I coulda been a nerd.

Back in high school I was a math whiz.  I was excelling in advanced math classes at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity at the ripe age of 14.  If I had stayed with the plan, maybe by now I’d be the bil­lion­aire scion of a soft­ware com­pany.  Or a tenured pro­fes­sor somewhere.

But instead, in col­lege, along with the graduate-level math classes I was tak­ing, I also took African Dance. Once those drums started to play, and I expe­ri­enced the joy of explor­ing the dif­fer­ent rhythms of move­ment, noth­ing else mat­tered as much.

I got hooked on dance.  But more­over, I got hooked on hav­ing a rela­tion­ship with the phys­i­cal body.  And I dis­cov­ered the power of a new type of knowl­edge – new to me, any­way — knowl­edge that grew from the inside out.

Even though I was good at it – really, really good, in fact — fill­ing in the cor­rect answer bub­ble on a mul­ti­ple choice test sud­denly didn’t seem very impor­tant.   Instead, I became pas­sion­ate about gain­ing aware­ness of my own limbs, spine, breath, and emo­tional expression.

Ulti­mately, that’s what led me to study chi­ro­prac­tic. I wanted to be a real doc­tor. A doc­tor who could help peo­ple tap into the most pow­er­ful heal­ing forces avail­able – the inner con­nec­tion to the body and its poten­tial. That’s the most effec­tive way to improve health.

I soon dis­cov­ered that the mus­cles and joints (and the lig­a­ments, ten­dons and bones), were only a small piece of the action.  Your brain is in charge of con­trol­ling and inte­grat­ing your body.

So I also had to become expert in how the brain and ner­vous sys­tem operates.

That meant learn­ing how indi­vid­ual nerve cells fire to con­trol mus­cle actions. But it also meant under­stand­ing the larger prin­ci­ples of thought, emo­tion, moti­va­tion and metaphor that guide the whole human enterprise.

Chi­ro­prac­tic is only a small piece of it

The chi­ro­prac­tic treat­ment model, with its empha­sis on per­son­al­ized man­ual ther­apy, makes a tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tion to improv­ing the nation’s health.

But if a chi­ro­prac­tor is only using the meth­ods he or she learned in chi­ro­prac­tic school, a lot of potent heal­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties are being left unexplored.

I’ve stud­ied yoga, Pilates, Feldenkrais, Alexan­der tech­nique, Laban Move­ment Analy­sis, bal­let, gyro­ton­ics, and other meth­ods of move­ment, align­ment, and body aware­ness.  I started study­ing these meth­ods long before I even dreamed I’d be a chi­ro­prac­tor and, basi­cally, I’ve never stopped learning.

These meth­ods are based on devel­op­ing your move­ment and pos­tural aware­ness, and giv­ing you the tools to guide your body towards health and full functioning.

I’ve also stud­ied a range of con­nec­tive tis­sue ther­a­pies: fric­tion mas­sage, trig­ger point ther­apy, myofas­cial release, Neu­ro­tac­tile ther­apy, and cran­iosacral harmonics.

These meth­ods are effec­tive means to release and bal­ance the con­nec­tive tis­sues and mus­cles, as well as the nerve sig­nals they send back to the brain.

My exten­sive knowl­edge of anatomy and phys­i­ol­ogy has helped me grasp the impor­tant prin­ci­ples com­mon to all of these meth­ods.  And lis­ten­ing to thou­sands of patients over thirty years has helped me under­stand the par­tic­u­lar ways indi­vid­u­als neglect their inner move­ment and body resources – and the pain and other prob­lems that result.

As far as this study and expe­ri­ence has been able to carry me in my quest to help my patients, it’s still not enough.  Because there’s an addi­tional dimen­sion of health that takes place in the envi­ron­men­tal and social realm.

Your health doesn’t begin or end at your skin surface

The new sci­en­tific stud­ies pour­ing out show the many aspects of our envi­ron­ment – both phys­i­cal and social – that have a pro­found influ­ence on health.

For instance, we know the sig­nif­i­cant role that pol­lu­tants play as con­trib­u­tors to can­cer, neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems, and more.  The qual­ity and purity of the food we eat is also a major health factor.

These envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors – and oth­ers – are an impor­tant sub­ject mat­ter for this blog.

More­over, our social envi­ron­ment – our fam­ily, friends, our social milieu as a whole, and the ways we inter­act with it – is another vital influ­ence on health.  It’s been proven.

So call the sis­ter you haven’t spo­ken to lately, pet your cat, take a yoga class at the gym instead of fol­low­ing along at home on a DVD, go out of your way to thank the server behind the counter at your favorite cof­fee (or juice) bar, join your church choir.  And e-mail your con­gres­sional rep­re­sen­ta­tive to lobby for a bet­ter national health plan.  Get involved.  And, by the way, con­tribute to this blog.

Your host,

Ron Lavine, D.C.

Deepen Your Body of Knowledge

John Cacioppo, Lone­li­ness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection