Chiropractic care is commonly known for the positive effects it can have on the muscular and skeletal systems. For example, you may seek care after a car accident to help with a tweaked muscle or go regularly to help ease tension in your lower back. But many people don’t realize how chiropractic care can heal both the mind and body through improved nervous system function.
What is the nervous system?
The nervous system is the command center of your body and controls pretty much everything you do. From movement to hormone regulation to digestion and stress response, the nervous system is in control. A healthy nervous system helps your body and brain communicate. This leads to better body function, reduced pain, better immunity and so much more. You can help your nervous system function by making healthy lifestyle choices. Things like eating well, exercising and getting regular chiropractic care can help you maintain and improve your well-being.
How chiropractic care helps the nervous system
Chiropractic doctors treat their patient’s musculoskeletal system. By identifying pain points, misalignments and problem areas, they can create treatment plans to align the body and reduce pain. They use more technique than just cracking joints — they use a variety of treatments to manage pain in the body. A combination of adjustments to the joints, therapy, massage, stretches and exercises may be used as part of a treatment plan.
Because everything in your body connects to the nervous system, chiropractic care also leads to other positive benefits to your well-being and health.
Here are five unexpected positive outcomes from chiropractic care.
1. Lowers Inflammation
Inflammation is an immune system response in the body. It signals that something is out of balance and your immune system is fighting to bring the body back to a state of homeostasis, or back to normal. Injury, illness and stress can all contribute to inflammation in the body. Sometimes you can see the inflammation, such as swelling of the lymph glands on your throat when you’re sick or swelling around a cut or injury. And other times you just feel it, like a pain in your muscle or an upset stomach.
Chiropractic adjustments help bring your body into alignment, relieving pressure from joints, muscles and nerves. This also helps to take pressure off of your nervous system, rebalancing it into a more normal state. When the nervous system is regulated, it sends nerve signals that promote healing within the body, helping to lower inflammation.
2. Boosts Immunity
Your body’s immunity also benefits by lowering inflammation! Think of your immune system like an army of soldiers fighting to keep you healthy. They’re in your body fighting battles — against stress, sickness and inflammation — but their numbers are limited. So if there are too many battles going on in your body, your soldiers are reduced when they need to fight off a sickness. So by reducing overall inflammation, your immunity soldiers are free to fight off sickness, thereby enhancing your body’s ability to ward off any illnesses that may come your way.
3. Improves Digestion
As the communication center, the nervous system is also responsible for sending messages for digestion. It sends signals to your organs to digest your food and secretes the necessary hormones to break down and process it. If your spine is out of alignment, it can put pressure on digestive nerves causing your system to slow down or function improperly. Therefore, chiropractic spinal adjustment can help improve digestion communication from the nervous system. This can help with symptoms such as constipation, gas and bloating.
4. Decreases Stress
Chiropractic care can help relieve your stress in more ways than one! Of course, a chiropractic massage can make you feel a sense of calm and reduce stress. It’s a chance for you to enjoy some self-care and feel the effects of someone working the tension out of your muscles. But because adjustments can also help regulate your nervous system’s output of hormones, it can help decrease stress. By helping your nervous system stabilize the output of cortisol, the stress hormone, you get less stress signals sent to the mind and body. And you get to breathe a sigh of relief!
5. Ease Headaches
Stress, muscle tension, a pinched nerve and poor digestion can contribute to headache frequency and severity. As you’ve already read, chiropractic care benefits the nervous and musculoskeletal systems. It helps to relieve pressure, regulate hormones and ease tension in your body, which helps reduce the number of headaches you get. Regular chiropractic visits can help you lower the frequency of headaches and alleviate the severity when you do get them.
Call for an Appointment Today
If you’re looking for a caring chiropractor to help you reduce stress, pain and other ailments, call us today to book an appointment at . We’ll identify a treatment plan and start your path to wellness together!