Chiropractic and Asthma
Chiropractic and asthma can be more related than you think. How your chiropractor can help you if you have asthma?
Asthma Facts
According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America:
- According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 13 people have asthma
- About 25 million Americans have asthma. This is 7.6 percent of adults and 8.4 percent of children. Asthma has been increasing since the early 1980s in all age, sex and racial groups.
- Asthma is the leading chronic disease in children. It is also the top reason for missed school days.
- Asthma is more common in adult women than adult men.
- Asthma is more common in children than adults and more common in boys than girls.
- Currently, there are 6.2 million people with asthma under the age of 18.
- More than 11.5 million people with asthma, including nearly 3 million children, report having had one or more asthma attacks in 2015.
- In 2015, 1 in 12 children had asthma.
- In 2013, about 13.8 million missed school days were reported due to asthma.
What is Asthma?
It is a respiratory condition marked by spasms in the bronchi of the lungs, causing difficulty in breathing. It usually results from an allergic reaction or other forms of hypersensitivity.
The respiratory pathways can become inflamed and can narrow due to swelling and excess mucous.
How do Chiropractic and Asthma intersect?
When a child slips and falls and scrapes their knee it becomes red, hot and swollen. That is the body’s amazing capability of healing. It brings blood to the area that transports all of the materials needed to start scabbing the wound over protecting it from infection. Give it a week and you would never even know it was there.
Those same mechanisms are constantly at work internally as well (we just don’t see them).
A fever breaks when we are presented with a harmful bacteria or virus in order to burn it off. Throwing up when there are harmful substances found in your stomach and digestive tract. Shivering when it is cold in order to keep your internal body temperature constant.
The point is that the human body is extremely capable of taking care of almost anything we come in contact with or stresses we put our bodies under.
When we look at asthma and we see words like “hypersensitivity” and “allergic reaction” which means the body is not functioning the way that it was intended to!
What is the Function of the Body?
The body has one master control system. Think of it as the circuit breaker to your home.
During a lightning storm or when the house needs more electricity than it is capable of you might “flip a breaker”. Part of the house will lose power in order to keep the entire system from shutting down. That is the same way the nervous system works in the body.
It can never turn off because we would die but instead we “flip a breaker”. The breaker happens to be our spines and depending on where the power is turned off depends on the dysfunction we may experience. This is called a subluxation, a subluxation is simply a misalignment of the spine causing stress on the nervous system. Sometimes it can result in the speeding up or the slowing down of the body’s normal mechanisms.
How Does Your Chiropractic Help Asthma?
In the definition of Asthma, we saw that it was a hypersensitivity or allergic reaction.
These are both signs that the nervous system are not functioning at an optimal level.
When we have one or more subluxations present we can start to see signs of hyperactivity of the nervous system and body. The usual pollutants and allergens in the air can now cause dramatic responses.
The same exercise can cause a different result with the way we are breathing. Stress typically managed can create difficulty breathing.
Chiropractic does not seek to treat asthma. We locate the subluxations and stresses on your nervous system.
When those are removed your body can return to its normal function. This can decrease the body’s over-reaction to what are typical stresses and substances in our environment.
Case Study: Chiropractic and Asthma
Interventions and Outcomes: The patient was cared for using specific, low-force adjustments with the Activator Instrument to address areas of vertebral subluxation in the cervical, thoracic, and lumbosacral spine.
Within two weeks of initiating chiropractic care, the patient was able to discontinue his allergy and asthma medications (as decided upon by his parents) and the use of his nebulizer.
In the first 5 months after beginning chiropractic care, he has had only wellness checkups at the medical doctor. In the past school year, the patient has not missed any days of school due to illness.
Conclusion: This case report provides supporting evidence that chiropractic care can help balance immune system functioning and relieve asthma symptoms as well as colds and allergies.
It is recommended that further research be done on this subject to support the findings of this case study.
Read more about this study at : http://icpa4kids.org/Chiropractic-Research/chiropractic-care-of-a-pediatric-patient-with-asthma-allergies-chronic-colds-a-vertebral-subluxation.html
Blessings,
Dr. Aaron Cain