Less Pain, Better Health
Let’s put a couple of puzzle pieces together. Multiple studies have shown that chiropractic care is a uniquely safe and effective protocol to help chronic low back pain (the toughest and most treatment-resistant type of low back pain). It is also well understood that chronic pain is mediated by a series of chemical, neurological and immune processes that happen in well-defined chain reactions.
A new study shines a light on the effect of spinal adjustments on one of these steps. Gevers-Montoro et al. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnint.2022.879083/full) have shown that a series of adjustments reduce the levels of inflammatory Tumor Necrosis Factor-alpha (TNF).
Two interesting corollaries to these findings jumped at me. First, we already know that adjustments reduce pain through nociception down-regulation which probably leads to the neuro-immune result of lower TNF observed in the current study.
Second, I remember reading that adjustments did not lower TNF. I had to look it up, and I found it (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28632555/) in this 2017 article. The difference is in the number of visits. One visit did not make changes but a series of adjustments over time did! This insight matches the clinical reality I have observed over the past 40 years.
So here you have it. Chiropractic care helps chronic low back pain (the toughest kind of low back pain) and it does it because it leads to improved neuro-immune function. If you didn’t get regular adjustments before, now you really want to get adjusted weekly and keep reaping the good health, comfort, and functional rewards!