The Role of Chiropractic Care in Proactive Wellness

​What is your definition of health? A lack of symptoms or optimally functioning body?

We live in a world where a lack of symptoms is considered being healthy. Many of us go to the doctor when a symptom has arisen because this symptom has made us unhealthy. We expect the doctor to do something or prescribe something to magically make our symptoms go away and then we are healthy again.

​What if we considered health to be a spectrum where at one end we were dead and at the other end we were optimally well. At some point on this spectrum as we moved from optimal wellness to dying we would develop symptoms. Symptoms are simply a point on the health spectrum.

If our aim is to be healthy, perhaps we should forget about simply trying to cross the symptomatic line on the health spectrum and aim for the optimal wellness point.

What is optimal wellness? How do we define it? What does it look like?

What if we defined optimal wellness as being able to adapt to our environment as best as possible? Optimal for one person may be different to optimal for another, but if we all attempted to push our bodies to adapt to our environment as best as we could then perhaps we could consider ourselves well.

If we take this approach, then optimal health and wellness is up to the individual. We cannot delegate our health to a doctor to look after while we continue to live a comfortable life. We need to identify the things that will enable us to function optimally in our changing environment and work on priming these things.

What sort of things might these be? Eating well, exercise, strength and flexibility might be some things that we could work on. Avoiding cigarettes, alcohol and toxic relationships might be another. There are so many things that we could focus on that would enable us to adapt maximally to our given environment. Maybe it is worth spending some time to consider the things that we need to work on. Working on areas that really need work may be better than doing an excellent job at something we already do well in. It may be better to be well rounded in all aspects of your health rather than fantastic in just a few.

Whatever we decide is essential in maximising our body’s ability to adapt to our environment, we should always consider the master system of the body that controls and coordinates all of the other systems – our nervous system. We cannot be optimally healthy without a healthy nervous system.

One way of ensuring that our nervous system is functioning optimally is to have regular chiropractic care. When the joints of our spine and body improve their movement our nervous system function improves as well. Chiropractic care is about the relationship between joint movement, nervous system function and hence health, wellness and adapting optimally to our environment.

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by ​Catalyst Health and Wellness Group