About Chiropractic: what are symptoms?

What are symptoms?

Your body has within it an incredible intelligence which has evolved across millions of years. From moment to moment, it coordinates your bodily systems with the information it is receiving about your external environment. When you are confronted with what at first appears to be an annoying symptom, you will be best served by considering it your body’s appropriate response to an environmental or lifestyle stress. Alternatively, it may be a signal telling you what not to do in order to help the body restore, and then optimize, health.

Symptoms are most usually a result of the body functioning exactly as it was designed to. Chiropractic is based on a philosophy which recognizes that within each of us resides a self-healing, self-regulating intelligence that, without interference, is all you need in order to achieve a state of optimal health and well-being. The interference-free expression of symptoms is, in most cases, an important part of healing and being healthy. The masking of symptoms with medication, or any other therapy, may not be in the best interest of your body’s attempts to adapt to challenges. Either way we need to respect what we feel and hear from our innate intelligence and not simply mask those signals with drugs.

Masking symptoms makes us more disconnected from our bodies and potentially interferes with the body’s inborn healing mechanisms. Chiropractors strive to ensure that such important mechanisms are not masked, but that the occurrence of symptoms reflects what your innate, adaptive intelligence knows to be appropriate.

So what is the relationship between chiropractic care and symptoms?

Almost all other healthcare providers focus on doing something in order to make their patients feel more comfortable. They ‘treat’ diseases – which is a label for a collection of symptoms – in an attempt to make the body work without symptoms so the patient is more comfortable. A chiropractors objective is not simply to alleviate back and neck pain, although that is often one of the beneficial side-effects of chiropractic care.