21st February, 2006

Dr NICK HODGSON

Have you ever wondered why when you get run down or sick, it tends to hit you in the same part of your body, seemingly every time? When I was a teenager, and into my early twenties, no matter what kind of minor infection I "caught", it would head straight for my chest/lungs. I would be choked up with bronchitis for weeks.

Many people who consult me as a chiropractor need to because when they get stressed, run down, overworked, physically or emotionally fatigued, or mysteriously ill; they always seem to end up with their neck or lower back "going out", or a bunch of headaches piling on top of each other.

We all seem to have our weak spots and if they recur often enough and severely enough we usually give our seemingly permanent residents a name: Migraines, Asthma, Irritable Bowel, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, Sinusitis, Depression and so on.

A JUGGLING ACT? Keeping healthy can involve learning healthy behaviours. PICTURE: Lise Gagne (www.istockphoto.com) "Patterns can develop in our nervous system when it comes to how we respond to chemical, physical, mental and/or emotional stresses and strains: basically similar to a 'habit' forming."

To understand why this happens we need to learn some more about the finer workings of the nervous system. Yes, that's right - it's not due to your lungs, muscles, immunity, or any other organ for that matter, that illness patterns recur. It all starts in your nerves!

“How can that be?” I can hear you thinking. “Surely if every time I get sick, if it affects my lungs, doesn’t that mean I’ve got weak lungs, not faulty nerves?”

To understand this better, let’s explore The Law of Facilitation - when an impulse passes through a certain set of neurons (nerve fibres) to the exclusion of others, it will take the same course on future occasions, and each time it traverses this path the resistance in the path will be less. (You may need to read this a couple of times to get your head around it.)

The most easily understood healthy example of this law, is the learning of a new motor skill: riding a bike, kicking a footy, juggling, playing a tune on an instrument. When you perform the task successfully, the information travels through your nervous system in a characteristic pattern (as individual as a fingerprint). So, according to the law of facilitation, once we have set off this characteristic nerve pattern once, it becomes easier and easier to set it off successfully again and again. Practice makes perfect.

Top sportspeople are even able to rehearse these patterns mentally, which we know as visualisation. And when you get really good at visualisation, brain research suggests that you are actually activating the same nerve loops that you would have if you actually performed the activity.

Now, here's the bad news. The same kinds of patterns can develop in our nervous system when it comes to how we respond to chemical, physical, mental and/or emotional stresses and strains: basically similar to a "habit" forming.

An example of this is asthma. Children who are vaccinated and the children of smokers are more prone to suffering from asthma throughout their life. Now vaccines and smoke in isolation do not cause asthma. But they can both irritate the airways and lungs of the children exposed. This could set up a facilitated nerve pattern. Future different kinds of stresses will tend to be channelled through that same loop, leading to repeated pressure on the lungs. Asthma is basically an overactivity of the immune and muscular tissues around the airways of the lungs, due to different triggers. But for a person who has not developed the particular facilitated pattern of an asthmatic, the same triggers may not be good for them; but they do not attack their lungs with the same speed and severity. (They may have another type of facilitated habit and suffer a sinus attack instead!)

Science has now demonstrated that our body replaces its' chemical building blocks on a continuous basis. This observation has led some experts to say that in just a couple of years, chemically speaking, you will have an entirely new body!? The time frame for this recycling process is still controversial, but the fact that it occurs is no mystery.
Considering why we seem to become recurrently “sick” in the same regions all the time leads to the questions: "Why does my body keep putting my arthritic ankle back the wrong way? Why can’t I have a new regenerated one with new cartilage?" "Why do we age?" "Why do we look the same with each new body?"

Well, now you know the answer! The nervous system is the slowest to change (and some scientists have argued that this is the one part of the body that doesn't regenerate chemically at all). And it is the nervous system which determines how, where, and when all the chemicals in the rest of the body are replaced. So the reason the ankle gets replaced in its' arthritic state is due to the existence of a facilitated nerve pattern: because a facilitated pattern of laying down extra calcium to barricade an overstressed joint has been established, as the body replaces the chemicals in that joint, it continues to lay down more and more calcium.

HOW DO YOU KICK THE SICKNESS "HABIT"?
We have been discussing the complex issue of how some sicknesses are a type of habit that your nervous system has gotten into. So, how do we break these habits? Until we can understand this area, every time we get run down, stressed, fatigued, overworked; we will find ourselves spiralling back into the same old sickness patterns.

Most of the principles we will discuss now are very similar to the steps needed to overcome any kind of habit. Eating disorders, drug addictions, behavioural habits, are all really examples of the nervous system facilitation that we spoke of earlier, just as much as recurrent lung infections, intestinal disorders, or joint degeneration can be.

1) Try to keep away from the environmental conditions in which the facilitated pattern has occurred in the past.

Drug rehabilitation rarely works if the addict returns to the same environment after detoxing. In terms of our bad health habits we need to try and understand the factors which will reinforce the facilitation in our nervous system. When dieting, we are often taught that the critical time is when you are in the supermarket. Once you have bought the fatty and sugary foods, and put them in the fridge, chances are you will "slip" into eating them, despite your promise to yourself that you would have enough will-power to resist. The answer? Don't have the bad foods in the pantry in the first place, and in the weaker moments, they won't be there as a choice of food.

So, once you know what area of your body where you seem to habitually get sick; the next stage is to research and think about the life situations that encourage the "bad habit". For example, for many of us, we get trapped into the mega-busy-treadmill. And if you look back through time, you will realise you can sustain this for only so long before you crash. A smarter tactic would be to recognise the warning signs that you are trapping yourself in this cycle once again, and learn to avoid getting trapped into the manic stage, and learn to "say no", pace yourself, and take time to smell the roses.

2) Give your nervous system something else to do. As a parent I learned quite quickly, that if you want your young child to stop doing something, you can try to tell them to stop till your red in the face. But what works best is to give them an attractive alternative, to distract them away from the unsuitable behaviour.

We can apply this same principle to our bad health habit. When are you most likely to slip into a bad habit? When you have nothing else to do, when you’re tired, when you’re angry, when you’re hungry, when you’re lonely? So, it's always a good idea to try to keep your nervous system away from the facilitated pattern by developing a new, more advantageous one.

It has been said that it takes 21 days to develop a new habit: if you can force yourself consciously to carry out a new behaviour for 21 days and avoid the old behaviour during that same time, the new facilitated pattern will become dominant over the old. In other words you are trying to develop new dominant facilitated patterns that are more productive and healthy.

3) Break the facilitated nerve pathways. When you have a chiropractic adjustment, you are not only having muscles and joints stretched, there is also a delayed process and response that occurs in your central nervous system following an adjustment.

Many people find that as they persist with regular chiropractic care, they are less likely to suffer from a relapse. This is because it is almost like the facilitation in the nervous system (which leads you back to the same old injury) is gradually being cleared away.

Research in the US demonstrated this when a group of drug addicts going through rehab were also given chiropractic adjustments. The result was that the retention rates of the addicts through the whole program became 100 per cent and the relapse rate was significantly reduced.

Acupuncture and auriculotherapy also appear to have the ability to tap into the circuitry of the nervous system and may also assist with breaking down faulty facilitated nerve pathways.

4) Renounce the title. How strongly do you hold onto your illness? Are you convinced that whenever you get sick that it will last at least two weeks? When people ask how you’re doing, is your first response always about your latest symptom? Are you too scared to attempt a new healing strategy because it might upset your weak spot? Do you give up on a new healthy habit really quickly because you convince yourself that it isn’t working even though you haven’t given it long enough to work?

Just as a top sportsperson can visualise themselves towards a successful performance, those trapped in the sickness habit can visualise themselves away from healing. Is it time that you start to daily reaffirm to yourself that your ailment is getting better all the time, as opposed to lying down and believing that you’re always going to suffer with your war wound?

Make a commitment to give yourself a new title: you are not Esther the Asthmatic, Con the Constipation, Arthur Arthritis, or Danny Depression - just as Abram and Saul found a new name to match their new identity to become Abraham and Paul; you can claim a new healthier identity for yourself.

5) Get "deep and meaningful". Unfortunately for some of us, the facilitated patterns that have developed in our lives (that are now having an effect on our health), are the result of past physical and/or emotional injury. The above strategies may help to reduce some of the pain and suffering, but until healing occurs at the deeper levels of the nervous system, the same patterns will return.

This may mean we need counselling, spiritual healing, some sort of behavioural therapy, and so on. It can be difficult to uncover the facilitated patterns that have established themselves in our nervous system with our own strength. Sometimes it requires someone looking from the outside in to throw some perspective.

6) Balance the brain. We know that the brain bathes itself in different chemicals of emotion synchronously with the feelings and thoughts and frequencies that are firing inside your central nervous system. A brain that is under stress and overloaded with faulty facilitated pathways, is exposing itself to more and more draining and destructive chemical reactions. Technology does exist that helps to calm, harmonise and synchronise the two hemispheres of the brain, leading to feelings of wellbeing, calmness, focus, insight and relaxation. This technology is known as binaural beat frequencies.

Research has shown that when two separate frequencies of sound are played into opposite ears at the same time, the two hemispheres start to harmonise and balance to the difference between the two sound frequencies. The practical and clinical implication of this is that if we control the frequencies being listened to by both ears, we can actually dictate the frequency range that the brain begins to fire in. In effect you can draw the brain into deep states equivalent to very skilled and deep meditation.

There are a number of companies that specialise in producing the CDs that have to be listened to in stereo headphones to create the therapeutic effects. Each makes similar claims but can vary substantially in price and format. The bottom line to these CDs is the carrier frequencies, not how nice the accompanying music a sounds or whether they add subliminal and subconscious messaging. If you like these other things as well then by all means pay the extra dollars for the product.

7) Talk to the computer programmer. If we have a computer that is malfunctioning we might require a programmer to come in and correct the faulty command prompts and scripting language that is encoded within the software. Preferably someone who knows the software well and has the skills to correct the glitches? There is only one being in our universe that knows each of us so intimately; and that is the one who created you in the first place. Not your mummy and daddy, but your God.

People who receive miraculous healing, sometimes in an instant when they seek God’s touch, must have received supernatural reprogramming at the nervous system level at least, to explain the sudden and dramatic changes in body and mind function. Don’t be afraid to ask for this kind of help for yourself.

Where to from here? Make the time to sit down and review your own sickness habits. List down your weak spots and attempt to delve into your past to uncover the events and circumstances that set off and reinforce your own nervous system’s facilitated pathways. Get adjusted regularly to reduce the vicious cycles in your nerves. Build better boundaries into your decision making processes. Develop some new behaviour to start to grow more advantageous patterns. Seek counsel and help from those people and resources that can help you along this healing journey.

Consciously observe and experience yourself blooming into a happier “health habit”.

The information contained in this article is of a general nature only. For advice on your specific situation, please consult your medical professional.

Dr Nick Hodgson is a chiropractor.
You can read more articles like this one at www.healthetalk.com.au



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