If you spend anytime at all at Crossroads, you’ll hear us talk about subluxation. Now, this could be confusing, if you associate chiropractic with only back pain. The thing is, chiropractic is really good at helping with back pain, but that is not our goal. Our goal is to find subluxations and fix them, allowing the body to heal, function normally, wear normally, and regulate its physiology normally. Remember, a subluxation, at its core is the idea of a spinal bone deviating from its normal position, causing mechanical and neurological dysfunction and distress.
Neurological dysfunction and distress could manifest in a bunch of different ways such as: digestive problems, allergies, headaches, etc. The reason stuff like this can be associated with subluxations can be described like this: if a spinal bone is misaligned, it can interfere with the surrounding neurology and the communication of the brain with said neurology. More simply: it messes with the brain’s ability to talk to the body’s organ systems. You can imagine how this can be a problem for anyone, including kids. Kids don’t often have back pain ( but they can), their subluxations often manifest as colic, ear infections, sleep trouble, ADD/ADHD, sensory issues, bedwetting, or headaches to name a few.
Really, subluxation is the root cause of many of our health issues. Your first subluxation probably occurred at birth. The birthing process itself, more specifically. More subluxations happened in childhood as you learned to walk, fell off your bike, played sports, or carried a too heavy backpack. These early subluxations may have caused symptoms or they may have caused problems you never felt till later.
Think of it this way, if you subluxated your low back when you fell skiing as a kid, you probably brushed it off and kept going. But if that subluxation remained, and your body walked around slightly imbalanced, with an altered gait, or some other biomechanical compensation, over time this is going to lead to not just back pain, but knee, hip, or foot issues. So now you’re 20 and wondering why you have knee pain, so you bury the pain with ibuprofen. You hit 30 and wonder why that same leg has not only knee pain, but also plantar fasciitis. You get the picture, right? The way we develop affects what we become. If we start with dysfunction, we only grow into more dysfunction.
When you know this, and understand what a subluxation is, you can see clearly why we put a premium on seeing kids in our office. Chiropractic can alter their entire future trajectory, by eliminating the root of much suffering (subluxation), before it ever has a chance to bloom into lifelong problems. Kids are hope, they are promise, potential, and possibility. Our job, is to just give them the best start we can and watch them grow to the best version of themselves.