Welcome to the Fall 2023 issue.
Chiropractic, according to the originator D.D. Palmer is a science, art, and philosophy “founded on tone.” With chiropractic, we achieve a new framework for understanding health. It’s all about tone!
Tone is a word often associated with the body’s muscles. A “toned” body denotes strength and flexibility. We don’t often hear this word “tone” in connection with the Nervous System, however this is the key principle in chiropractic philosophy. The Nervous System expresses tone, like a musical instrument expresses a vibrant sound.
Ideal tone, or “normal tone,” means the Nervous System is tuned to its ideal frequency manifesting as health and ease. D.D. Palmer discovered that “subluxations” in the body change the tone of the Nervous System, and this change in tone explains why someone expresses dis-ease, while others in a similar environment (with similar internal or external conditions) remain well.
To get to the heart of the matter, we need to understand the individual’s life, their experiences, and how they reacted to their distressing experiences. Because this is the key to understanding the shift in tone. Not everyone becomes subluxated when they experience stress. But some do. The goal in chiropractic is to help individuals advance through the stress to achieve an ideal expression of tone. It is so important to know, firstly, that the shift in tone caused by a stress in life is part of an adaptive measure in biology to overcome that unique stress! A person in a heightened tension pattern–a hypertonus or “sympathicotonia”–is displaying a clear need or desire to overcome a specific life-stressor. Here’s how it works:
The specific stress causes a shift in tone toward sympathicotonia. The body then adapts with specific changes in one or several organs to galvanize an effort to resolve and overcome that unique stressor. When the individual achieves resolution of the distress, the body enters a necessary “healing phase” with an equal and opposite tonal expression called “vagatonia” or parasympathetic fatigue, rest, and recovery, often accompanied by inflammatory symptoms in the organs.
In chiropractic, the aim is to improve the individual’s holistic capacity to adapt to their unique stressors in life, and to support the recovery phase after the stress is resolved. No one should have to adapt and recover alone. And the importance of chiropractic is in the connection it brings and the increased resilience it offers for the Nervous System. And then, when an individual shifts into a vagotonic healing phase of recovery, chiropractic philosophy ameliorates the fear or difficulty of the inflammatory symptoms, by supporting the body’s desire and ability to recover. In the vast majority of illnesses, the body will recover amazingly, if fear of the symptom is addressed, and if the individual comprehends the onsetting stressor with greater physical and emotional support.
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