Power Within

When I was a small child of 7 years old I went through a rather challenging ordeal medically. In March of 1995 I was diagnosed with a rare inflammation disease named after the doctor that discovered it in Japan named Dr Kawasaki. If you would like to read more about that, see my Kawasaki's disease notes post. Because of that ordeal I was left with a very damaged heart. I had 3 coronary aneurisms and we found out when I was 18 that my right coronary artery that is responsible for supplying the right half of my heart with oxygen is 80-90% blocked from scaring that was caused by the ordeal that I went through as a 7 year old.

Now that I have set the ground work, let me share with you from my small example how powerful the human bodies ability to adapt and heal on its own. Like I said when I was 18 we found out about how blocked my coronary arteries were. Other doctors were surprised that a person as young as me could have such damage to his heart and have no symptoms. I had taken care of myself for the most part but I was not by any means a picture of health. After we found that out we did some other tests to find out if there was any damage to the heart muscle. Incredibly they found that the heart had no muscle damage even though half of the blood supply had been cut off. Later we discovered that the left coronary circumflex artery (this normally just supplies the back of the heart) had grown around to the right side and is supplying the right side heart muscles that were supposed to be supplied by the right coronary artery that was damaged. This all happened on its own without any medical intervention. Also we found out that I have a larger lung capacity then other people my size. I also hypothesize that my height is also a result of my body adapting to the medical complications I had while I was a child, (my father and 2 brothers are 5'10"-11" and I am only 5'6" tall). My life has been just a small example of how powerful our bodies capability to heal on its own.

I propose that we all think of our bodies as more than just a machine full of chemicals. There is an intelligence at play here. Call it whatever you want, a spirit, innate intelligence, the soul, subconscious, whatever label you put on it, it has the ability to know better than we do what the needs of our body is. Another example to help illustrate  what I am trying to say is this, you have left the stove top on but it is not hot enough to be glowing. You place your hand on it and immediately pull it away. Who told you to pull it away? Did you even know it was hot before you pulled you hand away? Your body was able to respond quickly to minimize the damage. Also without even thinking about it your body has already began to heal the damage to the body. No one had to teach you body to do that. There are so many other examples of this intelligence in your body that I cannot write about them all.

I hope that this article has helped you to better appreciate the power within yourself to heal and adapt to your environment. I am not trying to say that we don't need medical intervention when necessary. I will be eternally grateful for the doctors that have helped me. I simply want to express the great awe that I have for our bodies inborn abilities to cope with our daily lives and function at 100%.

-Mike E

Snap, Crackle, and Pop

When you first hear those words you probably think of a popular breakfast cereal, but that is not what I am discussing in this post. What I want to talk about is the common comments I get from people when I tell them that I am going to be a chiropractor. The some of the most common phrases I have heard from people is "Oh you are going to be one of those back crackers" or "Good I need someone to pop my back" and others like that. I hope to be able to dispel some of these misconceptions about chiropractors and show what they are really all about.

First off, lets talk about the pop that some of you may have experienced under care of a chiropractor. The sound is not coming from any bone on bone grinding. The sound you hear is actually coming from one or more joint capsules. Most of your joints have a fluid filled capsule that helps it move freely and when they get stuck in a position the fluid is not getting replaced and is not filling the capsule correctly. When a force is put into the joint to free it from being stuck fluid rushes into the joint causing the popping (or cavitation) sound that you often here when moving around or on the chiropractic table. You can think of it this way, when you have a suction cup stuck on a window and you suddenly pull it off, the rushing air makes a popping sound. This is the same principle that happens in your joints.

Now that I have explained the sound, lets talk about what the chiropractor is trying to do. There is a common misconception that chiropractors are bone doctors. In reality we work on the nervous system. The nervous system is the information super highway of the body with the brain as the control center. Every tissue in the body communicates with the brain and the brain communicates with the tissues via the nervous system. When there is a disruption anywhere in the communication highway, misinformation or lack of information is being communicated to the tissues and/or to the brain and they do not function to their fullest potential. One of the greatest culprits of disrupting the communication highway are misaligned vertebra in your spine. Since nearly every nerve in the body has to pass through small spaces between vertebra, if that bone is misplaced, even to an extent of a couple millimeters,  the effects down the line of the communication highway can be drastic. So the chiropractors job is to find the misplaced vertebra and correct it via a chiropractic adjustment to free up the communication pathways. Yes chiropractors move bones but it is a means to a different end. It is for the purpose of helping the nervous system function at its fullest potential.

There are many different ways that a chiropractor can go about moving bones to help the nervous system work correctly. Only some of the techniques will actually elicit the sound that we talked about before. The method that I plan on using in my practice is a low force, gentle adjustment (with no cracking or popping) that uses the bodies own systems to work out the fixations of these bones that are disrupting the communications from brain to body and/or body to brain for a better functioning whole person.

I hope that I have been helpful in explaining what chiropractors really do in their offices. I plan on explaining some of the topics in this post in greater detail later. If you do have any questions, feel free to comment on this post or shoot me an email at mike.r.epperson@gmail.com.

-Mike E

What is Health anyway?

This question is one that has occupied my thoughts on more than one occasion lately. Although each of us may have our own personal definition of what health is, I would like to share what mine is.

To build on my definition, I would like to go back to my days as a chemistry student. In the study of physical science such topics as Light and Heat are discussed at great length. Each of these topics have their opposites. The opposite of Light is darkness and the opposite of Heat is coldness. But here we see a problem. Although we talk about light and darkness as two opposing forces, but is darkness actually a thing? Light as we know is are forms of energy that we can see with our eyes. If we block them we can form a shadow of darkness, but the darkness is not a thing, it is simply the lack of visible energy we call light. The same can be said about coldness. Heat is thermal energy, we make it by using different types of friction like rubbing two sticks to make a fire or increasing the electrical current creating electron friction in a piece of metal. We cannot create coldness however. Even in your refrigerator we are not creating cold we are simply removing the heat out the back. If you don't believe me feel the back of your refrigerator some time. So we see that like darkness, coldness is not a thing, it is simply the removal or blocking of heat.

So what does any of this science talk have to do with Health? I am glad you asked. Like light and heat, health has an opposite as well by the name of disease. What is disease, in the medical world it is a list of repeatable signs and symptoms that are present in a person. But why are the signs and symptoms there in the first place? I believe that they are there simply because the person has lost a bit of their ability to heal on their own. I present to you that health is what a person is missing when they are "sick" instead of having a disease. Health is the persons ability to adapt to the environmental forces that they encounter on a daily basis. These forces can come in the form of physical trauma, chemical toxins, or emotional stresses that bombard us all the time. When we lose this ability to adapt we become "sick", not because we caught something, but because like darkness and coldness, disease is not a thing it is the lack of health.

So in review health is our ability to adapt to our environment and withstand the external forces that continually pound on us. If we do not have enough health we fall to these forces and become "sick". Our goal is then to be proactive and seek out health rather then run away from disease (or lack of health).

-Mike E

Chiropractic Survival

I would like to share an essay I wrote for one of my classes a little while back. It was written to help illustrate that chiropractic is going to survive as a unique healthcare option. Not as a replacement of medicine but as another source for us to express our full health and well being.

Enjoy.

Is chiropractic going to survive as a profession? That is an excellent question. A point of view of the ways it would survive are given in the paper by Yvonne Villanueva-Russell entitled Gynecological Neurologists and Other Lessons of History. In this paper the author gives an example of another profession that fell early in its life due to spreading itself to thin and it not truly creating a viable identity. This is not too different to where Chiropractic is today as a profession. There are some in the profession that believe we have an identity crisis, but I think the reality is that they do not want to accept the inborn identity of what Chiropractic really is, the only profession capable and qualified to locate analyze and correct vertebral subluxations.

            To understand how chiropractic is to survive we need to talk about cultural authority. Cultural authority, in current definition, is the authority that society gives to an idea or being that gives them credibility and a place in the culture. Chiropractic has struggled with this through the years because of its “identity crisis.” There are many in the profession that would love to just be another specialty in medicine, and others that want to be the antagonist to medicine and paint medical doctors in a negative light like they were Hitler himself, while there are still others that would simply just like to be completely separate and distinct as a profession. The latter is the only way we can gain cultural authority. If we go with the first way we will just become pawns of the medical doctors. If we choose to be anti medicine then we alienate ourselves from those that support medicine. The path is clear in my eyes, the only way to become a sustainable profession is to cut our ties with other professions and build our own place in society.

Another aspect to gaining cultural authority is to be able to validate what we do by ways of academia. This has also been a big struggle for the chiropractic profession because there are many people in society who claim that what we do is “unscientific.” Lets talk about what is scientific. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as: "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” So what we can see is that at the basis of the scientific method “truth” can never actually be achieved only a hypothesis can be modified and tested again. While I was a researching assistant at the College of Charleston we were taught that a good hypothesis could never be proven, it can only be tested and enhanced when new things findings are found. The only people that say that science brings us facts are the news reporters that love to exaggerate the findings of scientist to make a good story. This is the only way that the public hears about science so they make the obvious conclusion of scientific findings equaling true facts. This is wrong and any researcher that is humble enough will tell you the same. All through history we have seen this trend. One example would be chemistry. The “truth” used to be that there were only four elements, earth, wind, water, and fire, and you could make anything with different combinations of those elements. Then Dmitri Mendeleev came around and came up with the “truth” of 118 elements that were the building blocks of all things. This became the new truth, but later we discovered the “truth” that atoms were made up of even smaller building blocks called electrons, protons, and neutrons. This continues on and on illustrating the point that science is not the end all definition of truth. It is just an evolving pool of knowledge that grows and changes directions like a leaf on the water. It is not the only way to gain knowledge and it should not be the only way to determine if a profession is valid.

In order for us to ultimately survive as a profession is to finally nail down what is our jurisdictional claim. Let me propose what jurisdictional claim we hold innately within our profession. We restore nerve function by adjusting the vertebra. Whether someone calls it the curing of back pain, manipulating the joints, or correcting vertebral subluxations, it makes no difference. We have a corner on the market of restoring nerve function. We need to own that fact and tell the world about it. Too many people are living with decreased nerve function due to vertebral subluxations. We need to narrow our focus to the goal of increasing nerve function and then we will be able to survive as a wonderful profession and not step on the feet of other professions. 

 -Mike E

A place to talk about heath and chiropractic

As I approach a turning point in my chiropractic education and enter into the health center to see patients as an intern later this summer, I have thought a lot about how I will present what I do as a chiropractor to my patients. So I am rejuvenating my old blog to outlet some of my musings about health and wellness, and how chiropractic plays a part in them. I will use this space to write essays on different health topics and discuss topics that mean a great deal to me. I hope they will be helpful to those that take the time to read them. I am planning to incorporate these thoughts and essays in my practice member education for my practice that I will be opening in 2016. There will be an open atmosphere to this blog, in that I encourage you to right comments and ask me questions about what I write. These are my thoughts and I am just one person. I simply hope to be able to convey my passion, knowledge, and experience about health and well being to as many as will listen to me.

-Mike E

Been a while!

Well I was looking at my blogger profile and saw this blog and I decided to start it back up. So a lot has changed since I posted last. I have a new career path. I was recently accepted to Sherman College of Chiropractic and will start this coming July 2012. I am excited for that new chapter in life. Nicole and I have were able to visit the campus last month in Spartanburg SC and it was great to meet some of the staff and faculty and get a tour of campus.



So now begins the beginning of the end of my undergrad life. Tomorrow I start my second to last semester at BYU-I which I am sure that it will be a great one. I hope to update this more as I continue towards a career as a practicing chiropractor.

Back in the thick of things

Well school is back in full force and i am learning tons. Some important things i have learned so far is: Biology is not that easy.... tutoring something ingrains the subject into your head so if anyone needs help with basic chemistry i am your man, also trials come at us when you least expect it and when you least want them ;) On a positive note I am really busy and don't really have time to get bored. Any free time that i have is spent studying for something or just thinking about my classes. Oh what fun it is to be in college. The tutoring job is going great! It is good to have some extra money in my pocket. I have a following of about 29 students that come to me for chemistry tutoring a week so that is fun. Life is great hard and confusing at times but fun. I am ready for another exciting week, bring it!