Wow. This is something that I never thought that I would hear when I first started practicing Chiropractic, but after two decades of serving, it is one of the most common things that I hear. In fact, I think I had three patients mention to me when I got back from holidays that I can’t go on holidays anymore, because when I do, their digestion (if you know what I mean) goes haywire.
So what does Chiropractic have to do with your GI tract and pooping? Well, simply put. Everything.
To simplify things, your digestive tract is just a long muscle tube. This muscle tube gets its information how to work via the nervous system, and specifically our parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is the part of the automonomic (or automatic) nervous system that is involved in “resting and digesting”. In comparison the opposite to the parasympathetic nervous system is the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system controls “fight, flight or freeze”. That is the stress response.
The parasympathetic system gets your GI tract “going”, while the sympathetic system shuts it down. This makes sense because if you are facing danger, and your life was on the line, you are not going to be worried about digesting your food. You want to stay alive.
The challenge is for most of us in our super fast paced, busy and stressful lifestyles, we tend to be shifted towards the sympathetic nervous system. That means our digestive systems probably are not acting as well as they should. You are not only not digesting your food properly, but that leads to less, well, poop.
So, how does Chiropractic get involved in all of this? Basically in two ways; by stimulating the parasympathetic system and by removing interference.
When you get a specific scientific chiropractic adjustment, your nervous system comes into balance, or specifically, your neural “tone” is restored. That means, instead of your autonomic nervous system being more sympathetically dominant, it balances out. Your autonomic nervous system can now function normally. Which for you means that you can now digest properly and do what you need to do…you get my point.
Secondly, the specific chiropractic adjustment removes any interference directly at the spinal level that is subluxated. So all the organs supplied by the nerves at that level will now get their proper nerve supply. If the subluxation is in an area that innervates your GI tract, after the adjustment, your tract will be working at one hundred percent.
So the real question is not “can your Chiropractor make me poop?”, you really should be asking yourself…”why did it take me this long to go see a chiropractor?”
Dr. Joshua Nikkanen
#yourbeardeddoc
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