When your body is functioning well, your brain and body are busy sending very clear messages to one another and the innate intelligence of your body handles your body’s requirements of repair and growth. When your body is dysfunctional, all sorts of ailments can occur from a sore back to bunions to cancer to indigestion. A major form of dysfunction occurs when the messages between your brain and body get blocked by a misalignment of the head and neck that irritates your spinal cord and thus interferes with nerve messages. This misalignment is indicated by a lack of balance in your body.

Essentially, your body is organized into a right and left side. Your brain has its right and left hemispheres. Your brain stem consists of two halves. You have a right and left eye, arms, hands, legs, feet and so on. It is your body’s desire that your two sides be as balanced as possible. Lack of balance leads to stress in your body.

When you are well balanced, your spine is also well balanced and aligned. In fact, without your spine being well balanced, you cannot be well balanced and, thus, you will be stressed. What we call subluxation occurs when the bones of the spine become misaligned to the degree that there is interference with neurological function. Subluxation irritates the nerves, interfering with the messages being transmitted. The surrounding muscles contract in an attempt to bring you back into balance or to reduce the pain caused by the stress. This creates a cycle of stress leading to degeneration leading to more stress and requires some intervention to break the vicious cycle.

All nerve messages pass through the atlas vertebra and so problems anywhere in your body can be caused or made worse by misalignment there. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell which messages are being blocked. There maybe a chemical reaction that is no longer happening when you digest food and so you now have heartburn when you eat certain foods. Your muscles may not be getting clear messages and so respond unequally causing body imbalance. This imbalance can then start to wear on joints and ligaments causing pain in areas like hips, or knees. Remember that all of your bodily functions are being controlled and directed by your brain. Any of them could become dysfunctional because of spinal subluxation.

What happens when the spine becomes subluxated is that the messages being sent to the muscles that support our bodies become imbalanced. The two halves of the spinal cord pass the messages between your brain and body unequally. If one half is free and clear and the other half is stressed by subluxation, messages on the stressed side will be interfered with and will not be relayed clearly. The muscles on each side will respond differently. This will cause your posture and spine to become unbalanced.

If there is misalignment anywhere in the spine, we find that the atlas vertebra is always misaligned. To only manipulate the lower vertebrae back into place will not correct the source of the subluxated spine and messages from the brain will still be out of balance. Your muscles will still respond unequally and your spine and body will be back out of balance very quickly.

Correcting the misalignment of the atlas vertebra removes the interference. The messages between your brain and body will become free and clear and your muscles will respond in turn to pull your body back into proper alignment. When your body is allowed to correct its own misalignment, it will hold that alignment for much longer than alignments obtained by manipulating individual vertebrae. Thus your entire body will function much more efficiently. At Peak Performance, many maintenance patients hold their adjustment up to six months at a time.