Chiropractic Principles
Chiropractic is an amazing profession. I truly love what I do. To its very roots, it has been founded upon a set of principles that ultimately have guided the profession and encourages us to approach health from a natural and holistic manner.
Today, I wanted to write upon the first principle of chiropractic (there are 33 in total). If this interests you (or disinterests), please let me know and I’ll touch more or less on the other principles in the future.
Principle 1 – There is a universal intelligence in all matter, which continually gives to it all its properties and actions, thus maintaining it in existence.
Pretty confusing right? Well, let’s dig into it a little bit.
Chiropractic Principles
Let’s Define It
Let’s first just define the two words according to the The American Heritage Dictionary
Universal – Of, relating to, or affecting the entire universe.
Intelligence – The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.
After understanding that, we can see that this universal intelligence is omnipresent, or everywhere. We do not need to look for it, because everywhere we look, we will find it. As a Christian, I define this as God. He is everywhere and a part of everything.
When we look at the definition of intelligence, we see that it requires the ability to get, understand, and apply knowledge. Well, apply it to what? In short, everything. We see it everywhere we look, whether at a tree that has the ability to use hydrogen bonds to get water from the deepest root to the tallest leaf, or a flock of birds flying together to be more efficient and travel further distances. This intelligence is imbued into every aspect of our lives.
Innate Intelligence
When we look at the human body, we see that our bodies are imbued with this same intelligence. We call this “innate intelligence,” or that same universal intelligence that is in every cell of our body. Just as universal intelligence is everywhere in the universe, innate intelligence is everywhere within our body. Thank God that it is!
Imagine if every single biochemical process within our body had to be a conscious thought? Imagine if everytime we scraped our skin we had to think about healing? Or everytime we ate we had to think about breaking down the food and turning those macronutrients into fuel and building blocks for our body to repair itself. Or think about every signal we had to send from our brain to another part of our body in order to make these processes happen.
Why Am I Writing About This?
I want to write about this so people understand where we come from in our office. While we do treat pain, we care significantly more about a person’s overall function. We strive to ensure that our body is able to communicate within itself to the best of its ability. We do that by focusing on postural distortions and spinal subluxations. These interfere with our nervous systems ability to communicate (if you want the super sciency version of this, ask me in person).
In chiropractic, we say that the resistance of the host is stronger than the power of the pathogen. In other words, if the body is healthy then it is more than capable of fighting off disease and healing itself when infected or injured.
“Have you more faith in a spoonful of medicine
than in the power that animates the living world? “
-BJ Palmer
In Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this. It truly fascinates my mind to think about how much goes on around us that just happens because of universal intelligence. It is truly a beautiful thing.
Next time you are on a walk, take a minute to appreciate everything going on around you and be grateful for these beautiful bodies that were created for us.