People choose chiropractic care for a wide variety of health and wellness reasons. Chiropractic is a specialised approach designed to release tension from the spinal nerves and help the entire spine and nervous system function better. If pain or symptoms are what brought you in, we will begin to address those issues while we investigate the underlying causes.
Our main focus in this office is to understand how day-to-day stresses have begun to change your spine and your health. Everyone manages a different amount of stress in their lives. If accidents, injuries, chronic emotional tension or even diets or medications are part of your life history, then there is a chance that these stresses have begun to affect your entire nervous system. The nerves that connect the brain to the body travel through the spinal-core. The spine itself is a common place for stress to affect the muscles and the joints. Over time this can lead to many back and neck related problems. However, our greatest concern is when those stresses settle deeper within the nerves themselves. When this occurs, your health can be affected as well as your spine.
The first test we will use looks at the temperature along each side of the spine. The body’s temperature controls are affected by pressure and tension in the spinal nerves. Researchers have found that changes in temperature along the spine are directly related to how well organs work! Measuring the subtle changes temperature control allows the doctor an inside view of how body systems are responding to stress.
The next test uses two sensors that lightly touch the skin along the back and neck so that the tiny nerve signals what’s making your muscles work, and can be assessed.
Our databanks know exactly how much energy the muscles along the spine should “spend” to maintain proper posture and alignment. If these signals are too strong or even too weak, the computerised program will detect and score the results. Muscles that are constantly overworked tire more easily and are part of the picture in a patient’s overall sense of fatigue and exhaustion.
The third test in this examination is known as Heart Rate Variability (HRV). While you sit quietly in the examination room, your hand is placed on a sensing platform that monitors your heart rate over 5 minutes.
This test is widely used in cardiology, exercise physiology, psychology and now chiropractic. It is a reliable and valid procedure that measures the beat to beat timings of your heart. This data is collected and run through computer programs to look at the way that your body handles lifestyle stress. Everything from anxiety, work and family pressures, poor diet, lack of exercise or old injuries can leave a stain on the body’s stress management systems. HRV gives us an accurate reading on the amount of “reserve” you have available for keeping up with the daily demands. It is also an excellent method for tracking how well you are recovering and regaining your vital energy.
All of this important information from each test is reviewed by the clinician. By combining the scores from each of the tests, an overall result, known as the COREscoreTM is produced. This is your stress number. It represents how efficiently your spinal nerves are working to keep you in the healthy zone. A perfect score is 100. Your score is shown in the box on the report. Our goal will be to get you moving towards that 100 score!
