Doctors of Chiropractic are Wellness Doctors
It's official, Doctors of Chiropractic who provide wellness care to patients and their families can reduce overall health care costs, improve health behavior, and enhance patient perceived quality of life. Until recently, little has been known about how chiropractic adjustments affect the chemistry of biological processes on a cellular level.
It's obvious that chiropractic adjustments help people to feel better; but until that last 10 years, we've only recently begun to understand what exactly is happening at the cellular level.
In 2005, a landmark study published in the Journal of Vertebral Subluxation (JVSR) found evidence that chiropractic adjustments can reduce oxidative stress in the body.
What is Oxidative Stress?
Oxidative stress is the damage that occurs when free radicals outnumber the body’s antioxidants. Oxidative stress damages all body cell components: proteins, lipids and DNA.
Oxidative stress plays a role in a whole host of diseases and disorders: Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis and many others.
Thiols are compounds in the body that act as antioxidants, reacting with free radicals to neutralize them. Basically, thiols put out the tiny fires in your body that can cause damage. Serum levels of thiols reflect DNA’s capacity to repair itself and can be used as a marker for anti-aging.
In a 2003 study published in the Journal of Anti Aging Medicine, scientists found low serum thiol levels in people with nine different categories of human disease and disorder.
Chiropractic Adjustments reduce oxidative stress through long term treatment
The study published in JVSR consisted of 76 participants: one group received short-term chiropractic care; a second group received long-term chiropractic care; and the third group received no chiropractic care.
After qualifying for age, sex and the use of nutritional supplements, the participants that received chiropractic adjustments for 2 or more years that were healthy had higher serum thiol levels than those with disease. Some of the chiropractic patients had serum thiol levels higher than what is associated with normal wellness.
One of the investigators explained: “Oxidative stress, metabolically generating free radicals, is now a broadly accepted theory of how we age and develop disease.”
Every day we experience physical, emotional and chemical stress that affects our body. Certainly, it could be hypothesized that such stressors affect oxidative stress and DNA repair on a cellular level.
This study demonstrated how Chiropractic care and the chiropractic adjustment could help the body adapt to such stress in our environment.
