I used to be suspicious of chiropractors. I called them quacks that pulled your leg and took your money. I said that because the people I knew that went to a chiropractor would go two or three times a week for months on end. After we got married, I saw some people that were truly helped by chiropractors and my opinion of them changed some. I also went to Dr. Kevin Wyman in Gaithersburg, and he helped Cathy and me several times without repeated visits. He even taught me how to adjust a twisted pelvis with two wedge shaped blocks, and it has helped us on numerous occasions. His main job is working for an insurance company, evaluating chiropractic claims to spot fraud. He only operates his chiropractic office part time and does not have to have all his income from his practice. We highly recommend him.

Several years ago we got a book and DVD on home chiropractic that have been very helpful for our family. It taught us how to evaluate the problem and how to correct it. There have been different times that a vertebra was out of place on one of us, and within a few minutes Cathy or I were able to adjust the spine and make the vertebra pop back into place. Often the pain went away almost immediately. Sometimes the spine has to be adjusted a number of days in a row, because it keeps popping out again due to the weakness of the muscles . My opinion of chiropractic has changed since I have been able to experience first hand how to move the spine and see that it actually relieves the pain and corrects the problem.

“Home Chiropractic” is simple enough that each of you could probably learn how to do the basic adjustments to the spine to relieve pain. It is not a comprehensive chiropractic course, but it is a valuable tool. It gives you a tool to help correct the problem right away before the vertebra gets “set” in its uncomfortable position and becomes difficult to get it to go back to its correct position. It is my opinion that one of the reasons that people have to keep going to the chiropractor for weeks on end is that is how chiropractors make their money. If they corrected the problem in a visit or two, they would not have enough patients to keep them in business. The other reason that people have to go to the chiropractor for repeated visits is that a person tends to wait for a number of weeks, months, or years before going to the chiropractor, hoping that the pain will go away on its own. By that time the vertebra has become “set” in its wrong position or the nerve has been pinched for too long, or other damage has occurred. It then takes longer to correct the problem, and sometimes the problem can’t be corrected by chiropractic methods.

If you go to a medical doctor, his main tools are to give you pain killers, exercises, or surgery. When a vertebra is out of place and causing pain, the pain is not because you have a lack of pain killers in your body. Not all back pain is because a vertebra is out of place, but if it is, and a simple adjustment by your spouse fixed the problem, you have no need to go to a doctor whose solution is to do surgery on your back and leave you with potential lasting pain and restrictions on what you can do. Surgery makes the doctor a lot more money than taking two minutes to pop your spine back into place.

Learning simple chiropractic techniques is a health care tool that I believe is important for each family to have.  The spine contains the central communication network for the body. Because of that, the health of the spine can affect the health of the body. A pinched nerve in the spine can cause a seemingly unrelated problem in another part of the body that is serviced by that nerve.

The Home Chiropractic Handbook and DVD can be ordered from these websites:
http://www.home-chiropractic.com/
http://www.heattherapyprod.com/chiropracticpage6.htm