AJCC 2003

October 2003

Gravity Based Chiropractic

by Richard E. Garde, BS, DC

We Chiropractors work with the subtle substance of the soul. We release the imprisoned impulse, the tiny rivulet of force that emanates from the mind and flows over the nerves to cells and stirs them to life. We deal with the majestic power that transforms common food into living, loving, thinking clay; that robes the earth with beauty and hues and scents the flowers with the glory of the air.”

“In the dim dark distance long ago, when sun first bowed to the morning star, this power spoke and there was life; it quickened the slime of the sea and the dust of the earth and drove the cell to union with its fellows in countless living forms. Through aeons of time it finned the fish and winged the bird and fanged the beast. Endlessly it worked, evolving its forms until it produced the crowning glory of them all. With tireless energy it blows the bubble of each individual life and then silently, relentlessly dissolves the form, and absorbs the spirit into itself again.”

“And yet you ask, ‘Can Chiropractic cure appendicitis or the flu?’ Have you more faith in a spoonful of medicine than in the power that animates the living world?”

Most chiropractors are familiar with this famous quote attributed to B.J. Palmer. I remember, in my student days, sitting in the Palmer College’s library going through the old yearbooks and finding this quote in one of them. It was actually written by a woman graduate — whose name I have unfortunately forgotten. While her name has been lost in Chiropractic history, her sentiments have been read and thought about by several generations of Chiropractors and their patients who may find these words hanging in their chiropractor’s offices.

Think of it. Cells formed and grew — always constrained by their gravity environment — so that they first grew two dimensionally. Life ‘quickened the slime of the sea and the dust of the earth and drove the cell to union with its fellows in countless living forms’. One of life’s characteristics is it adapts to its environment, which is carbon-based, oxygen-rich and a three-dimensional gravity well. Early life was an ocean of sea vegetation that was essentially flat. The first land plants grew on X and Z axes — no Y. Until some cells formed and saw the unclaimed territory was up not out. Competition was less upwards. The vertical dimension required a helical organization for strength and support.

The first animals were marine creatures in a buoyant environment. When animals flopped out of the sea they had to deal with the harsher effects of gravity. They grew in various ways to give them some survival advantage. The ages of massive reptiles came and went. A little warm and hairy creature appeared - that if it could look down its evolutionary lineage would be amazed at its progeny’s success.

To give itself survivability, that little warm and hairy creature had to be efficient. In addition to the gravity well, its environment was hot and dry. It had to compete against stronger and faster predators for stronger and faster prey. It needed to minimize water consumption and reduce heat buildup so that it could increase its hunter-gatherer range. How did it do that? The answer was environmentally elegant and evolutionarily profound. It stood up. The vertical answer to the gravity problem was species changing. It was a bigger discovery than fire. It changed a species and required a cascading series of changes to the organism that increased its ability to survive and added to its environmental and evolutionary success.

Being vertical reduced certain effects of gravity compression and added specific benefits that increased its survivability. At first look, the vertical position, the two-legged position, was less efficient than the four-legged for propulsion. However, by standing vertically certain trade-offs became apparent. Front limbs could be used to carry and hold. This modification also allowed the front limbs to develop throwing mechanics - to hurl rocks and spears and eventually baseballs.

Evolution: Somewhere, Something went terribly wrong. -unknown artist

As the hand developed in usage, the brain grew to control it. The bigger the computer, the more heat is produced by its bigger and faster processor. What is true of silicon chips is also true for bio-computers. Excessive heat is a deadly conundrum for computers. The vertical position is ideal to handle the heat exchange problem. By being vertical, there is a 60% reduction in sun exposure; that is why you lie down to tan, horizontal orientation increases sun exposure. Vertical orientation also exposes more body surface area to cooling by convection. This means if the organism is vertical, the computer can increase in size and computing power without fatally overheating the organism.

There are other advantages: Vertical position changed the orientation of muscles such as the tongue. Humans are the only mammals that have the root of the tongue descending into the level of C3. Other mammals have the tongue entirely in the oral cavity. The descended muscular origin of the tongue is important in sound production. The human vocal chamber is enlarged again by a gift from gravity. Thus, the neurology of communication had the hardware tools to develop from grunts and growls by going vertical - now someone can heckle the guy throwing the baseball. Or sing the National Anthem before the game.

Two-legged standing is harder than four-legged standing. The center of gravity of a bipedal structure has a smaller base than a quadruped. This potential instability requires a complicated system of locomotion and balance that is driven by neurobiomechanical integration. Neurology of posture is complex and interrelated throughout the nervous system. Mechanoreceptors constantly sense position and relay information to the spinal cord, brain and body concerning relative position under gravity. Muscle subsystems of static position and movement interplay to keep the body relatively centered over its base. Efferent mechanoreceptor signals barrage the spinal cord Lamina VII and through secondary pathways influence the Cerebellum, Vestibular Nucleus as well as the Thalamus, Hypothalamus and cortical functions. This means that not only body position under gravity can influence pain mechanisms but also visceral functions as well as the immune system.

From stance and locomotion also come the selected human qualities of imagination and vision. ‘How so?’ you may ask. I’ll let Bernd Heinrich speak to that deep connection.

“We are psychologically evolved to pursue long-range goals, because through millions of years that is what we on average had to do in order to eat. To us, even an old deer that had not yet been caught would have required a very long chase. It would have required strategy, knowledge, and persistence. Those hominids who didn’t have the taste for the long hunt, as such, perhaps for its own sake, would very seldom have been successful. They left fewer descendants.”

“Our ancient type of hunting — where we were superior relative to other predators — required us to maintain long-term vision that both rewarded us by the chase itself and that held the prize in our imagination even when it was out of sight, smell, and hearing. It was not just sweat glands that made us premier endurance predators. It was also our minds fueled by passion. Our enthusiasm for the chase had to be like the migratory birds’ passion to fly off on their great journeys, as if propelled by dreams.”

“A quick pounce-and-kill requires no dream. Dreams are the beacons that carry us far ahead into the hunt, into the future, and into a marathon. We can visualize far ahead. We see our quarry even as it recedes over the hills and into the mists. It is still in our mind’s eye, still a target, and imagination becomes the main motivator. It is the pull that allows us to reach into the future, whether it is to kill a mammoth or an antelope, or to write a book, or to achieve record time in a race. Other things being equal, those hunters who had the most love of nature would be the ones who sought out all its allures. They were the ones who persisted the longest on the trail. They derived pleasure from being out, exploring, and traveling afar. When they felt fatigue and pain, they did not stop, because their dream carried them still forward. They were our ancestors.”

I think it was no accident that Homo Erectus was the first of the hominids to leave Africa. The structure of that fellow was essentially the same as present day humans. Vertical posture makes for efficient traveling and other survival traits.

So you can see that there were some considerable evolutionary advantages to vertical posture. Our ancestors were environmentally selected by their efficiency to continue their line. Their development was selected by their very efficiency to their environment. Not only did their shape create the ability to survive easier but also allowed them to thrive in a gravity-dependent universe. Vertical posture to oppose gravity was what made this creature and its line the most efficient organism and increased its position up the evolutionary survivability index. I would not have named him Homo Sapiens. I would have called her Homo Verticalis.

You don’t have to be a paleontological anthropologist to ponder the existential truths locked in fossilized remains. The inheritor of the optimized survival traits discussed above is standing right there in your office looking back at you. Those survival traits are shouting at you when the descendant of the little furry creature is slumped in front of you complaining of shoulder and neck pain with pins and needles sensation in their fingers, with a weakened immune system and visceral problems. The blueprint for that patient’s correction has a 3 to 7 million-year track record. This concept is the foundation for all the methods for posture correction currently invented and that will be discovered in the future. We can thank a little furry grandfather and grandmother for figuring out one of the secrets of the universe. Standing up to gravity is one of the best survivability traits discovered.

It is up to us to reawaken people’s vision so that they can see it. Once a person understands consciously how their relationship to gravity directly impacts their health they emerge from the Valley of the Blind. All around them is the evidence of sick and suffering people. But they have the key. They can see the key to a long and healthy life for themselves and their loved ones. That path to a healthy life leads through a posture correcting chiropractor’s door — your door.

There are hundreds of people right in your community slumping their way through their day. It is hard to tell fish about water. It is the environment in which they live. It is the same for people living in the gravity well called Earth. Most do not wonder about it. They take their drug fixes trying to find chemical solutions for mechanical problems.

People get crushed by gravity but lack the tools to see it, understand it, or reverse it. It is your job to wake them up. So that they may see. So that they may understand. So that they may live.

These are your tools of intervention:

• If you can speak in the language of posture — physics — understand gravity adaptations three dimensionally in rotations and translations.

• If you are familiar with the properties of tissue — bio-rheology — understand the stiffness of tissue to be released and pushed through to apply a corrective vector to release joint locking.

• If you know neurology of posture — proprioception — awareness of place in space and the reflexes developed million of years ago to establish vertical orientation.

Then these are your tools to work with the ‘subtle substance of the soul.’ Use them to protect and to restore your patient’s environmental heritage and birthright.

Use them and then you are a Gravity-based Chiropractor.

References

Crelin ES. The Human Vocal Tract. New York: Vantage Press, 1987.

Defining What Is Biologically Human

(http://biology.uindy.edu/Biol504/HUMANSTRATEGY/16transition.htm)

Elenkov, I., Wilder, R., Chrousos, G., Vizi, S., “The Sympathetic Nerve — An Integrative Interface between Two Supersystems: The Brain and the Immune System,” Pharmacological Reviews, 52:595 - 638, 2000.

Heinrich, Bernd, Racing the Antelope, What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life, Cliff Street Books, 2001.

Lennon J, Shealy CN. “The Posture of Health: Gravity, Oxygen and You.“ The Healing Breath Journal.

Thompson, D’Arcy, On Growth and Form, Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Wheeler, Pete, “Human ancestors walked tall, stayed cool.” Natural History, Aug.93, Vol. 102 Issue 8, p65- 68.