Ever wondered why a person with poor posture doesn’t look happy and healthy? That’s because they aren’t.
The one constant physical force that we are faced with as human beings is gravity. Gravity pulls us down and – yes – eventually it wins…ARGH – and we die.
How well we respond to gravity determines our health, happiness and quality of life.
It’s well acknowledged that a confident, upright posture gives you more clarity and confidence in your thoughts and abilities. It’s been shown that regardless of a person’s hierarchical role in a business or organisation, a powerful posture makes a person think and act more powerfully AND others see them as more capable.
These may sound like big statements so let’s get a little nerdy and have a closer look at them.
The discoverer of chiropractic, DD Palmer said it this way: “Life is an expression of tone. Tone is expressed in function by normal elasticity, strength, and excitability…the cause of disease is any variation in tone.”
From the very time you are being formed in utero you are subject to and adapting to gravity. Just as a guitar will give different sound when the strings are in a different shape, tone and tension, every cell, tissue and organ will perform differently depending on its shape, tone and tension.
As chiropractors our role is to optimise your body’s shape, tone and tension and from that you will have better function.
In the past, medical researchers have focused attention on the molecular and chemical components that comprise life, with the hope that studying of all the parts will lead to an understanding of the whole.
More recently they are acknowledging that structure and the tone of that structure affects the function to the deepest levels including the molecules and chemical performance.
How well your body resists gravity determines how healthy you are, how well you perform, how well you think, how much energy you have and, in fact how long you live.
Your body is a continuous chain of movement which means that any alteration to optimal movement any-where in your body can affect many organs, tissues and cells through your whole body – they are all physically interconnected.
So, proper structure is critical for proper function and health.
When bones lose their ability to move properly our brain shifts the body to compensate to gravity. This creates altered tension in not only the spinal chord and spinal nerves but every chemical function, cell, tissue and organ in the body. This communication breakdown alters information to and from the brain and the body resulting in ill health.
According to Dr. A. Breig, Neuro-surgeon and Nobel Prize recipient stated that just the “Loss of the cervical (neck) curve stretches the spinal cord 5-7 cm and causes disease.” Look at the number of people around you who have a forward pitched neck? There’s even a name for it now – ‘Text Neck’!!
Research published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 52:1662–1667, 2004 found that older men and women with hyperkyphotic (forward pitched posture) have lower brain function, less energy, mental and emotional problems and higher mortality rates than those of the same age range who don’t have slumping spines.
There are numerous recent studies that indicate that mechanical stress applied to the surface of cells can induce alteration of the cells shape, signal transduction and gene expression. Moreover, at the whole cell level, cell shape distortion is able to alter protein synthesis, glycolysis, RNA pro-cessing, DNA replication, switch cells between gene programmes that lead to distinct cell fates – growth, differentiation or cell death.
Obviously as chiropractors we geek out on these things. We can sit in a public place for hours just observing people’s structure and putting together the puzzle of what their life is like because of their structural alterations.
I don’t suggest that you get that obsessed with this issue but at the same time, take the opportunity to look at your posture and the structure of your loved ones and workmates or team players you hang out with and you will understand more why a person with poor posture doesn’t look happy and healthy.
So, consider the power of posture and make sure that the people you care for get their spine checked and adjusted if necessary by a chiropractor.
Mark
