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 What is an adjustment?
What exactly is a spinal adjustment? What exactly is the chiropractor doing to your neck or back when you “get adjusted?”
The chiropractic adjustment is as artistic as well as scientific in nature. Once the doctor has determined that you have a subluxation, he must determine which direction is subluxated and the minimal amount of force or thrust needed to start correcting it. What is the best technique required to correct it? Are there any factors that contraindicate an adjustment? Are there any patient activities that should or should not be done while away from the office? When adjusting, is the patient properly relaxed? Many times the chiropractor goes through this and many other checklists mentally before every adjustment. An experienced chiropractor must rely on prior patient experience in order to give the “perfect” adjustment each time.
Many times the doctors will go through a checklist mentally during and immediately following the adjustment; there is a certain indescribable “feeling” the chiropractor gets when the adjustment is just right. After having given over 40,000 adjustments, I know exactly whether or not I am getting the proper pressure.
What is meant by the “perfect adjustment?” It is an adjustment that reduces or corrects the subluxation. The adjustment is a part of the overall process of stabilizing and correcting spinal degeneration before permanent change has occurred.
All chiropractors have the same goal -- the elimination of subluxations. This is the goal of the chiropractic adjustment. When the chiropractor introduces a force into your spine, he is not really “putting the bone into perfect place.” What is happening is that he is unlocking the malpositioned (subluxated) vertebrae from its fixed position and permitting the body to move it exactly where it belongs. Only the body knows exactly how far and where the bone will go on each visit. The chiropractor can only make a reasonable approximation, the body does the rest. An illustration of this is similar to when your car may be stuck in the mud and a friend pushes your car to help dislodge it; when it comes out of the mud, it was not your friend’s strength that dislodged it. It was a specific thrust in the right direction. The body does the same with an adjustment.
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