Vertical Health Care

Š 1999 John D. Andre, D.C.

In the field of Health Care, it can be difficult to evaluate one physician's work against another's, or one system's approach against another's. There is much to be confused about.

We've been taught that if we have symptoms, we are sick, and if we don't have symptoms, we are well. Wouldn't it be neat if that's all there was to understanding our bodies. It IS true that symptoms are the body's alarm system. However, they are not a perfectly accurate, clearly-readable indicator of our body's processes. To classify a patient's condition by the display of symptom alone is simplistic, at best.

What About Symptoms?

Symptoms are an attempt by the body to communicate. As with any effort towards dialogue, we can either take that information in and respond to it. Or we can turn it off.

The primary approach of most in Mainstream Medicine has been, and continues to be, to simply "turn off" the symptoms. They suppress them. A metaphor for this would be: the firemen drive up to a building, upon entry they hear the fire alarm, so they turn that alarm off and drive away - thinking they've done something helpful. Actually, all they did was to turn off the noise.

We've all been trained to think that we just need to get rid of the "noise." Of course, no one wants to stay in pain. But then again, it is NOT that simple.

Sick Care vs. Health Care

We might start with sorting out some terms. Words Matter! Some medical terms are tossed about with a wild sense of abandon. TV ads bend the truth, first one way - and then the other. Too often, dollars dictate what people say.

How can we sort out the difference between Sick Care and Health Care? Simply put, we can't. So, let's not use these two terms as though they mean something different. That is, unless the goal is to confuse people or obfuscate some facts. In essence, it's those who are sick that most actively seek health. The rest of us usually just take health for granted. The squeaky wheels are looking for the grease.

Acute vs. Chronic

In simple terms, acute means fresh, or new, or "hot" - as in recently inflamed. Chronic means that which has been around for a while. Chronic also infers a condition which has been unrelenting.

Where it gets a bit crazy is when a person with a chronic condition gets an acute flare up of something that lives right next to that chronic condition in the physiology. Also, when an acute condition hangs on for a while, we are not REALLY sure just when to redefine it as chronic. These two terms have some, but limited, value in our goal to understanding Health Care.

Stress vs. Stressor

Hans Selye, M.D. did a great job addressing the mechanics of how our bodies deal with stress and its impact. In his first book, The Stress of Life, he detailed the General Adaptative Syndrome (GAS).

We live with stress everyday. It's an important part of living a challenging and meaningful life. It is only when a stress becomes more than we can handle that it becomes a problem (a stressor). At that stage, it overwhelms the nervous system, blowing circuit breakers.

Stress can be physical, chemical, thermal, emotional, dietary, financial, derivational (lack of needed sleep or quiet time), and more. When it overwhelms the system, it becomes traumatic, blowing circuit breakers.

Trauma vs. Functional Disease

Now we are getting down to a couple of contrasting words which can really help us understand what's going on. Trauma is that stressor's impact which was Too Much for the nervous system to handle. Whereas May West spoke favorably about "Too much of a good thing," everything has its limits.

In the words of George Goodhart, D.C., the founder of Applied Kinesiology, "Your mother may forgive you, your father may forgive you, your brothers and sisters may forgive you, but your nervous system will never forgive you." The nervous system never forgets.

The very worst kind of trauma is that which an individual never saw coming. The impact of total surprise takes our startle reflex to the limits. This is what puts a person into shock.

Clinically, it is common to find a patient who has been everywhere, been seen by everybody, and yet has had little or no positive results to show for their efforts. The very first finding we want to rule out in such a case is a Stuck Shock Syndrome. For the most sensitive individuals, it is very difficult to release shock, once it has set in. It will frequently just settle down into a low grade kind of a funk, and beat the person for the rest of their life . . . unless those circuits get reset. A given trauma could have been a macrotrauma, such as a car wreck. Or, less easy to see, it might be a series of microtraumas. In one very sad case, an adult patient had a history as a child whose mother would hit her over the head with a school book to express unhappiness with the child's behaviors. Not one of those individual hits could ever get that mother convicted of child abuse. However, those many microtraumas added up over years to cause very real and significant spinal problems for that child. On a more insidious note, more than one patient has presented with a pair of feet that did a poor job of supporting the spine. Over many years, all those microtraumas - step, step, step - added up to some very tough spinal problems. Like that, trauma unattended can and does cause function to go awry.

Functional Disease - as opposed to trauma - involves function gone wrong in the psychophysiology. This may be physical. Or, it may be mental/emotional. There may be seriously hurt feelings that have never been released. Or, it may simply be Stinkin' Thinkin'.

The vast majority of individuals who do not feel well are dealing with function gone wrong. Many of these patients have simply been worn down over time by an unending series of stresses that were more than they could handle. Sequentially resetting the circuit breakers in the nervous system restores the majority of function.

The Basics

For over 100 years, chiropractic physicians have been concerned with the relationship between the body's structure and function. A hundred years ago, this was a breakthrough in understanding. Why else adjust the spine, or balance muscles to help adjustments hold? Back then, this new truth was a wake up call to Mainstream Medicine. (Chiropractors built a profession helping the sick people the MDs couldn't.) Today, it is commonplace to find many MDs thinking in terms of that most fundamental truth: the relationship between structure and function. Old habits die hard, however. Whereas it's true that one will not likely see anyone in Mainstream Medicine applying leaches to a patient's skin anymore, they still often place one's focus upon "the bug" that will come out of nowhere and GET you. On the other hand, for over 100 years, chiropractic physicians have been saying that it is much more prudent to look at the functional strength of the immune system of the patient, and their ability to resist "the bugs," than it is to RUN from "the bugs." (This is not meant to diminish the importance of the efforts made by Public Health Officials in areas such as sanitation.)

Paradigms & Perspectives

One's ability to solve a given problem is highly correlated to one's ability to perceive the problem clearly. It is a matter of perspective. One's angle of view will usually govern HOW one approaches any consideration.

Today, in the average medical office, Mainstream Medicine hasn't progressed profoundly. Even though most medical doctors now knows that it is antipurpose to hit everything that walks in the door with an antibiotic. Many a doctor still yields to the parents' demand, as they clamor for the antibiotics they have been trained to want for their children. (We are rapidly losing whatever benefits may have been available to us over the long-term here, simply because of the way clinicians make choices.)

The Old Paradigms

Historically, each segment of the healing arts has worked from their platform of understanding. Their basic functional principle could be called their rason d'ętre.

Mainstream Medicine more or less relies upon the principle of Suppression. Further: take drug "A" for symptom "A". If that doesn't work: take surgery "A" to remove symptom "A". And if all else fails, "shrink" complex "A" from out of the patient's mind in order to remove symptom "A".

Osteopathy at its beginning was concerned with the quality of one's blood and manipulation of the hard and soft tissues of the patient's body. Today, they are mostly merged with Mainstream Medicine.

Homeopathy rests upon the principle: Like Causes Like; Like Cures Like. VERY small doses are given.

Vibrational Medicine, Radionics, and such, attend to the importance of harmonic resonance. In some cases, selection and application of an appropriate microcurrent frequency to the patient can cause some wondrous changes.

Magnetic Therapy treats the physiology primarily through the application of north and south pole magnetic energy.

Energy Work, Reiki, and the like help the patient by adding energy - usually through a healers hands - into the bioenergetic fields of the body. This is a very active area of concern as we round out the 20th Century. Chi Gong is a red hot topic today.

Acupuncture/Meridian Therapy rests upon the principle of Stimulation . . . hopefully using it intelligently to increase and decrease function in the various tissues and organs, as desired.

AyurVeda is most concerned with the balancing of one's doshas. The doshas live right next door to, and involve, the elements and the meridians.

Chiropractic, at its point of beginning, said: if a bone in the spine is fixated, it WILL distort a nerve's function, so adjust it; free the fixation.

Naturopathy focuses mostly upon the toxins in one's body, and treats with cleansing, life style modifications, and herbs.

Over the years, folks loyal to the various persuasions above would essentially shout across the street at one another: "My paradigm is bigger than your paradigm." And, "My paradigm can beat up your paradigm." There has been some lacking in elegance.

The Digital Revolution

Today, there is without question an explosion of new knowledge bursting upon the surface of life. This brings with it an impact.

New information brings us new perspectives. How often does one hear: "You know, I've never thought of it that way before?"

New Paradigms

Significant new information will change the ground we stand upon. That ground plane is our world-view . . . the master paradigm from which we pivot and function.

A metanoia - a paradigm shift - can be very scary. At one moment, we were basing all our decisions upon "X." Then, out of the clear blue sky . . . when we least expected it . . . bang, here comes this FLASH of information that changes everything.

At least WE can change. What about that poor person who has the dread disease: Conceptual Stenosis . . . they stand there in the face of insurmountable odds, and swear that nothing has happened, nothing has changed. (That can be SO embarrassing!)

Health's New Paradigm

This journey hasn't been easy for Doctors of Chiropractic (DCs), raised inside the same Cultural Trance as everyone else. Fortunately, many DCs have been practicing with their eyes wide open. Year after year, the patient's bodies reveal more and more previously hidden truths. The advent of Applied Kinesiology (AK) in the 1960s gained us an important new tool. The ability to test the body's muscles has given birth to the possibility of meaningful dialogue between the doctor and the patient's nervous system. This has opened a floodgate of new information.

The BioComputer

The late Alan Beardall, D.C. discovered that the human nervous system stores data - and speaks to us - using ones and zeros. It's all digital. If we are getting a good BioComputer response (if the patient's nervous system is basically coherent and the muscle indicators display clearly), we will find the most amazing and helpful display of information at our fingertips.

We've validated the fine work on stress done by Hans Selye, M.D., and taken it a few clicks further. The nervous system remembers. Stress is stored in the flesh and in the mind, hence the wonderfulness of the term BodyMind. It's all stacked up in layers, like an onion.

The late Marshall Himes, D.C., along with Andy Petersen, D.C., brought the work of A.D. Speransky, M.D. forward, and into the Chiropractic Profession. They called their work Segmental Neuropathy. They validated Spernasky's thesis on the neurogenesis of disease, and they found that those layers of the onion are just stored memory patterns inside the nervous system.

In March 1995, Beverly Rubik, Ph.D. published a breakthrough article in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine: Energy Medicine and The Unifying Concept of Information. In this article, she asked us to consider the significance of information to the human systems. This article is of landmark significance.

Peeling The Onion

It's really very simple. The onion only knows how to do two things: 1) it can add layers on: injuries, insults, childhood falls, pains, compensations, adaptations, disappointments, broken hearts, and more, or 2) with some assistance, layer after layer can be peeled away, releasing stress, and subsequently fatigue. This is a veritable process of youthing.

Old age and death are nothing but the result of continuously adding layers continuously, until the onion becomes so large that friends and family dig a hole, put it into the ground, and place a stone there to commemorate what a great onion it was. Dr. Alan Beardall said, "We humans, we die one muscle at a time."

How Do We Peel It?

Alan Beardall, D.C. and Sheldon Deal, D.C. discovered and refined the concept of Body Priority Dictates. This is a system for reading and understanding the body's BioComputer display, figuring out what to do first - what to do next.

A practitioner skilled in AK can systematically read one's body language. The main components are: a) the body's posture (static and dynamic), b) the muscle weaknesses that come up on postural display and are read via manual muscle testing, c) the various important reflex beds (especially along the spine), and d) the symptom display.

Interestingly, with each subsequent layer of the peeled onion, the posture changes, as does the pattern of muscle weakness displayed. With each subsequent layer rising to the surface (on display), comes its associated symptom set. With skill and a bit of luck, a number of layers can often be removed during a given 12-to-15-minute office visit.

Vertical Technology

Digging down through the layers of one's onion is similar to digging in a mine. Sometimes we need to go deep in order to access the best gold. Digging deeper, we often hear from the patient that they are once again experiencing symptoms they haven't had for many years. Ah Ha. And, they thought just because they hadn't seen those symptoms in a while that the associated problems had been fixed in their body - or at least had gone away.

It is important to remember that the more deeply we dig into the physical, the more we unearth the old, buried mental/emotional stresses stored there. The good news is that we are flushing up to the surface - where we can get at them - many issues at the core of the patient's health problems. These must be processed and dealt with as they surface, or many areas of the psychophysiology will go out-of-wack. For this reason, AK physicians frequently team up with skilled members of the psychological fraternity.

This vertical work produces results. In general, if we can get the pattern up on display, we can usually fix it. Patients do not wonder if they are making progress. This is truly cost effective, high value care.

Horizontal Therapy

As is implied, this is essentially where the problems and the symptoms are shoved sideways - back and forth. Almost all drug therapy is horizontal in nature. Any therapy which is suppressive and fails to unlayer the onion, is by default horizontal.

Indeed, any therapy is either horizontal or vertical to the extent that it succeeds or fails to get deeper problematic layers to the surface and resolved.