Helpful Background Information

What is Chiropractic?

Chiropractic is a natural, non-invasive approach to your health care. Chiropractic recognizes the scientific fact that your body is naturally self-healing, and it helps to ease the neural pathways that allow your body to heal itself effectively. Did you know that virtually every system in your body – from your organs, to your tissues, and even to individual cells – is controlled and regulated by your nervous system? Your brain sends impulses to the billions of nerves in your body, and receives critical information in return. The main pathway between your brain and the body is the spinal cord, protected by the bony vertebrae that make up the spinal column.

Through injury, stress, or even daily life, your spinal vertebrae can become misaligned, and pinch or irritate the nerve tissue of your spinal cord. As a result, the vital signals between your brain and your body’s organs and tissues can be diminished or altered. Spinal joints that aren’t moving as they should can irritate and even choke nearby nerves. Your nervous system is disrupted, and you experience pain and discomfort.

A chiropractor is highly trained and licensed to be able to manipulate the bones of the spine to restore proper motion and alignment to these stuck joints, allowing the free flow of healthy nerve impulses. Chiropractors remove imbalances in your posture and structural misalignments that tend to accumulate in our bodies over time. Much of what we term “poor health” is really the result of chronic nerve interference by these misaligned vertebrae. A proper chiropractic adjustment will remove the impediments that prevent the body from restoring itself to full health.

Dr. Jennifer Ridley is a Doctor of Chiropractic, a member of a time-honored healthcare discipline with licensed practitioners in all 50 states. Chiropractic is recognized by governmental health care programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Worker’s Compensation and others.

What is Functional Medicine?

The best way to describe functional medicine is to compare it to common, or “conventional” medicine. Conventional medicine often finds itself driven by market forces (for example, the profit margins of big pharmaceutical companies) that have nothing whatsoever to do with a patient’s general health or wellness. As a result, conventional medicine tends to focus primarily on relieving the symptoms of illness – pain, low energy, or decreased libido, for example. Are you in pain, or are your cholesterol numbers too high? Just pop a pill or two, and that pain medicine will temporarily dull the ache, or that cholesterol medicine will temporarily bring those alarming numbers down. And once your symptoms are controlled, even though you may be taking multiple prescription drugs for the rest of your life, you may be able to convince yourself that your illness is “cured,” when actually it has never even been addressed in the first place.

Functional medicine, by contrast, asks questions such as, “Why is your body experiencing pain? What is going on that is making your body produce too much cholesterol?” Dr. Ridley’s functional medicine approach looks for and addresses the root causes of body dysfunction – with the goal of restoring health, not just controlling or hiding signs and symptoms. Functional medicine focuses on repairing, rebuilding, and restoring the natural, fundamental processes that underlie optimal health, and adjusting the environmental factors that affect it for better or worse.

If everyone took responsibility for their own health, in time there would be no need for big pharmaceutical companies. A wise person might ask whether it is truly in these companies interest to promote health and wellness – to honestly cure disease – or to continue marketing, advertising, and selling expensive products that often require lifetime use.

In a nutshell, when your “Check Engine” light comes on in your car, you have two options if you want the light to go out. Conventional medicine might suggest you pull out the fuse that controls the “Check Engine” light (Hey! The light is gone! Everything must be okay!). Functional medicine – as practiced by Dr. Ridley at LiveWell Chiropractic and Wellness – will require looking under the hood, figuring out what the problem is, and fixing it. Now the light has gone out because an underlying problem has been solved… not merely because someone pulled a fuse.