Garbage Bags are not Parachutes!

The Upper Cervical Specialist

By Dr. Blakely

Not all chiropractors use the same techniques. I am an upper cervical specialist, but I also adjust all the segments of the spine that are misaligned and need to be adjusted. Cervical is the neck and my goal is to realign the very top of the head and neck to get it back into the perfect position.

I chose to become an upper cervical specialist because this region of the spine has a huge impact on overall health and well being. How can this be? Well, the brain is housed inside your skull and then there's an opening at the base of the skull where the brain stem and spinal cord pass down into the spinal canal. If that very first vertebra is misaligned, it can affect all the organ systems when it pinches your brain stem and spinal cord at the top of your neck. Misalignment can affect your muscle control mechanisms, causing changes in your posture. Misalignment can impact your digestive system, gallbladder, heart rate, blood pressure and even your immune system.

There are a lot of doctors that will only perform upper cervical adjustments and I certainly understand why. The reason I adjust the rest of the joints and spine is because a lot of times people have had problems for many years before they seek care. Over extended periods of time, they often have degeneration in these other joints and we need to realign all the segments of the spine.

Talk show host Montel Williams did a feature on one of his programs about how he had suffered from low back pain for many years and he thought it was because of his MS. And then he started getting upper cervical work and lo and behold, his low back pain resolved.

What I have found in my practice is that about 25% of my patients with chronic low back pain, the cause was misalignment in their head and neck. Somewhere along the line, they were in an accident or injury and misaligned their head and neck, which consequently affected their lower back.

If you go to a conventional chiropractor and they keep adjusting your low back, it may never fix the problem because it’s not getting at the source. For this reason, we ask every patient to complete a lengthy questionnaire. We want to know what’s happened to you from day one to get to the source of the problem. It's quite common for it to take about 7 years for your spine to degenerate enough to realize that you actually have an issue. I hear all kinds of stories from people about how they were injured during childhood and forgot about the incident, including all the guys that have jumped off a roof during childhood. Just remember this: Garbage bags are not parachutes!