Learning to be Healthy is Like Learning to Ride a Bike
When you first learned to ride a bike, someone had to teach you the rules of the road. In my case it was my dad who taught me: ride on the right, wear a helmet, use hand signals, and so forth.
It’s all good advice.
But even when you know these rules, you still don’t know how to ride.
You’ve learned an external database of bike-riding related ideas. But your brain, muscles, and balance system still can’t automatically coordinate their actions to keep you in balance and moving forward. That takes a different type of learning process.
In the world of preventive healthcare, it’s like being told to eat nine servings of vegetables, exercise every day, get adequate sleep, and the like.
It’s all good advice. And you should follow it. But it’s an external database of health-related ideas. It’s not enough.
None of it trains your brain, digestive tract, kidneys, liver, and endocrine glands to automatically coordinate their actions to create improved health.
These internal organs (and the others that are responsible for expressing your health) are similar in many ways to the biceps, pectorals, quadriceps, and other muscles that allow you to ride a bike. Just like your muscles, they need an integrated game plan in order to do their job effectively.
When the background chatter in the brain and spinal cord is out of balance, your processing circuitry gets overloaded. Then your internal calculations lose accuracy and your health will also be out of balance.
That’s why your mental state has such a significant impact on health.
Unfortunately, our terminology to describe these mental states is inadequate. General terms like “anxiety” and “depression” are just the start. The central nervous system takes on a much wider range of altered states than can be expressed with these generic descriptions.
That’s where manual therapy comes in.
A tight muscle restricts your motion and makes you weaker. But a tight muscle is also an altered signal being fed back into the brain.
A spinal joint that’s jammed blocks movement and can cause pain. And it’s another source of abnormal body-brain feedback.
Manual Therapy — The Future of Health Care
Most people imagine that the scientific healthcare of the future will involve a whole lot of advanced chemistry and high tech gadgets and gizmos.
I don’t think so.
Manual therapy — using hands-on treatments to improve health — is one of the most ancient health practices. So it’s odd to think of manual therapy as one of the cutting-edge, scientifically advanced treatments that will revolutionize the healthcare of the future.
But manual therapy works directly on the body’s most sophisticated internal control system, the nervous system. Hands-on treatment is scientifically proven to eliminate blockages to optimal brain function and help your internal organs work better.
Sure, eating your vegetables and getting good sleep are important steps to promote health. But to truly boost your internal health intelligence, unclutter the abnormal signal processing in your brain, and improve your automatic control mechanisms, experience the future of healthcare — manual therapy.
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