Preventive Chiropractic Care

Often people seek chiropractic care for chronic pain or after suffering an injury. The chiropractic professional have historically focused on prevention, wellness, and health promotion just as much as it has on caring for injuries after the fact.

A focus on wellness makes Hart Family Chiropractic an excellent source of chiropractic preventive care in Atascadero. We offer a variety of natural, non-surgical, and holistic services aimed to help patients live a healthier, pain-free life.

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Chiropractic Adjustments

Chiropractic care aimed at preventing discomfort, injury, and disease is centered around the chiropractic adjustment. It’s an approach unique to chiropractic, in which the chiropractor’s hands (or a small instrument) are used to apply a controlled, sudden force to the spine and related spinal components. The goal of the adjustment is to correct and/or reduce interferences of body communication, blood flow and the flow of life force energy throughout your body. When your life force is fully unobstructed, your body is free to express its full health potential.

The flow of life energy in your body is decreased by subluxations and imbalance within the spine. A subluxation is where the vertebra exerts a pressure that slowly interferes with your nerves’ normal energy flow. While subluxations can result in pain, quite often they do not. If left uncorrected over a period of time, subluxations can disrupt your nervous system’s normal function of relaying vital nerve impulses to essential parts of the body. A chiropractic adjustment re-aligns the spine to keeps your nerve channels open the way nature intended. The adjustment allows your brain to better communicate with your body and thus allows the electrical life force to flow.

Dr. Well's Adjustments are a gentle, natural, and non-invasive way to turn on your life force energy. A healthy, adjusted spine keeps your flow of energy balanced, your immune system strong, and your resistance to disease high. Preventive adjustments remove blockages and create normal motion in your spine before pain, muscle tightness, or other symptoms set in.

Through regular adjustments that align the spine, restore musculoskeletal balance, and release your life force energy, chiropractors can help relieve and/or prevent:

• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Back pain
• Numbness or tingling in the extremities

Improving the spine’s alignment can help increase your range of motion, improve your overall quality of life, and improve your body’s ability to heal itself.

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Immune Function and Chiropractic

Chiropractic care boosts your immune function and modulates the chemical reactions that keep you healthy. Patients who come in with colds, sore throats, sinus congestion and stomach viruses often remark that their recovery seems to be accelerated by chiropractic care. Numerous studies lend support to the idea that chiropractic correction of spinal disfunction can aid the immune responses of the body by reducing nerve interference.

Many people wonder what the spine has to do with immune function. The answer is simple: your spinal cord is part of the master control system for your body- your nervous system- and it controls everything else in the body, including your immune system. The role of a healthy spine is to protect the nerve system from stress, allowing it to transmit information. Freely flowing information across your nerve system is an essential element for health.

By decreasing stress in the nervous system, chiropractic permits the immune system to function more effectively.

Dr. Wells and the chiropractors at Hart Family Chiropractic seek out obstructions to the flow of energy and information across your nerve system, and ensure that your vertebrae are in a healthy position and allowed to move properly. When your spine is aligned there is no stress on the nerve system. This allows for proper regulation and healing.

During an immune response, the brain and the immune system “talk to each other,” a process which is essential for maintaining balance in the body. If the nervous system is not functioning properly, then the immune system cannot function at 100%, and thus the body becomes fertile ground for bacteria, viruses and illness.

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Chiropractic and Athletic Performance

When chiropractors screen athletes, we identify and correct biomechanical deficiencies before they lead to injuries down the road. Balance is key to preventing sports injuries. And while to the layperson balance means “equilibrium,” chiropractors are primarily concerned with the balance between your bones, muscles, tissue, ligaments, and tendons. Keeping the body balanced and aligned is the key to keeping athletes injury-free.

The body is meant to function in synergy with itself, each part working in unison with others. Each joint in the body is responsible for a small, specific movement. If one or more of these joints cannot express its full range of motion, the unnatural movement patterns will throw your body out of balance and increase the chance of injury.

Misaligned spinal bones have an effect on your nervous system as well. Out of place vertebrae prevent the nerves from sending the proper signals throughout your body, resulting in either too much or not enough of the right signals reaching the muscles and other bodily systems you rely upon to perform. This type of obstruction in your nervous system increases your risk of:

• Pulled muscles
• Joint inflammation
• Torn ligaments
• Tendinitis
• Joint dislocation and other athletic injuries.

By eliminating the imbalances that occur within the body and by keeping everything functioning at its peak, chiropractic care greatly reduces the likelihood of injury.