Get Cracking on Your Health

When a living system is suffering from ill health, the remedy is to connect it with more of itself. –Francisco Varella

The first case of chiropractic care was given to a Davenport, Iowa man whose deafness was untreatable against all of the medical knowledge of 1895. In a desperate attempt to return his hearing, the man went to see Daniel David Palmer, a Canadian who claimed to know how to help him. After the first adjustment, the man’s hearing regained much of what was lost, and subsequent visits cured what medical doctors (MDs) said was a hopeless case. Palmer was inundated with work. In just two years, he was able to open the first, and still the finest, college of chiropractic. Today, over a century later, chiropractic is still gaining acceptance as a great healer.

“Medical intervention is the fourth largest cause of preventable death,” says Corey R. Lees, Doctor of Chiropractic (DC) in Mechanicsburg. Lees explains that adverse reactions to medicines, invasive surgeries, and misdiagnoses from MDs consistently rank each year in the top ten causes of avoidable death. This year, it’s number four. Why? Well, the medical field asks the question, “What can be done to heal this body?” Theories are speculated upon and usually a medicinal foreign substance is introduced to the body. Medicine is projected to heal because of how the body is expected to react. The body, still mysterious to science, often reacts against expectations. Thus, a well-deserved number four ranking.

The chiropractic field asks, “How can the body be made to heal itself?” An assessment is made without invasive testing. Adjustments are made to the body. No prescriptions, no medicating. Nothing is added.

“The body is self-healing,” said Lees. “The nervous system controls health. It controls every bodily function and how you perceive the world. We clear the pathways so the body can do the job itself.”

MDs look to remove pain from the patient, but the DC does not want to remove pain. “If you can’t feel the pain of a broken ankle, you’re going to keep walking on it and do more damage until you cut an artery,” Lees exampled. Chiropractic is a natural healing because it counts on the body’s nervous system to signal when it suffers and then respond to the problem. But with the overload of chemical, physical, and mental stress on the body everyday, the neural highways get jammed. This often results in slight misalignments and subluxations.

A subluxation is a complex involving the bones in the joint, the muscles, and the surrounding soft tissue. The complex starts when the bones have gone out of their normal position. The area attempts to splint itself to prevent further injury. Abnormal bony growths develop over time such as bone spurs. The muscles also attempt to splint the joint to prevent more injury. They can become tight and spasmed on one side of the subluxation and weak and atrophied on the other. Scar tissue results. The surrounding soft tissue will become inflamed and swollen. It will increase in temperature, and blood and fluid will engulf the area. This will also add to the scar tissue. Permanent soft tissue damage may result. The solution to the subluxation complex is a complete chiropractic assessment.

Every single person can benefit from chiropractic. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (Sept. 8, 1999), one third of all children aged 6 to 36 months will have at least a half dozen episodes of middle ear infections, otitis media. Lees quotes a study from Current Opinion in Pediatrics. Half were treated by pediatricians, half by chiropractors. Thirty-one percent of the chiropractic-treated children contracted at least one case of otitis while eighty percent of the pediatrician-treated children did. For women, a study in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics (May 1999) involving 84 subjects (54 with diagnosed PMS and 30 without) evaluated the potential for chiropractic to help relieve PMS symptoms. Complete chiropractic examinations revealed that the PMS group was more likely to show signs of spinal problems (i.e., spinal tenderness, muscle weakness, neck disability, etc.) than the non-PMS group.

Chiropractic is non-invasive, 100 times safer than the medical profession (an MD must pay an average of $40,000 dollars annually for Malpractice insurance. Lees pays $400 a year), and cheaper per visit than a lot of insurance co-pays (Lees charges $15/visit)! Let your body be your doctor.

Corey Lees, DC, is located at 6103 Carlisle Pike, Mechanicsburg. He can be reached at 795-9566.

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