By Dr. Scott Rosenthal
It’s amazing: You place a bandage over a booboo and after just a few days, the wound is miraculously healed! From a child’s perspective, it may appear that the bandage has magical healing powers. I have witnessed this with my own children. Even a tiny, nearly invisible, red mark would send them running for the first aid kit. (Though, the appeal of sticking cartoon characters all over themselves may have had something to do with it.)
The real question you need to ask yourself is: “Where does healing come from, the outside or the inside?”
Your body is a marvel! It has 206 bones suspended by 650 muscles. You own a mega-multitasking liver that conducts 500 vital functions. A heart beats about 100,000 times each day while moving 2,000 gallons of blood over 60,000 miles of vessels to reach billions and billions of cells. An extensive immune system, acting as the body’s military, is always on duty to seek and destroy microorganisms and toxins. And 100 billion nerve cells transmit controlling and reporting messages back and forth between your brain and body at the speed of up to 268 mph. The inside is pretty cool!
You may be wondering what exactly is meant by “inside” or “outside” healing. Think of your “Inside” healing as those inner processes that are guided by the intelligence of your body. “Outside” healing is reliant on external interventions such as doctors, pills and bandages.
If you cut your hand open, you will likely need a doctor to sew it up in order for it to heal. True. But the body naturally does its part, too—conducting the many processes that form a protective scab and create new living tissue. I am not suggesting that outside intervention is not important in removing obstructions to your body’s ability to heal itself. There is a time and place for intervention. What I am suggesting is that too much focus is given to the bandage at the cost of fully recognizing how the body heals and how to support optimum health.
Your body has an inner intelligent force driving it to self-heal. This innate/inborn wisdom is light years ahead of scientific understanding and yes, smarter than a bandage! It produces compounds of chemicals at precisely the right time in the right place for the right job. It turns your food into new living cells and energy that sustains your life. On a daily basis, it orchestrates processes that remove cancer cells, bacteria, viruses and toxins from your body. You create LIFE every second of every day! It’s not only pretty cool, but one of the greatest wonders of the universe!
By recognizing the wisdom within, you can begin to approach your health in a new way- a way that is central to the chiropractic approach and what I believe makes chiropractic special. Instead of looking for what you need to treat a challenge from the outside (such as using medication to treat a symptom), start looking at what went wrong on the inside that allowed your health to stray and diminish. Remove the imbalance and your body will heal.
Take headaches for example. If you have a tension headache or migraine, you have to ask yourself what is causing your pain. Is it due to an insufficient amount of pain drugs in your diet (outside) or from an imbalance caused by abnormal spinal function in the upper neck (inside)? From my experience, 80 percent of headaches originate from upper neck issues. In chiropractic, we would correct the spinal condition bringing balance back to your body. This allows the pain to naturally dissipate. We would also look at coaching you on ergonomics in regard to your computer time.
Many examples can be made from high blood pressure and cholesterol to menstrual pain and depression. In order to ask the right questions about what might be causing your inside imbalances, think of the word “DREAM.”
Is your health challenge coming from an imbalance in your:
D: diet
R: rest
E: exercise
A: alignment of the spine and body
M: mental attitude
Great health is your body’s natural state. You are pre-programmed to function optimally. You came out of the box this way. It’s your birth right! Sickness primarily occurs when there is interference to the body’s innate ability to heal itself. By focusing on the inside and removing obstructions found in your DREAM, you can return to optimum levels of health and remain there. Failing to do so can cause continued suffering and allow your health to decline further over time. Worst of all, it may prove that you are NOT smarter than a bandage.
