Chiropractic Care
Chiropractic care plays a major role in the field of epigenetics and in cell based health care. Research shows that spinal manipulative therapy, or SMT, plays a key role in signaling the body to make epigenetic shifts. It does this through proprioception. Proprioception acts as a trigger to tell the body to check your genetic code and to make sure that the best version of your genes are being expressed. Stress and environmental factors cause histone demethylase to be released in the body and this can cause our cells to express less favorable genes.
Autonomic shifts in the nervous system are another way that chiropractic care can affect your cells. Your autonomic nervous system is divided into two parts. The sympathetic and parasympathetic. In general terms, your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for speeding things up and putting you on high alert. The opposite of this is the parasympathetic nervous system. It is responsible for growth and healing and generally slows things down. SMT has been shown to cause parasympathetic shifts in the body. This moves your system away from its high alert state and into a growth and healing state that facilitates cellular processes.
Research done by Chang Ha Suh, from the university of Colorado, further sheds light on how chiropractic care can affect the body. His research showed conclusively that dysfunction of the spinal column caused nerve interference and that interference can reduce nerve transmission by a staggering 60%. This explains why SMT has such a profound impact on proprioception, as these signals need to travel via the nerves to reach the brain. This reduction also affects your body’s ability to communicate and coordinate with itself which hinders cellular processes and genetic expression.