I wanted to touch base today regarding a question that I get every day, and that is how does Activator work? For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the activator instrument is the tool we use during our office visits to adjust your spine. This is the main tool that I use with our patients here in the office. Dr. Linda uses it on occasion for older children, but typically not with babies.

The idea is that with the Activator instrument we can give adjustments that are extremely precise, extremely accurate and very, very gentle and very comfortable. The fundamental idea of an adjustment is to move the bone in the spine to take the pressure off the nerve. If there is a dis-relationship, a misalignment, a subluxation, that’s what we call them, between the bones and they are not functioning properly, it’s going to create a disruption on the nerves that are traveling between the bone, on the nerves that are in the joints, on the nerves that are, all around this structure. These disturbance to the spinal joint and nerves affect the quality of the signals traveling along these nerves between the brain and the rest of the body.

We need to correct these structural dysfunctions and the subsequent interferences to the nervous system because they are going to keep your body from functioning and healing the way it should. To correct that, we perform adjustments. An adjustments needs a certain amount of force to move the bone back into proper position, proper range of motion, proper function in order to take the pressure off the nerve so that the body can start to function and heal.

There are several ways to deliver force that force. The traditional way, the way that a lot of people use to move the bones is to put your hand on the side of the bone and push. Now, that creates a force that is sufficient to move the bone. It’s an approach that’s tried and true. It’s been used for decades and decades. It works. However, when we use an Activator, we’re able to change how the force that will move the bone is created. The goal remains to correct subluxations, that cause the interference on your nervous system so your body can heal in a way that is very, very precise, very safe, very effective.

And the advantage to you is that it is extremely gentle and comfortable. So why is that? Well, if you remember high school physics, force is mass times acceleration. In the traditional model of moving the bone with your hand you apply weight with body mass and whatever acceleration your body can deliver. The skilled practitioner would actually have quite a high level of acceleration available.

With the Activator we’re able to move that equation, mass times acceleration, in a whole totally different direction where now we have very light mass that is applied to the bone, but it’s very fast. Because of this very high rate of acceleration, we’re able to have the force necessary to move the bone in a very, very measured predictable way with very low mass. To you what that translate into is an adjustment that is going to bring about very predictable results and very good results, very fast and it’s very comfortable.

So long explanation about how the Activator works, however, I think it’s a question that I get so often it would be good to refer to this clip time and time again. In the meantime, I’m Dr. Jean-Marc Slak here in Burlington and I can’t wait to see you.