BJ Palmer, a philosopher and the founder of chiropractic, was adamant about understanding natural law. It has been proven that the healing phase is a 9-to-1 factor, meaning that every year of disorder requires nine in healing. Does it mean that you could be symptom-free before nine years? Yes. The patient can sometimes be argumentative, reasoning that “If I feel good, why do I have to keep seeing the chiropractor?” This is when the patient often decides to become the doctor and make his or her own plan of treatment without being fully healed. That is when an exacerbation of the condition is likely to occur. The understanding of healing is the most difficult part for the patient to comprehend. For example, the day that the first cell is damaged, it takes nine times that to have the cell normalized. In the interim, the body will feel better and have its ups and downs.
In the world of chiropractic, we feel drugs and medications should be avoided or limited to allow the body to heal itself with its innate intelligence. At 60 years of age and with 37 years of practice, I am still shocked when I find patients taking as many as 29 medications daily. Now, what is being fixed that it is necessary to take 29 of anything?
In the past, I have periodically referred some patients to Mayo Clinic. When their evaluations were complete, many times their prescribed medications were reduced to three, four or five. When a large amount of medications are taken forever, your body is subject to their control and in most cases cannot heal on its own because the innate intelligence of our bodies has been limited and “overdrugged.” There never seems to be an end to using these drugs, so what repairs are truly done? It’s been said that the power within the body heals the body, meaning that the body’s universal innate intelligence does the complete homeostatic healing.
True healing actually takes longer than one may suspect. As I previously mentioned, the body will have its ups and downs during healing. It is important to strengthen the body slowly because it is in a weakened condition and is more susceptible to injury, relapse or exacerbation of the condition. The body must be slowly rehabilitated back to its healthy state to not further distress the system. We must also recondition the muscles to allow them to hold the spine into its pre-injury position, one that is free of pain and aches.
So why does it take several visits of chiropractic care to heal the body? To allow the body to strengthen and get used to a healing position that is innate at birth. IBI