We know that chiropractic treatment helps with many chronic pain complications, but did you know that an adjustment by a Greeley chiropractor can help you fight common illnesses, too? Many patients avoid the chiropractor’s office because they have colds, but your local chiropractor may even encourages sick patients to come in for their chiropractic appointments because these adjustments can help you fight illnesses and may even help stave off an oncoming cold.
The truth is that when your body is in alignment, it is going to function better. Let’s compare how our bodies work to a car for a moment. If your car is out of alignment, it can cause friction between parts, leading to serious damage. If your body is out of alignment, various parts are hindered from functioning the way they are supposed to. Getting regular chiropractic adjustments can help your body prevent and fight off common infections that lead to things like the common cold and the flu.
What Does an Adjustment Have to Do with a Common Cold?
What does an adjustment by a licensed chiropractor have to do with the common cold? You might be surprised by how much of a relationship there is between illnesses and chiropractic adjustments.
This may not be what comes to mind when you’re laid up on the couch eating soup, but your body is actually extremely well-adapted to preventing illness. Its immune system relies on the nervous system to send messages to the brain, allowing it and your immune system to operate at their highest possible levels. Sometimes, even when we feel healthy, the signals running between your brain and the rest of your nervous system become blocked or confused. These interferences are called subluxations. They’re physical nerve stresses that cause the compression and irritation of nerve pathways, which affects how your brain keeps your internal organs running.
Chiropractic care can help remove subluxations by properly aligning your spine, allowing for clear neural pathways that make for clear communication between your brain and your organs. Recent research found that one prominent messenger molecule, IL-2, previously thought to be an immune system messenger, is actually active in the nervous system. This led researchers to believe that spinal misalignments causing neural dysfunctions cause stress in the body and lead to changes in the immune system that inhibit its response to pathogens.
What can a Chiropractor Do?
Chiropractic care is primarily concerned with subluxations, and there’s no better way to identify and correct them than by getting an adjustment. Eliminating these subluxations clears the way for your immune system to work properly by boosting the coordinated responses to pathogens and outside threats to your body of your immune and nervous systems. Eradicating subluxations allows the two complementary systems to communicate with each other better.
There is some clinical research that shows that when an adjustment is applied to a subluxation area, the white blood cell count of that area increases. White blood cells are the foot soldiers of your immune system, traveling to infections via your bloodstream and quickly dispensing with possible pathogens by spraying them with antibodies. One reason your immune system can weaken is if your white blood cell count drops.
Another key ingredient of your immune system is the CD4+T cell. Some research has shown that patients receiving chiropractic treatment increased their CD4+T cell count.
Chiropractic Care and Headaches
Allowing your body to fight off common cold infections is great, but a chiropractor can also help with your migraines or stress headaches, too.
Most of us struggle with headaches at one time or another. The causes of these can often be mysterious, and a small portion of the population suffers from regular migraines, which can be debilitating and extremely painful.
There are so many causes of headaches that chiropractic care can’t solve all of them. But for headaches that start in the neck, spinal adjustments can help relieve and prevent pain. Spinal adjustments reduce stress on the nervous system and the spinal cord, which can cause neck tension and muscle soreness, often resulting in headaches.
In a world where many of us sit in the same position behind a desk or work physical jobs putting stress on the back and neck, a spinal adjustment can help with many of our headaches. A good chiropractor can also suggest ways to correct your posture and avoid future stress on your back and neck.
