Did you know that your body tries to guide you away from being hurt and diseased and towards being healthy and functional every day? Your body uses a series of signals, called symptoms, that are activated to advise you when tissue damage or compromised organ function could be occurring. When you are in need of nourishment your body guides you to eat via hunger. When you’re in need of rest your body guides you towards sleep via a feeling of tiredness. If your body is fighting an infection I need to elevate its temperature in order to kill the foreign invasion, it goes into a febrile state. If somebody feels pain or any other unpleasant symptom they usually feel like they are unlucky. “Why me” is a common response, as opposed to “Lucky Me” because my body is giving me the opportunity to remove factors that are causing harm to it. Imagine how many people have suffered heart attacks or been diagnosed with cancer that wish that they had listened to the signs earlier. Symptoms such as fatigue, tiredness, lack of energy, indigestion, headaches, anxiety, insomnia, irregular heartbeat such as a Arrhythmia and tachycardia, or simply those times that people observe that “something just isn’t right”. While our body doesn’t always give us obvious signs, we are missing a golden opportunity to ignore the signs when they are given if we choose to do so. The vitality, energy, immunity, resistance and mental focus that we have as kids does not have to diminish as we age. As adults we can absolutely maintain the same level of health and vitality that we enjoyed as kids and must see any deviation from this healthy state as a reduction in health. We must also dive deep and look for the cause as soon as we perceive that “something isn’t quite right”.
Our body uses similar signals when it tries to advise us that we are doing something that is damaging our spine. Remembering that our spine encases the spinal cord, which transmits messages from the brain to the rest of the body and is therefore an extremely important structure for our health. Any possible threat to the health of the spine would understandably receive attention from the brain and a symptom to try and guide our behaviour away from damaging it would follow accordingly. While symptoms such as back pain, sciatic pain, stiffness headaches, numbness and tingling down our arms and legs are not pleasant, they should never be turned off via pain medication or ignored. As a spinal practitioner I have seen literally thousands of cases where people report feeling symptoms for years or decades before a patient's initial visit. Many of these cases unfortunately involve the diagnosis of a completely avoidable degeneration of the spine, such as osteoarthritis or intervertebral disc disease. The human body often signals via painful stimuli for a certain period of time and when it is not listened to, goes dormant. Understandably if people do not comprehend this signalling system, when symptoms disappear they will think that their body has dealt with it and that there is nothing wrong. This would be the case if the body was dealing with a bacterial or viral infection where the immune system recognises it, may or may not cause symptoms such as fever, runny nose etc, and then when the body eventually kills the infection, symptoms disappear. Back pain and symptoms relating to spinal dysfunction however generally alert us to the fact that the function of the spine has been compromised. This may have been via an incorrect posture sustained for prolonged periods of time or a fall, impact or trauma whereby segments of the spine have been subluxated. It may be due to lack of physical exercise, a diet high in inflammatory foods, poor sleep and even stress. Spinal dysfunction often involves contraction of supporting spinal muscles and asymmetry of the loads falling on a joint and an intervertebral disc. If these are not rectified, wear and tear in the form of osteoarthritis and intervertebral disc disease can result many years or decades down the track. The idea is that we recognise any pain or symptom and use it as a way of identifying the underlying cause. This would be similar to driving a car and noticing that the car is vibrating due to a misaligned wheel. If we keep driving we know that we will wear out the tyre. Fortunately in the case of the car new tires can be purchased and placed on the wheels. In the case of our spine, we cannot replace intervertebral joints or discs. In any case, it makes much more sense to simply realign the wheel of the car, instead of waiting for the tyre to wear out. At this stage, without actually aligning the wheel, the new tyre will also wear out at a faster rate than what it would have if the wheels were all aligned.
Listen to the signs that your body gives you when it is trying to advise you that something that you are doing is harming it. It is not your fault for unknowingly doing anything to your body that is harming it or compromising its function, as you were never taught how to look after it. The idea behind the CELLR8 is that it empowers you with all of the information necessary to be able to reverse the effects of poor habits, maintain or improve the function of your cells and receive the most optimal level of performance possible.
