| I began to realize that the upper thoracic adjustment I had received was in an area where the sympathetics originate. And they obviously were facilitated, which is something I had read about in the work of Irwin Korr [one of the great physiology researchers of the 20th century]. I realized that an adjustment can cause a facilitated sympathetic nervous system to relax and no longer be facilitated, thus allowing the parasympathetic system to get control again. The decreased sed rate was proof positive that those proinflammatory hormone levels had been reduced, because sed rate is a measure of inflammation.
Expanding on this, the functional model of the vertebral subluxation complex (sometimes known as the Faye model) is now widely taught in chiropractic colleges. Could you summarize its perspective and tell us about its main points.
The subluxation complex goes back to 1966, when I was preparing to teach at the Anglo-European Chiropractic College, to start a program there. I was going to be teaching baccalaureate students from Europe who would already have a good basic science background. About that time, I received a paper from the ACA that led me to the conclusion that as chiropractors, we were dealing with neurobiological mechanisms and joint dysfunction. We were also dealing with muscular changes (hypertrophy, atrophy, spasms, and degenerative changes). We also had the inflammatory response occurring around certain joints and in certain nerves. In addition, I was well into reading all of Selye’s experiments in his textbook, Stress, where he discerned how mammals respond to stress, protecting themselves or healing once there is a disease process.
It boiled down to five components – the biomechanical, the neurological, the muscular, the inflammatory and the stress response. So I put that all together and called it the subluxation complex. I taught at the Anglo-European college that the purpose of the orthopedic and neurological examination was really just to discover what the pathologies were, and that we needed an additional examination component to look at function of the whole locomotor system, because we saw that the spine was part of a closed kinematic system.
A key point here was that the spine couldn’t be treated individually but had to be evaluated as a component of the locomotor system. And then, of course, we taught about inflammation at a really high level. We also attempted, without having a huge physiology department, to show how you determine whether a patient is under stress and in a stress response or a failed stress response. So now we had a way of determining what surgeons call the constitution of the patient. But rather than determining whether our patients were strong enough to respond to surgery, we had to determine whether they were ready have a general healthy adaptive response to what we were doing.
What would be some of indicators of the presence or absence of this ability to respond to chiropractic treatment?
There are a number of them. If the patient perspires really easily, if they’re very jumpy when they hear a noise or a shout, if they pace because they’re unable to stand or sit still, if they don’t sleep very well, and if the digestive system is really upset. Those are all signs of being in a state of fight-or-flight. Your blood pressure rises, your heart beats faster. There is a hyperesthesia to “skin rolling” by the spine or to pinprick in areas of spinal irritation. Spine dysfunction produces facilitation, as Irwin Korr’s extensive research in this area demonstrated.
I have a question about the relation of theory and practice. As any health science evolves, the best explanation for how a particular treatment (such as a chiropractic adjustment) works will naturally change and develop over time. What happens, then, when some doctors still cling to the old explanatory model? This would apply to chiropractic, medicine or any other healing art.
What you’re saying is that if you’re using some sort of chiropractic system, and you obviously get good results, how does that interface with the possibility of having a new system that also would get the same results? With regard to the subluxation complex, if you don’t understand these components and you’re not interfacing with them, you will not have the same ability to predict whether a patient is going to respond or not respond. You do what you do and you see whether the patient is going to respond. I strongly believe that the chiropractor’s work becomes way more predictable when we monitor the five components of subluxation complex, with regard to how many visits the patient will need, for how long, and what to expect from visit to visit. That’s the benefit of understanding what you’re dealing with. |
