Newsletter for August

Here's the link for our August newsletter http://www.alive-chiro.co.uk/doctor.asp?chiropractor=57S

I hope you find it useful. Your feedback would be welcomed

Yours in Health

Peter

We Don't Crack Bones

There are a lot of myths, misconceptions that go around about chiropractic. Some of the more common are:-

1. We crack bones.

People have confused chiropractic care with spinal manipulation but there is a huge difference.

For a start, anyone can do spinal manipulation with either no training or a weekend course. Only chiropractors can do chiropractic care and learning how to do it takes 5 years of intensive training.

Spinal manipulation is about forcing your bones where the manipulator thinks they "ought" to go. Very frequently your body doesn't want them to go that way so it resists. A lot of force has to be used to overcome this resistance. Your body always has good reasons for its behaviour - if it doesn't want to move a certain way or it causes pain it is because the body knows that damage will happen. Forcing your body to move where it doesn't want to go may cause more damage.

A chiropractic adjustment is about finding out what your body is trying to do and helping it along. Because your body is helping rather than resisting I don't need to use much force. People are often very surprised at how light a touch is needed and how quickly the body responds.

I often use the analogy that spinal manipulation is like pushing a car uphill with the brakes on. A chiropractic adjustment is like taking the brakes off and pushing it downhill.

Please let me know your comments, suggestions or requests for information on peter@penrithchiropractic.com

The cost of war

Dwight D. Eisenhower. From a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Watching THE Wedding

Like several billion others I spent Friday morning watching two young people getting married. I cried - but I always cry at weddings. Goodness knows what I'll be like at my children's weddings! What with crying through the ceremony, Dad-dancing afterwards and cracking bad jokes during my speech they probably won't invite me!

I was very moved by the sermons and speeches. The combined lesson they seemed to be putting over was "We know that there will be pomp and ceremony and media and wealth and pageantry and celebrity, but in the end all there is is love."

Service of others rather than self-service seemed to be the message. No wonder Catherine Middleton hesitated before agreeing to marry William. Now she is our princess - we own her, we claim the right to judge her and we will put our hopes and fears into her and William. We can even buy "Kate" dolls - that would freak me out!

So Catherine and William set out their stall - to be honourable, decent, loving and to act with humanity. In a world where common humanity doesn't seem very common that moved me very much.

All the pageantry and royal splendour was done in the way only we can do it. And we can do it because we have over a thousand years of unbroken tradition and gradual evolution of our society.

I have puzzled for years over what it means to be British. One factor seems to be an ability for all classes to adapt and compromise, and an adversion on all sides to revolution. I think this is because of a deeply engrained, shared and evolving sense of fairness. What gets us really fired up are things which we see as "unfair". I don't know if this is uniquely British, but I think one of our strengths is the institutionialisation of the idea of "fair play" and "sticking up for the underdog". Possibly these ideas helped us to lead the way in the abolition of slavery and the development of democracy.

I think we have lost confidence in these strengths. Certainly since the 1970's we lost our way really badly. We tried to be American, then we tried to be European. We tried a nanny state, then we tried "every man for himself", and nothing seemed to fit.

I've lost count of the booms and busts I've lived through and I don't know if we will ever stop making the same mistakes. What I do know is that I agree with two young people who try to put honour, duty, service of others and love above material things - because that is the only way to find peace and happiness.

Chiropractic aids movement, movement gives health and life

Many thanks to a great chiropractor and inspiration, Dr Tedd Koren for this.

"Worms will not eat living wood where the vital sap is flowing; rust will not hinder the opening of a gate when the hinges are used each day.
Movement gives health and life. Stagnation brings disease and death."
- Chinese Medicine proverb
 
A subluxation is an area of stagnation: stagnated nerve impulses, energy and body structures. The job of the chiropractor is to locate and correct subluxations, permitting energy, healing and life to flow.

CLA Insight 5 tech patient intro

Everyone coming to see us gets scanned using this technology. I was trained as a scientist before I became a chiropractor, and I'm naturally sceptical, so I like to measure what I'm doing and prove to myself that clients are getting the results they need.

Once you are alive all the rest is easy!

For you to be alive your innate intelligence had to battle against the laws of physics, to turn chaos into complex order, to turn dead food into living tissue, and to grow you from a single cell into a highly organised thinking, loving, self aware person who is capable of changing the world.

 

Now that you have achieved the impossible - is there anything in life you can't do?