What is health? Most of the time when you ask someone, “How do you know if someone’s healthy?” They’re gonna say that they’re healthy if they look good or they feel good. Well that model is something that we really need to destroy!

Let’s use these two as an example. Who are they? It’s Patrick Swayze and Farrah Fawcett. Do you know what happened to these two individuals? They were the poster children for healthy human beings, right? You can see Patrick Swayze with six-pack abs and Farrah Fawcett, lean and looking very vibrant.

Unfortunately if you followed what happened with both of them, they died from cancer! And so the question is, “Were they healthy that day before they got diagnosed?” “The week before they got diagnosed?” The answer has to be what? NO. They had something going on inside their body that was brewing—it was cancer. They didn’t have symptoms; they look good; they felt good. What’s going on with that! How did that work?

Health is not how you look or how you feel–it’s really something else. We’re gonna cover that in just a second. Let’s talk about a fire alarm. The purpose of a fire alarm in our house is to do what? It’s to warn us, right? It’s to tell us that there’s danger; there’s something more pressing going on and it’s trying to grab our attention so we do something about it. On the same note, we have fire alarms inside of our body that go off all the time. If we have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, headaches, neck pain, back pain, indigestion, acid reflux, constipation or diarrhea. What are these things? These are all fire alarms! These are things going off inside our body saying something more important is happening.

What do we do? We are taught that when this fire alarm goes off inside of our body we go to our doctor and we get a handful of pills, some kind of potion or some kind of procedure. Something to essentially turn off the fire alarm or take the 9-volt battery out of the fire alarm. What will happen is, we take this stuff and then we go on living.

Let’s compare this to what happens in a house if you smell smoke and you wake up in the middle of the night and the fire alarm is going off. Who’s gonna go and pull the ladder out of the garage and set up the ladder when you’re half asleep, climb up on the top of the ladder and pop the 9-volt battery out of the fire alarm just so you can go back to bed? Very few people would ever do that. That’s foolish! That’s insane and if you did that, your house would burn down.

And you’d probably deserve it at that point because that would be such a dumb thing to do; yet when it comes to our body we are taught that that is totally socially acceptable. That’s a normal thing to do. You have high blood pressure, so go in get a pill to silence that high blood pressure—pull the 9-volt battery out. Instead of asking the most important question. What’s that question? It’s: Why do I have high blood pressure? Why do I have high cholesterol? Why am I having headaches? Fire alarms in our body are extremely important. They are called symptoms. Symptoms are important. They should not be ignored or covered up. If health is not how you look or how you feel, then what is health?

Well according to the World Health Organization (WHO) the definition of health really has nothing to do with symptoms, how you look or how you feel; but rather the definition of health is optimal functioning of your body—socially, mentally, physically and spiritually. And not just merely the absence of sickness or disease. So before we talk about anything else, we have to talk about what controls the function of your body—because that’s what controls your health. That’s what has to be your number one most important asset.

If we look at this, we turn to Gray’s Anatomy (not the TV series), which is the authority on human anatomy, and they say that every single function in the human body is under the direct control of the nervous system. That’s interesting! The nervous system controls everything and so let’s look at that. The brain has this amazing healing energy and capacity within. The brain has to send energy down through the spinal cord. It comes out through those nerves and it controls every single cell tissue and organ.

Right now as you’re reading this, your heart’s beating, your lungs are breathing, your stomach may be digesting some food that you ate; and all that’s happening because your brain is controlling the whole process. and the organs are also talking to each other that all happens through the nerves. The brain and the nerves all of these things are totally controlling the function of the body. The body has this inborn ability to heal itself. It’s a powerful ability as long as it’s functioning. As long as it’s giving you through to all the organs. We have a tremendous capacity to heal and to function to be healthy.

Here’s where we run into trouble. There’s this thing called a vertebral subluxation. Remember we talked about how the energy from the brain comes through the spinal cord out the nerves into the organs? It has to come out through the spinal cord. It comes out through these individual nerve trunks that are called spinal nerve roots. So these spinal nerve roots, over here and those are the ones that branch and divide and subdivide until they control every single organ.

What can happen with different traumas and stresses in our life is the bones of the spine can shift out of alignment and this shift is called a subluxation. That acts like a dimmer switch on a wall it turns down the energy from the spinal cord and it can’t get through into the organs so the organs overtime will actually weaken and degenerate. It will create disease—they will malfunction.

Here’s one of the most important, interesting and surprising facts. Would you think a subluxation most of the time would cause pain? Most people say, “Yes,” but the truth is NO. Most subluxation don’t cause any pain at all. That means, by the time someone has pain, the nerve is so inflamed that the organ has been in crisis for a while. And the person’s health is depleting—the function is depleting.

So how do you know if you have a subluxation? You have to get checked for subluxation. This is one of the reasons that we see so many families in our practice that we check a spouse who maybe has no symptoms or we check the children who have no symptoms. Because the power of prevention and the power of catching this early is huge. Instead of waiting for little Johnny to fall down for the fifth time and then start to have some pain. Let’s check him after he fell down the first time or maybe even check him before he falls down just to make sure that he’s functional and working properly. Just because the first trauma that starts is actually what well could be childbirth.

Childbirth can be a very traumatic thing for the neck area of a baby sometimes. The first subluxation is coming out of the birthing canal or going through a c-section. Even a c-section is not any less traumatic to a child spine compared to a natural birth. They’re still trying to twist and contort and clear the child with making the smallest incision possible to get them out quickly.

We look at this and we say there’s a Gonstead difference. How is this stuff so different? We’re gonna go into detail briefly. It’s specific! We’re trying to find exactly where there’s a subluxation in the spine. Exactly where there’s irritation to a nerve and then we want to correct that subluxation and not just pop and click and crack every single segment in the spine. We take x-ray. We palpate the spine. We use a little instrument that measures temperature. Adjust the spine very precisely. We have specialized equipment to adjust different parts of the spine. We have different tables that accommodate different types of patients.
We also do a type of corrective care combined in with this Gonstead system. With the corrective care, the goal is to physically change the structure of the spine so how do we measure that? We have an x-ray in the beginning that might show something abnormal and we do follow-up x-ray to measure and to prove that we are structurally changing the spine. That is one of our goals in care.

I hope you found this helpful covering the crucial important topic of, “What is Health?” We all have to be on the same page first to understand health. It’s not how you look and it’s not how you feel. But it’s how you function and what controls the function. The function is controlled by your brain, your spinal cord and nerves—which is your nervous system. What protects those delicate nerves? That’s the spine. If the spine misaligns or subluxates that will cause dysfunction that will breakdown the signals coming from the brain going into the organ or from the organ back to the brain. Over time that will weaken and degenerate the organs and create disorders and disease.

For more information or to schedule a consultation, please contact our office at 208-888-6077.

References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray%27s_Anatomy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebral_subluxation
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrah_Fawcett
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Swayze
• https://youtu.be/WPtI0ColBv0