A lot of people are under the impression that chiropractic care is addictive and once you start care you can never stop.  Another thought process is that you don’t need chiropractic care until you start getting adjusted, then you need it forever so you’re better off not starting it at all.

First of all, chiropractic care is not addictive.  People might get used to actually feeling better; more balanced, less stressed and more energetic, but I don’t believe that is a problem.  Do you?  Would you really complain if you actually felt better everyday?  As far as never being able to stop care goes, I leave that entirely up to the patient.  When a patient comes into my office, they have a couple of choices to make.  One, do they want to receive chiropractic care at all?  Two, once they start, do they want to be done once the symptoms are gone and come back once the symptoms return?  And finally, once the symptoms are gone, do they want to continue on with maintenance to make sure that the symptoms never return?

Honestly I believe the reason why this is such an issue is because of lack of education on what chiropractic is really all about.  Let me ask another question?  Do you see a dentist twice a year even if you feel there is nothing wrong with your teeth?  I know some of you haven’t been to a dentist in a long time because that’s not the most exciting appointment for you.  Answer this question though, do you brush your teeth on a daily basis even if your teeth don’t bother you?  I know that everyone brushes their teeth at least once a day and many of us actually brush at least twice a day.  Why do we do this?  Well, we were taught growing up that it’s just something that we do for good hygiene and the health of our teeth.    Now, if all of you teeth fell out and you could replace them with dentures, would you ultimately lose your health?  Some clever people know that in order for all of your teeth to have fallen out there probably was a problem with your health to begin with and I agree.  However, the main purpose of our teeth is to start the digestive process.  So, let’s just say for simplicity sake that all of your teeth were knocked out due to a trauma.  This clears the issue of having a health problem prior to the teeth falling out.  Now if I asked you the same question as above, if all your teeth fell out and you could replace them with dentures, would you have ultimately lost your health?  What would your answer be?  Probably “no.”  That is correct.  So, let’s look at another component of the body, your nervous system.  Your brain, spinal cord and all of your nerves make up your nervous system.  The main job of the nervous system is to tell your entire body, each and every cell, what to do and when to do it.  It also receives a ton of information from the entire body to tell it what is happening so that the brain then knows what to tell the body to do in each situation.  Now, if something happened in the body that caused an interference with those communication pathways, do you think we would have a bigger problem?  A problem that ultimately would affect our health?  YES!  It doesn’t matter what you are doing for health if your body can’t communicate to the brain and the brain can’t communicate to the body.  That interference is called a “subluxation” or a “misalignment” and is something that chiropractors have been trained extensively on.  They have learned how to detect them and how to correct them.

This is why I believe in maintenance care.  We want to maintain the health of the nervous system because without it functioning properly our overall health decline.  So, you answer the question.  Is chiropractic care important?  And, is it something that I should never stop?  The fate of your health is ultimately in your hands.  What are you going to do with it?