Your Nervous System

We now live in a world that is changing at a rate hundreds of times faster than it ever has before. The days of going to your doctor and blindly following their prescriptions for care have long since passed. People now scour the Internet, searching for answers, because they have become dissatisfied with the explanations they have been given and the results they have obtained. Why is it that some of us have tried everything, yet the results we seek continue to be beyond our reach? In a world where we claim to be so technologically advanced, why is it that we are sicker now than we have ever been before?

“The number of American children with chronic illnesses has quadrupled since the time when some of their parents were kids” JAMA, June, 2007

“Although expenses (Imaging and therapy rates) related to back and neck problems have increased substantially in the last decade, outcomes such as functional disability and work limitations do not appear to be improving, according to a study in the February 13 issue of JAMA.” JAMA. 2008;299[6]:656-664

“Vis Medicatrix Naturae” Latin for “healing power of the body”. Though you may not have known the definition, you know the results. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself. If you suffer a cut on your finger you would normally wrap that finger in a band-aid. 2-3 days later when the band aid is taken off the cut is healed. What healed the cut, the band-aid or the body? What thought processes did you go through to make this healing occur? Did you focus night and day on clots stopping the bleeding and scar tissue forming or did you go about your regular activities?

The simple explanation to all these questions is that the body has an inborn ability to heal itself. Though it may not always succeed, the body is always trying to maintain “homeostasis”; an internal balance between all processes in the body that occurs when you are healthy. No matter what happens, your body is always striving and making changes in attempts to get back to that balanced point.

So then why do I have these health problems? Truth be told, your body doesn’t want you to have the problem. It is doing everything it can to get you away from being in that state. Your body wants to get better; its trying as hard as it can… but what if there was something preventing your body from acting in the way it wanted?

The nervous system is the master control system of the body. As you scroll down this page, your brain tells your muscles in your fingers to contract and flex in order to move the mouse. Within the last 5 seconds you took a breath, without even thinking about it. That was your nervous system working with muscles in your stomach and chest expanding to draw in air. As you sit here, the meal you ate hours before is being digested. Signals from your brain are telling cells in your stomach just how much acid to produce in order to start processing the food your body needs for energy, growth and repair. In fact, most of your body functions are controlled by your nervous system without you even having to think about it!

The nervous system is incredibly important, but it is also incredibly delicate. It is because of these two facts that much of the nervous system is surrounded by bone. Our skull’s main purpose is to protect our brain and the job of the spine is to protect the spinal cord. It is the spinal cord that transmits all the messages from the brain to every single part of the body.

So without even thinking about it, our body is trying to fix our problems. The nervous system is sending messages to every part of our body in order to get back into homeostasis or a normal and balanced internal equilibrium. What if the bone that was supposed to protect these nerves was out of place? What if instead of protecting the nerves, the bone was now irritating and keeping them from working properly? Could your body ever fully heal to the best of its ability if this was the case? How would you know if this was happening? How would you know if your body was in or out of balance?

This entry was posted on May 5, 2009 at 4:50 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.