Do you suffer from neck pain or back pain?

As much as I talk about pain being a poor indicator of health and how your body's ability to function dictates how healthy you are, it is still a very big problem for thousands of people in this country. Every day, millions are reaching for a bottle of aspirin or Tylenol to relieve some type of pain. Most don't even know that they are poisoning their bodies at the same time and setting it up for failure further down the road.

Take aspirin for example, we are taught to take it for aches and pains. You should even take one a day as you get older to show your heart that you care about it. Right?!

Did you know that your aspirin is causing your stomach and intestines to bleed everytime you take it? They fail to leave that part out of the commercials. Or how about your liver and kidneys? They have to filter everything out of your body.

Being that ALL medication is processed as a poison (because that's what it is) in your body, it will cause damage to either one or both. As a matter of fact, Tylenol is now reported as the number 1 cause of liver disease. You cannot assume that something is not dangerous to your body because you buy it at the grocery store without a script.

Here's something else I bet you didn't know: you don't suffer from a deficiency of aspirin or Tylenol! I usually get a few chuckles when I make that statement so feel free to insert yours here. Your pain does not come from not having a high enough level of pain killers or antiinflammatories in your system. Pain is a perception of the brain or signal.

This means if an area of the body loses its ability to function then at a certain level your brain decides, "Hey, I guess I better tell him/her about it." It then throws out a signal to you, preferably where the problem is, so that you can correct the problem. Sometimes the brain gets the location right and sometimes it does not. This is because less than 10% of your nerves actually deal with pain, everything else is function.

Let me translate. By the time you are feeling pain, then something else has already lost its ability to function properly somewhere else. So how do I know that? (Glad you asked)

All nerves exit from the spine and every single cell, tissue, and organ in your body is hooked up to a nerve. Every nerve controls more than one thing. Part of the nerve goes to control a group of muscles and the other part goes to organs and tissues. If you have pain, then something is not functioning properly. The nerves exiting that part of the spine are now affected, which disrupts the messages being sent to whatever parts of the body it controls.

For example, lets say you have a job where you work at the computer a lot. Now you notice that your neck is starting to get tight on a daily basis and some pain actually starts to creep in from time to time. The nerves exiting that part of the spine also go to control areas of the brain, your eyes, your nose, your sinuses, your throat, etc. All those areas are not allowed to function as well as they normally would.

Now I am not saying that you will also have problems in all those areas. What I am saying is that now you are set up to have problems in those areas. Let's say with no stress on the neck your sinuses can function at 100%. Now let's throw a little stress in there and a couple of misalignments and now they can only function at 75%. Who do you think is more likely to get a sinus infection - sinuses functioning at 100% or 75%?

I get asked all the time what the deal is with chiropractic. Why shouldn't we just take Advil or whatever else? My response is that we look at the body differently than most MDs. We try to find an area of the body that is not functioning properly, which is causing problems (symptoms) there or somewhere else, and restore normal function. If you go to your RD (that's regular doctor), they will ask for your symptoms and prescribe medication to correct those.

So let me ask you this? What makes more sense, addressing the cause of the problems or the effects of the problems? In which scenario do you think a reoccurrence is least likely? This is why pretty much all the research you can find on the effectiveness of chiropractic says we are just as good or better than medication.

The more things you can improve or problems you can solve without drugs or surgery, the longer your body will last you, and the more you will be able to enjoy it later in life.