly line's electrical power comes from generators; your body's generator is the brainstem and brain.  Each part of the body - each unit - adds some part to the completed, whole object (the body).  All of the parts fit into one systematic scheme.  Even though it begins as a bunch of seemingly unrelated parts, when assembled correctly, the parts turn into something greater.

With power, the mechanical assembly line's purpose is possible - to create a whole, complete automobile (or whatever it may be).  The Henry Ford plants had generators that produced electricity that ran each unit, wherein power flowed from generators above to cables to the wires of each unit into the unit itself.  Electrical energy is a prerequisite for that systematic scheme to operate normally.  100% electrical energy must reach all parts equally and without disruption to ensure the normal, finished product.  As long as everything goes into its correct order and place at the correct time, then the finished product will be normal.

The human body is a factory with an assembly line for the purpose of creating an intelligent, thinking, sensing individual that possesses its own heating, cooling, maintenance and upkeep departments, locomotion (movement), reproduction, etc.  Once a mother's body is prepared and the seed planted, then she incubates it and 270-280 days later - a new human, organ by organ and piece by piece after month and month, is created.  The brainstem comes first, then the brain (the main components of the power plant) with nerves/wires that are systematically placed and divided throughout the developing body to supply power to parts below.  An organic line is laid next - the mouth, throat, stomach, intestines, bowels, bladder and rectum (entrance to exit) - it's a series of tubes from entrance to exit / from above to below.  Lateral feeders add to the structure - the heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, etc.  A four way pump (heart and lungs) is added with circulating tubes that bring oxygen to and takes carbon dioxide away from all parts of the body.  Heating and cooling fluids flow through the tubes (arteries, veins) to every tissue cell in the body.  The arms and legs are added to allow for movement.

Once complete, the new and independent unit is ready for delivery from mom, at which point the switch is flipped and the independent energy begins flowing from above-down, inside-out sufficient to run its own power system.

If one unit in the assembly line receives less power, be it in the mechanical or the human, then it runs at reduced speed and efficiency, congesting the units behind it and paralyzing the units forward, thus affecting the entire plant ALL BECAUSE it lost power to keep it on par.  If one unit breaks down, the product (as a whole) is reduced to less than normal/adequate.

Instead of treating the slowed down machine, the logical approach is to find and correct the cause of the power shortage, adjust it, and get it back to normal.  This is what a mechanical engineer would do.  The spinal engineer does the same.  This is what Upper Cervical Care is all about.  The difference between the machine and the human assembly lines is that the human has repair cells and reserves that easily take place of the worn out, defective parts.  No matter the condition, tissue cells are ready and willing to make repairs at once in the proper place and the proper way.  As long as the internal assembly line is running on full, normal power/energy, then - from above-down, inside-out - the repair cells are directed where to go, how to be placed, the quantity needed, such as we find in healed scars, fused bone fractures, cuts, abrasions, etc.  It's no different internally than with these external, clearly visible examples.

The tissue centers are established in-utero and may lay dormant for years like, as Dr. Palmer described, a municipal fire department equipped with all needed to put out fires is built but not necessarily used until called upon months or even years later.

It's not cult thinking to understand the obvious - that the human body is an internal, self-sustaining, and self-healing assembly line.  If you get that, then you can change your health, your family's health, your friend's health, and you can be a part of changing the way that America looks at health.

What Palmer has in common with Edison, Franklin, and Newton

There was a time when we people did not understand such basic concepts as gravity.  What goes up, must come down.  It was not until Sir Isaac Newton was struck on the head with an apple and then studied why the apple came down instead of up that people under that simple and basic idea.  It was established as a law of nature. 

Then, the Wright Brothers saw a sheet hanging on a laundry line and decided that if a sheet could catch wind and drift upward into the air, then why couldn't a machine, under the right circumstances, do the same?  Scientists told them that they were crazy even after they accomplished the building of a machine that could fly a man into the air for over an hour.  Still, there were skeptics.  Yet, they prevailed because they adapted a machine to a natural law.

Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity by noticing sparks flying from a piece of metal in his hand while simultaneously flying a kite.  Thomas Edison turned around and harnessed the natural law of electrical current into various appliances that we still use today. 

These were brilliant men and they simply took natural laws and worked with them to turn new ideas into realities that bettered the lives of billions of people. 

BJ Palmer deserves to be on that list.  Decades ago, he began working with the law of life that describes the way that the human body regulates and heals itself.  He would say that medicine fails because it tries to adapt internal/natural laws to external concepts, which is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  He said that, as healers, we should be seeking to adapt external theories to internal laws.  His application of upper cervical chiropractic principles works within the natural law of life and helps answer the all-important questions as to "Why/How the body develops sickness or dis-ease," in addition to solving the problem so that people can get well.  He was a brilliant human being ahead of his time.  

The important thing to remember about natural laws is that they help us gain an understanding of how the world works.  Everything seems so chaotic without an understanding; as if the universe had just come about through a series of random occurrences.  With knowledge comes a better understanding. 

The law of life teaches us that the body is not a chaotic, disorganized thing.  It's highly organized.  Where medicine fails by going against this law with its external theories, we do not.  They attempt to solve internal problems with external solutions and that's not a fundamentally sound approach in any way.  BJ Palmer said, "If he (physician) knew internal law more and external violations less, he could and would solve all phases of one only internal dis-ease.  How to permit internal law to restore itself inherently follow.  This field has been too long neglected (chiropractic)."

Science and Healthcare

One of the most common, yet ridiculous knocks against my profession is that it is lacking in scientific backing. 

This is one of the reasons, in which many doctors specializing in Upper Cervical/brainstem arena choose to steer clear of the term "chiropractic."  Not many versions of chiropractic are all that scientific.  While there is certainly a lot to be said for intuition, many chiropractors rely on their hands to detect something that you cannot feel.  You cannot feel neurologic distortion with any kind of accuracy - or certainly not with consistency.  Many Upper Cervical practitioners, though, utilize thermography to study patterns of inflammation specific to a particular misalignment.  It's something that can be reproduced from one doctor to the next.  Combine that with the hormonal, blood pressure, blood sugar, and other internal and external changes that result from precisely correcting a misalignment and you have not only a philosophy and an art, but also a science. 

Medicine likes to hang its hat on being "scientific."  Is it really, though?  When you watch those commercials for the latest and greatest drugs, do you see the symptom-treatment that has a laundry list of side effects with a wide range of severity and think "scientific"?  The FDA approval label...does that make you think "scientifically sound"?  You can't predict how a chemical concoction is going to affect each individual.  That's why they have to name all of the side effects in the commercials. 

I ask you, though, what does it really mean if something is labeled as scientific?  Science is just a means of obtaining knowledge.  There's a big difference between science, which requires experimentation, and a law of nature.  Gravity is a law.  Science was used to define it.  Drop a rock from the roof, it hits the grounds.  Scientific study complete.  The Law of Gravity established. 

Medicine is a very experimental science.  It always has been.  It's not being studied based on the idea of some physical or chemical law.  It's basis for study is actually in direct opposition to a fundamental law...The Law of Cause and Effect.  For every action, there's a reaction.  Medicine studies only the reactions and effects but not the actions and causes.  That's why it is so hit or miss. 

It's easy to develop double blind studies (the main cog in the medical science wheel) that look at effects.  All then that you must do to give the study a passing grade is to temporarily subdue the effect.  Healing is a tad more complicated than just subduing effects.  Removing the cause of a health problem has its own set of effects.  So, we have to be careful to look at the big picture when we look at what is referred to as science in healthcare. 

BJ Palmer did fifteen years of research on getting sick people well through Upper Cervical.  The results were astronomical.  Removing the upper cervical subluxation (misalignment to the effect that disrupts normal brainstem function) got sick people well by allowing them to heal from the inside.  Effects/symptoms were monitored, along with blood work and urinalysis, but the big picture was that the cause was being removed; the cause that had interrupted the pancreas from producing insulin or the blood pressure from being properly regulated or the reproductive cycle to be abnormal or any other of the thousands of effect producing internal causes that exist because the brainstem is compromised. 

The science of Upper Cervical Care proves the Law of Life.  No further experimentation is required.  It's just time for sick people to wake up and get well. 

The Source of All Healing

If there is one thing above all else that I've taken away from BJ Palmer's "Law of Life," volume 36 of a series of books written to define the purpose and philosophy of healing, it would be that Palmer had an unbelievably advanced way of thinking about health.  It's so simple and it makes so much sense.  Rather than a theory based on research that will be irrelevant in two or so decades, Palmer uses anatomy and physiology to teach us how healing happens and the simple and easy to understand manner in which we can ensure that it does.  People often tell me that "our theory" makes sense.  It's not really a theory.  This is basic science applied in a logical method. 

The only thing that complicates it is that people have a hard time coming to grips with their brains, neurologic systems, or bodies (as a whole) being smart enough to figure things out on its own.  We think that we have to intervene in some way.  Upper Cervical Care is, yes, an intervention, but one with the purpose of ensuring that your brain, your neurologic system, and body (as a whole) is able to use its intelligence (inborn to it) to figure it all out. 

We've been taught disease.  We've been taught that every symptom comes from some outside source that must be addressed with some sort of outside means.  The reality, based not on theory but on simple science applied, is that health breaks down from the inside.  Conditions develop on the inside.  We've been taught a lot of things that are not fundamentally sound, in theory.  The fact that they are merely theories automatically should make you question their validity. 

What we cannot deny is that the body heals itself.  The evidence is overwhelming.  You cut your arm, your body heals it.  You break your leg, your body heals it.  You have the flu, your body heals it.  We learn that early on, too.  Unfortunately, we either forget about that or take it for granted.  As years go by, the fact that our brains, bodies, and neurologic systems are infinitely smarter than we could ever be gets ignored in favor of a bunch of theories.  Did you personally have to think about or help your cut to heal, your leg to mend, or your immune system to knock out the flu virus?  You may have thought that it was the Neosporin, the cast, or the Tylenol, but it wasn't...it was your body.  It didn't then and rarely does it now need those interventions. 

It's really simple: from the moment that the sperm and egg that created you met and joined together, your body gained access to an intelligence that directed your development into a fully functional adult.  Trust that innate intelligence.  It's responsible for every function in your body.  Try giving it some credit.  Your body is an assembly line.  That innate intelligence powers it and makes it run.  It powers the messages from the brain thru the brainstem to the nerves to the organs to the cells and back up to the brain.  That's the source for all healing. 

History of Chiropractic Bias Continued...

From a political standpoint, all BJ Palmer - the developer of the chiropractic profession and the inventor of the practices and procedures now known as Upper Cervical Care - ever wanted was for what he did and what he taught (and, thus, those that he taught) to be distinctly recognized as different from medicine.  He spent a great deal of his life fighting for that cause.  In front of House and Senate committees, Palmer argued that every man or woman with a license to practice chiropractic be confined to that and only that.  He defined said practice by what he called the Above-Down, Inside-Out principle, in which conditions and dis-eases developed from a problem inside the body from an interference that fundamentally prevented the brainstem and brain from performing adequately the routine processes and functions that ensure optimal health.  Palmer stated that any deviation from this principle, by way of prescribing vitamins or doing physical therapy, would fall outside of the scope of practice for the licensee and, thus, be considered the practice of medicine - which seeks to treat disease by methods that produce the effects opposite of symptoms.

The argument made a lot of sense, but the amendment for which the above was argued did not come to pass...

The profession that Palmer developed is not what you see from every Doctor of Chiropractic in your town.  Far from it.  Palmer, circa the late 50s, would have been disappointed at where our profession is at right now.  He was a man of principle and he thought that one of the main problems in the budding medicine vs. chiropractic rivalry was that medical doctors could not respect a doctor of chiropractic if the chiropractor was treating disease and of the same mindset as a medical doctor.  Chiropractic blurred the line in their own scope of practice and began treating symptoms, just as medical physicians, only with different tools.  Spinal manipulation (not to be confused with correcting specific misalignments), physical therapy, and nutritional advice can all achieve certain ends naturally and often more effectively than medication and/or surgery, but those methods are used for the treatment of symptoms and, as such, do not fall within the original intention of chiropractic, which was founded and developed on the reputation of removing CAUSE of a health condition; not treating its EFFECT.

Palmer felt (and I'd agree) that if chiropractors would stick to the practice of chiropracTIC, then perhaps medical doctors would still not agree with our philosophy but they could respect our methods.  If you look at the methods advocated by Palmer, you'd be astounded at the detail.  He was one of the first to use thermal imaging (which is now used to assess the risk for breast cancer by oncologists) all the way back in the twenties.  He would use thermal imaging to assess and monitor the function of the nerve system's hub, the brainstem, as a means of detecting distortion.  He used x-rays analysis.  He had a facility in Iowa dedicated to research, which employed medical doctors run their medical tests to clinically verify internal changes made by correction of an Upper Cervical misalignment (that had been affecting the brainstem and, thus, the internal function of the body, causing the patient's body to break down).  Palmer was very meticulous in his methods and no one would ever mistake him for a random manipulator or bone cracker.  Medical physicians respected him for the work that he put in and he expected that all of those that practiced as he did would garner that same respect.

My dad recently told me that, during a fact finding series of phone calls to local chiropractors, he had asked each office if they used digital imaging and x-ray analysis in their clinical assessments.  Several did x-rays, a handful used scanning (although for educational purposes more than clinical), and two, as my dad was told, didn't need to use either because his hands were so well trained.  


Ask yourself this question, "If I do have a bias against chiropractic, where did it come from?"