A full spine approach to chiropractic

Whether you’re new to chiropractic or you’ve been seeing chiropractors for years, hopefully you’ll have noticed we tend not to only focus on the “area of complaint”. We look at the spine from top to bottom in order to get an understanding of how things are moving, how well your nervous system is functioning and how well your whole body has integrated the last adjustment.

One of the oldest concepts in chiropractic, which explains partly why this is necessary, is the “Lovett Brother Relationship”, which was discovered more than 100 years ago and has been adopted into many techniques within chiropractic since then. It discusses the relationships different vertebral levels (spine bones) have with one another.

Without going into too much detail, the Lovett Brother Relationship describes functional pairs of bones in the spine which exist in opposite positions of the spine to each other. These “Lovett Brothers” are linked as a result of gravity acting on the curves of the spine, and when one in the pair is not moving properly it will result in its Lovett Brother becoming dysfunctional.

Often, if we are not adjusting multiple areas of the spine, we can miss out on dysfunctional parts of a pair of bones in the spine. Ultimately this will have a reciprocal effect on how well our body heals – either making it extremely difficult for us to get rid of the original problem or resulting in new problems arising.

These dysfunctional pairs happen to result in our spinal joints not communicating as well as they could with our brain. This therefore results in our brain not being able to sense poor joint positioning and ultimately poor posture. The knock-on effect is irritated joints that become inflamed, which unfortunately ends up irritating the nerves which exit between the bones – and we all know unhappy nerves equal an unhappy body.

Moral of the story is: get your spine checked routinely to make sure we aren’t slipping into any unhealthy dysfunctional patterns, and to keep our nervous system healthy!

- By Brad Taylor