The Gift of Healing Hands

1,000 Word Preview- The Gift of Healing Hands “At this point, I’ll try anything” is a confession I often hear from new patients at our first encounter on my chiropractic table. I trusted that adjustments would help them, but I quickly learned that it would only be one piece in the puzzle of true healing. It was a hard pill to swallow when chiropractic—my foundational area of study—failed to be enough. I personally witnessed the limitations of a one-track mind through colleagues and mentors, until I sought out accessory styles of care to add to my clinical toolbelt. With a hunger for obscure knowledge, I chose to work in a clinical environment that encouraged each doctor to view the body as a deeply intelligent being. With the help of unexpected mentors and trusting patients, I was granted a fast pass to higher learning and dove headfirst into a world of self-healing. Muscle testing was a major component of this new direction because it helped patients gain trust in my ability to communicate with their symptoms. In my practice, I utilize both indicator and orthopedic styles of muscle testing to reduce the physical symptoms of painful movement and restore the imbalances of the energetic body. The physical and non-physical portions of our body are no longer separate in my mind. Most students of yoga, reiki, and eastern medicine practices have experienced the instantaneous relief that the physical body receives after resolving issues stored within the “subtle” mind-body. Despite living in a society where we all have separate interests and motives, we are unified under the commonality that humans have one body and will spend a lifetime learning the different stages and sensations that can be experienced within it. As a manual therapist, I use indicator muscle testing to prove to patients the potent power of their beliefs. We all love indisputable proof. I also use subjective responses (verbal feedback about changes felt) to invite both believers and non-believers alike, to accept that something intelligent is happening within our tissues and that we have access to learning how to influence it. Orthopedic or indicator muscle testing is my evaluation technique to select appropriate therapies for a person who struggles from a combination of physical and emotional discomfort. By connecting through a circuit of shared electricity, I learn more about the pain they experience as well as when it’s necessary to refer them to another provider. Muscle testing, both manual and indicator, influenced my belief that with the right provider (truly an interpreter), everyone has access to learning the subtle language of the subconscious body. By adding this technique into your daily life, you may reveal issues that have stumped other doctors, guiding you to correct treatment plans. By sharing this guide, I can offer a catalogue of success stories that I witnessed behind the closed doors of an office. Underneath healing hands, the philosophies of chiropractic, muscle testing, and acupuncture worked their magic. When applied in a safe and appropriate way, I was able to learn a system that combined sports chiropractic with the energetic themes of these practices. The late Dr. Candance Pert, author of The Molecules of Emotions, believes that biochemicals such as neuropeptides are the substrates of emotion and therefore, exist to interpret the sensations of the entire body. They are not the thought, but they move with it to serve as a portal of transformation. She reminds us that, “we can no longer view the emotional brain to be confined to the classical locations of the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. We have discovered other locations with high concentrations of almost every neuropeptide receptor that exists, such as the dorsal horn, or backside of the spinal cord.” Chiropractic adjustments intimately influence the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. The delivery helps to deaccelerate the synapses at each nerve cell from fading by fighting joint degeneration caused by traumatic interventions and normal aging. Healthy joint movement and prolonged activity keeps the body’s regulating systems moving and fresh. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles proved in their 2015 study that the brain remembers how many baseline synapses should be at each nerve cell and will work to restore that number if they are destroyed.6 The findings strongly suggest that neuronal synapses are a crucial component of memory but that ultimately, a memory lies in the neuron itself. Our brain alone holds 86 billion neurons! That is a lot of emotional, sensational, and movement driven memories. What the body holds onto is not yet clear and reproducible in research. If you ask any practicing clinical doctor that uses their hands such as movement therapists, massage therapist, or yoga instructors, they’ll all have a story about witnessing a spontaneous outburst of emotions in a previously neutral patient following a manual intervention. A chiropractic adjustment can restore a deep spinal restriction that may have been present for many years and the instantaneous rewiring of the nervous system’s communication at that spinal segment is shocking. By releasing the lost memory of all the synapses that provide information to the brain, it’s like breaking a dam and flooding the brain with lost memories giving it a sudden ability to “speak” to that segment’s spinal nerves, their motor units, and every organ system that the segment innervates. Dr. Candance Pert believed, long before society was prepared to agree with her, that “virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, have a definite psychosomatic component.” In medicine and healing arts, many providers lose that ability to “see” the person they are working on. A healer looks at the whole human experience and trusts the interconnection between emotions, perceptions, environment, and their resulting physical symptoms. A healer views the person in front of them as a cosmic delivery, the universe perfectly aligned the two of you to meet — on this time and day — for a greater purpose than either party may understand for years to come.