Being an Atlanta chiropractor, I here questions like this all the time. “Can chiropractic cure my headaches”? “Can a chiropractor cure my asthma”? The truth is, a chiropractor can not cure ANYTHING. As a matter of fact, no doctor, whether it be medical or chiropractic, has EVER cured anything.
To understand that, you must understand what healing, or curing, is. It is very simply the creation of new healthy tissue. When you get a cut on your arm, billions of cells are destroyed. Your body heals itself by replacing those damaged, or dead, cells with healthy new ones. When you have a sore throat, you have sick or dying cells in your throat. Once your body replaces all of those bad cells with new cells, your soar throat is healed, or cured. You could gather every doctor and scientist in the world, and not one of them could create a blade of grass, let alone human tissue. Your body, on the other hand, is creating billions of cells every minute of everyday from birth till death. Skin cells are replaced every couple of weeks, red blood cells are replaced every 120 days, organ tissues are replaced every 4 to 6 months and bone tissue is replaced every 7 years. So every 7 years you literally have a new body.
The only part of the body that does not replace itself is the Central Nervous System. Your brain and spinal cord, which are responsible for running the show, are the same you’ll have from womb to tomb. Everything you experience in life is perceived through your nervous system, so you can see the importance of keeping this system healthy. It’s what connects everything to everything else. Even though the Central Nervous System is the most important system in the body, it is still not what heals us. Even a corpse has a brain and spinal cord.
The Nervous System
So what does heal us? The answer is simple. LIFE heals. What is life, you ask? In chiropractic philosophy, there is a definition that explains “life is necessarily the union of intelligence and matter”. The intelligence referred to here is described as an Innate Intelligence in living things. Not an educated intelligence, which would be what you have learned since you were born. This intelligence has been around since the first living thing occupied this planet. It has propagated all species, including human kind. It made you from two cells into a baby in nine months. When you were born, it did not leave you. It remains on the job. It is what turns your food in to living tissue. Therefore, it is the one and only thing that can heal, or cure the body. Go to the butcher and get a steak. Cut that steak. I don’t care how many bandages or how much antibiotic you apply, that cut isn’t going to heal. Only living things have the ability to heal. If I cut my finger, given enough time, it will heal. It doesn’t need a band aid or an ointment to get it done. Your Innate Intelligence needs no help from anyone, or anything, to keep your body functioning at 100%. All it needs is NO interference. As an Atlanta chiropractor, I never take credit for the healing that occurs in my patients. I encourage them to give the credit to their body’s intelligence. It’s not the body that heals itself, it’s the Power that made it.
If the body’s intelligence is what heals, or cures us, where does chiropractic fit in to this equation? Chiropractic science shows that all information, including Innate Intelligence, travels over the Nervous System to communicate to each cell, tissue, and organ in your body. Chiropractic research has shown that nerves can be impinged upon where they exit the spinal column. This can create an interference in the normal transmission of information, or intelligence, across that nerve. This interference is what Chiropractors call a Subluxation. It is common sense that a body will function better without nerve interference. Just ask actor Christopher Reeves, from the movie Superman. A chiropractor’s job is merely to find these interferences and correct them. That is it. The living body’s Innate Intelligence does the rest. So, no chiropractor, or any other doctor anywhere, has ever cured anybody of anything. It’s the Power that made your body that heals you. It’s the chiropractor’s job to open the channels and allow that Power to flow.