The practice of chiropractic concerns itself with the relationship between structure, your spine and function, primarily coordinated by your nervous system. Chiropractic helps reconnect the malfunctioning areas of your body so it can work more effectively and with appropriate health practices allows you to participate more fully in all stages of life
How do things go wrong
Throughout life, we all experience stress from primarily 3 areas trauma, toxins and thoughts. This could start from the birth process to bumps, falls, sporting strains and sprains and smaller micro traumas from sitting in front of screens or at a desk for hours. All 3 stressors and combination of these have the potential to create misalignments in the joints of your spine. Some misalignments your body can correct, some your body cannot. Both types of misalignments place added stress and pressure on the surrounding joints, muscles and nerves of the spine.. Normally, the body will self-correct these misalignments if possible. HOWEVER, if the misalignment is in a direction your body cannot correct we have a problem.
When your body cannot correct a problem it will compensate.
Much like if you have a stone in your shoe, you will walk differently to take pressure off this ‘injury’. Throughout your life each time your body compensates for a misalignment it cannot fix, it begins to get more and more bound and twisted. Eventually your body has compensations on top of compensations, on top of compensations! As a result your body becomes stiff, rigid, and movement becomes harder.
The most noticeable change from this compensation build up is poor posture.
The final straw from having poor posture is PAIN.
Pain seemingly comes out of nowhere but in reality it has often been building for years.
What do we do and How do we help?
There are a large number of techniques in chiropractic Here at OFC we use
Advanced Bio-Structural Correction developed by Dr Jesse Jukowitz and has emerged as a relatively new way to improve structure and function of the human body. It is a full body approach, which involves adjusting only the bones in the body in a direction that the body cannot self correct them. This technique is particular good at improving poor posture. Some of the aspects of poor posture include your head being too far in front of your shoulders, rounded shoulders, hunched forward, protruding abdomen, nerve pain, sciatica symptoms, un-level shoulders or an un-level pelvis.
Sacral-Occiptal Technique is a comprehensive, gentle and innovative technique of Chiropractic founded in 1925 by Dr De Jarnette. It is so named because of the relationship between the sacrum (base of the spine) and occiput (base of the skull). One of the functions of the sacrum is to pump Cerebro-Spinal Fluid (CSF) from the base of the spine back up the spinal canal to the brain and throughout the nervous system. The occiput also helps to pump CSF. The minute rhythmical motion that circulates the CSF is essential to optimal health of the nervous system. The goal of SOT is to facilitate the continuous motion of CSF that is required for the central nervous system to function efficiently through adjusting and correcting associated subluxations.
Babies and children We see and adjust many babies, toddlers and children in the practice and many choose to get checked through out all stages of growth and development.
Children have busy life’s and their stressors mimic those of many adults trying to cope with the fullness of life. They too feel the pressures of tying to keep up - whether it is fitting in all the activities that parents encourage and support, the increasing spirit of competition and achievement, chemical exposure, technology addictions, lack of movement and even a stressful pregnancy and birth. If a growing brain and spine are not moving, growing, adapting, engaging and expressing quite as it should it will find its’ own way to develop. This is where the internal messaging between brain and body can become inaccurate, so the brain has to make decisions based on inappropriate input. Therefore the messages back to the body will not provide the optimum response in the organs, cells or systems. The whole system can get thrown off kilter, both in the body and in the brain, and that is when we do not function at our best or as healthy as we could be.
Chiropractic for growing spines is about detecting where the brain and the body are not connecting well causing interference in the messages, and possibly the output. Adjustments correct the abnormal spinal and/or cranial movement allowing whole system to connect better so it can heal itself and function as well as possible. The adjustments consist of very gentle stimulation to the affected spinal segments and skull bones and are specifically tailored to each individual depending on their size, age and presentation.