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Why Conventional Chiropractic is Just Symptom Relief
Since chiropractic’s inception in 1895, the primary treatment protocol for the spine’s misalignments has been an adjustment-a sudden force delivered into a segment or part of the spine. While an adjustment may provide some pain relief, it’s not going to make any lasting change in the spine. Soft tissue physiology and function explain why.
When a muscle is stretched by an adjustment, the stretch reflex is triggered. Its purpose is to resist the change in muscle length by causing the stretched muscle to contract. The stretch reflex is also protecting the body from injury. The more sudden the adjustment and the change in muscle length, the stronger the muscles contract in the opposite direction.
The stretch reflex has both a dynamic component and a static component. The dynamic component is more powerful and kicks in with the initial sudden increase in muscle length. The static stretch reflex keeps the muscle contracting until the muscle has resumed its normal resting length.
Now let’s consider a conventional chiropractic adjustment. After the trust is delivered into the spine, the stretch reflex is triggered. Muscles contract to resist the change in muscle length. So while you may get some temporary pain relief, your spine and posture haven’t changed.
The bottom line: Conventional chiropractic adjustments, regardless of their frequency, will not align and balance your spine. That’s why we use chiropractic and rehabilitation procedures to produce effective result via your post x-rays.
The anatomy of a Healthy Spine is an amazing biomechanical masterpiece. It enables us to have movement for fitness and health. How? Our soft tissue (muscles, discs, and ligaments) hold our hard tissue (vertebrae) in their optimum position relative to gravity.
Muscles provide strength and flexibility. Discs absorb shock, letting the spine twist and bend. Ligaments connect and secure the vertebrae. Vertebrae protect the spinal cord and support the body weight.
What does good posture look like? From the front, your head, shoulders, hips, and knees are all level. From a side view, we can easily draw a straight, vertical line from the center mass of your head (that point is one inch in front of your ear), through your shoulder, hip, and knee. You’ll also see three natural curves.
When your spine is in proper position and moving the way it’s supposed to, there’s a forward curve in the neck (cervical curve), a backward curve in the upper back (thoracic curve), and a forward curve in the low back (lumbar curve).
National healthcare statistics claim that 65 million of us suffer from back pain. It’s the number two reason for doctor visits after colds and other respiratory infections. What’s happening?
First consider this fact: Sitting increases spinal stress by 35% compared to standing and 50% compared to lying down. Now think about lives that we lead: Sitting for too many hours in a car commuting, working at a computer, watching TV, or playing video games. Being overweight. Picking up heavy objects incorrectly. Wearing high-heeled or platform shoes. Carrying heavy backpacks. Not exercising regularly. Smoking. Worrying about home, work, and world issues. They all affect out spine.
There is, of course, another obvious and common reason for back pain: injury. But regardless of the whether our problems are the result of a sports injury in our youth, an accident, or the daily wear and tear of life, when our spines are misaligned and unbalanced, our posture loses its natural curves and our front-to-back posture becomes twisted. Muscles spasm. Ligaments can get stretched and torn. Vertebrae can slip. Discs can be herniated—the outer ring weakens and may tear, causing the gel-like inner portion to bulge outward—putting pressure on nearby nerves, resulting in pain and dysfunction. Now, we’re no longer strong enough to fight the effects of gravity. Our overall health is compromised.
How The Pettibon System Came To Be
In a career that has spanned more than half a century, Dr. Burl R. Pettibon has unrelenting in demanding that chiropractic deliver on its promise: Provide healthcare that enables the human spine to maintain its optimal structure for normal function.
When Dr. Pettibon retired in 1988, despite more than 30 years of practice and being recipient of the Daniel David Palmer Chiropractic Scientific Award, he couldn’t put aside doubts aboiut whether chiropractic produced permanent spine and postural change.
In 1991, Dr. Pettibon decided to put chiropractic adjustments to the test. He partnered with the late Dr. Vern Pierce, and together, they set up research in a rented area of the clinic building at Sherman College of Chiropractic in South Carolina.
By 1993, after two and one-half years of research, their findings showed:
Attempts to adjust/manipulate vertebrae into different positions, whether into misalignment, worked on cadavers and other inanimate objects but did not make any lasting corrections in living people, and whatever was attempted made a person’s spine measurably worse.
Reinventing Chiropractic
It wasn’t enough for Dr. Pettibon to identify what didn’t work. So he spent the next three years taking what he learned from his research and applying it to reinventing chiropractic and rehabilitation procedures. The foundational core of The Pettibon System was completed in 1996. Research to support its efficacy and its continual enhancement are unending.
Science Put Into Practice
The Pettibon Weighting System
How does The Pettibon System re-align your spine so that it can function optimally in its upright position relative to gravity? With the patented Pettibon Weight System.
The Pettibon Weight System consists of specially designed head, shoulder, and hip weights that you wear daily for 20 minutes. The amount of weight and its placement depends upon the spinal misalignment that needs to be corrected.
The nervous system always wants us to hold our heads upright and it has five righting reflexes that continually send it skull and spine positional information. Wearing the weights alters the body’s center of mass, causing the righting reflexes to send new sensory information to the nervous system. To balance the body relative to the weights, the nervous system causes some involved spinal muscles to relax and others to contract, thereby correcting the spine and posture relative to gravity. Additionally, the weights force the involved muscles to do isometric exercises. These exercises are needed to restore muscle strength, endurance, and balance so that the spine is held in alignment after optimal strength has been gained.
Why Isometric Exercises?
Two kinds of muscle fibers make up the musculoskeletal system. One is fast-twitch muscle fiber. The other is slow-twitch muscle finer. Muscle fiber. Muscles have both types of fibers but usually one fiber to type dominates a muscle group. Our postural muscles have mostly slowly-twitch fiber.
In the gym, when we’re ‘pumping iron’ and doing aerobic exercises, we’re affecting fast-twitch muscle fiber, or phasic muscles. What is happening to our postural muscles? Not much. So exercises to strengthen phasic muscles don’t improve posture.
When phasic muscles fatigue and/or when they’re injured, they go faccid and collapse. Postural muscles react very differently form phasic muscles when they’re injured or fatigued. They spasm. and postural muscles rarely spasm evenly, either side-to-side or front-to-back. So, they pull the spine out of alignment. That’s why poor posture distorts our appearance.
Isometic exercises involved pushing against a force that moves very slowly or doesn’t move at all. They help eliminate postural muscle spasms as well as rehabilitate muscles’ balance, and endurance.
Active patient participation in care
You’re going to be actively participating in your rehabilitation care—both at the clinic and at home!
When you come to the clinic, you won’t sit passively waiting to be seen. You’ll prepare for your examination by doing warm-up exercises and stretching your muscles, ligaments, and discs using Wobble Chair and the Repetitive Cervical Traction.
With the Pettibon System, strengthening postural muscles an building endurance is an ongoing process. To accomplish this goal, you’ll use the Linked Exercise Trainer in the clinic and rehabilitation equipment twice daily at home.
Home rehabilitation care is critical to your correction. Be forewarned: your compliance is mandatory! You’ll get training and instructional aids and lots of enthusiastic encouragement and support from our staff and your fellow patients.
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