To help patients who are seeking pain relief, Atlanta chiropractic doctor Dembowski may use spinal adjustment, also called spinal manipulation, to adjust the spine into better alignment to correct any subluxations or dysfunctions of the vertebrae.
Restoring spinal structural integrity through chiropractic adjustment can improve your health by reducing pressure on sensitive nerves. Pain is reduced when nerves are not impaired by bones that are out of alignment.
The spine is not the only area that the skilled hands of a chiropractor can adjust. The neck, shoulder, the head’s alignment with the spine, elbow, wrist, knee and leg joints can benefit from chiropractic manipulation.
Sometimes a popping sound is heard when a bone or joint is adjusted to a better position, because a bubble of gas is released from the joint, like when you crack your knuckles. Rarely does the patient experience any pain when the adjustment is performed. Often the patient feels relief immediately.
History of Chiropractic
Hippocrates, the father of medicine who was born in 470 B.C., wrote “Get knowledge of the spine, for this is the requisite for many diseases.”
Another doctor of the time, Herodotus, was renowned for manipulating a patient’s spine to cure disease.
At the end of the 19th century, when Daniel David Palmer came on the health care scene, medicine was leaving an era of proclaimed cure-alls to pursue more scientific investigation into the treatment of disease.
D.D. reasoned that the body had an ample supply of natural healing power transmitted through the nervous system. If a single organ was sick, it must not be receiving its normal nerve supply. That led to the premise of spinal misalignment, or subluxation, and from there to a procedure for adjusting the vertebrae.
D.D. performed his first adjustments in 1895, relieving one man of deafness and another person of heart trouble. Arrangements were made to train others in the application of the chiropractic principle. The Palmer School and Cure was founded in 1897 and was later incorporated under the laws of Iowa. The school later became the Palmer School of Chiropractic.
“I am not the first person to replace subluxated vertebrae, but I do claim to be the first person to replace displaced vertebrae by using the spinous and transverse processes as levers…and to develop the philosophy and science of chiropractic adjustments.” D.D. Palmer, Discoverer of Chiropractic.