Can your chiropractic doctor keep your brain from shrinking? The Journal of Neuroscience brings sobering news to long-term back pain sufferers. Scientists found that even one year of long-term back pain can age the brain 10 to 20 years. 26 individuals with long-term, continuous pain of more than a year were compared with 26 healthy individuals. The researchers theorize that the stress of long-term pain causes “burnout shrinkage.” But that may not be a life sentence.
Shrinkage doesn’t always equal loss of brain cells and shrinkage may reverse once the long-term pain ends. Can chiropractic care reverse the damage? Chiropractic success with long-term conditions is well known. Apparently “learning to live with it” may cause serious long-term problems. If you know anyone with a long-term condition please advise them to explore chiropractic care first. Their pain and their brain will thank them for the relief.
Most of you know that there are damaging effects to your brain from electromagnetic radiation, environmental pollution, toxic chemical additives to food and other chemicals added to the things we drink, but did you know that PAIN can cause your BRAIN to shrink. I have been contemplating this brain shrinkage phenomenon since I first read about it last year. The conclusions I have come up with may astound a lot of you.
Here they are (keep in mind that I am being sarcastic here to prove a point): 1) it may be beneficial to most of us that we only use a minor percentage of our brain’s capacity to engage in our daily activities (the myth that we use only 10% of our brains is exactly that, a myth). But this could mean that most of us have lots of brains to spare so if we ever get into pain and start to lose our brains, we shouldn’t have much of a problem. 2) Because people tend to think that their pain will “eventually go away by itself” (if only I had a dollar for every time I heard this), I suppose that the logic explanation for the reason that the pain eventually goes away is that part of our brain just disappeared. 3) If pain causes our brains to shrink it would probably be a good thing for those of us who are quite knowledgeable on every subject known to mankind (i.e. smarty pants) to be in pain every once in a while in order to give the other people around us a chance to keep up with us. 4) Some of us have been told that we have “swollen heads”, pain every once in a while might help our heads to shrink slightly, allowing us more easy passage through doorways and getting in and out of cars, we would also be less of an obstruction for the people behind us at the movie theatre. 5) Chronic pain could allow us to have that constant light headed feeling that some long distance runners strive for because our heads would literally be lighter. This would also help our posture because a lighter head would be easier to keep upright. Less forward head leaning with the reduction in weight makes for a better posture.
Well I hope you get the big idea here. The big idea is that having a smaller brain is not a good thing or should I say avoiding pain is a good thing! It’s been found that the best way to avoid pain is to be proactive about your health. When our patients at the chiropractic office in San Diego ask us how often they should come in to get adjusted I recommend at least one time per month to get checked and realigned. All of the chiropractors at New Century Spine Centers personally try to get adjusted once per week and it is believed that it helps prevent a lot of problems with our health that we would have otherwise developed.
So here is my official position on how often you need to be coming in to get adjusted. If you do not have acute pain due to some unfortunate incident you should be coming in once per month. I look forward to seeing you and helping you maintain your hat size for the duration of your life. New Century Spine Centers is located in San Diego in Mission Valley and can be reached at 619-630-9153.
Want to find out more about pain management, then visit New Century Spine Centers site on how to choose the best chiropractor for your needs.