Clearly, there is a way of looking at symptoms as a signal of the body/mind’s inner communication through inner awareness and feeling. From the chiropractic/naturalistic perspective, ignoring symptoms (whether it be by “living with,” rationalizing or denying them, or via pharmaceutical elimination) promotes a suppression and eventual desensitization of your body/mind’s inner signaling or communication system. This is comparable to cutting the wires to your automobile’s dashboard warning lights when they go on.

Chiropractic clinical and scientific investigations suggest that spinal problems are important in nerve system abnormalities – and, thus, in major body/mind communication and control. So, what are the effects and indications or signals of early nerve system disturbance?

One answer – and compelling documentation – has come from the medical field in Europe, where there has been greater progress in medical-chiropractic integration and cooperation than in the United States.

An article entitled, “Blocked Atlantal Nerve Syndrome in Babies and Infants” (published in a German medical journal) included the findings of two prominent specialists in manual medicine. Their abstract concludes the following:

One reported case study describes an 18-month-old boy with early relapsing tonsillitis, frequent enteritis (intestinal infection), therapy-resistant conjunctivitis, frequent colds and earaches, and increasing sleeping problems (including fear of lying down and screaming during the night). After the first specific adjustment of the atlas, the child demanded to be put to bed and slept peacefully. The conjunctivitis cleared completely, and previously disturbed appetite returned to normal.

Another report describes a random examination of 1250 babies at five days post partum. 211 of the infants suffered from vomiting, hyper-activity and sleeplessness. Examination revealed cervical strain in 95% of this group. Release of the strain by specific manipulation frequently resulted in immediate quieting, cessation of crying, muscular relaxation and sleepiness. Similarly, a study from Denmark revealed that of almost 300 infants with colic, 94% showed a satisfactory result from chiropractic spinal correction, primarily directed to the neck region.

>From these and other studies, conclusions show that approximately 80% of all children are not in normal nerve balance and that many have atlas blockage or subluxation misalignment (vertebra out of position with nerve interference). The normalization of the clinical picture following even the lightest adjustment is sometimes gradual, often immediate, and “consistently amazing.”

These investigations reflect the experience of our office and that of many doctors of chiropractic working with children and infants. There is strong reason to believe that uncorrected childhood health problems set the stage for much illness in later life; and that many, if not most, sickness and health problems are in place by the age of 10.

If we take these very common infant health problems as signs of early nerve interference (and, thus, disturbances of inner communication and feeling), we might ask: “What happens to them?” Very often (though not always) such problems appear to “go away” or are “grown out of.” But what has happened to their cause?

As previously discussed, lacking specific correction of the functional cause, these disappearances are but the inner awareness and signaling systems shutting off as they go ignored. It is only suppression and cutting off symptoms, not correction of the underlying causes. For example, it is now generally acknowledged by pediatric expertise that the supposed “growing out” of allergies, asthma and bronchitis that was conveyed to parents from the 1950s to the 1980s was simply a “burrowing deeper” of syndromes that later surface in adulthood as chronic pulmonary disorders such as asthma and emphysema.

Keeping our sights on the period of adulthood, clinical observation and documentation (as well as plenty of common experience) reveal another range of all too-common symptoms. These occur in the area believed related to infantile colic, now possibly developing into a dramatic advancing of gastro-intestinal (GI) problems and complaints. A plethora of television ads and the over-the-counter medications deal with acid stomach and indigestion, pre-ulcers and ulcers, gastritis, reflux, constipation, diarrhea, irritable bowel and colitis, and other variations of digestive organ disturbance, resulting in many people living on Tums, Pepcid and Prilosec, and lots of negative (“no findings”) medical tests, and various other scopings and imagings.

But there is serious sickness competition in other areas of our body as well. To wit, approximately 70 to 80% of all people will have a disabling low-back episode during their adulthood. This is not counting neck or upper back events, or headaches (80% of which have been shown to arise from cervical spine problems). From the chiropractic viewpoint, it’s easy to conclude that a lot of people’s spines have not received proper attention. Chiropractic x-ray analysis virtually always reveals it is long overdue in adults with muscular-skeletal complaints. As dramatic support from medical literature shows, when autopsies of adults investigate the spinal-nerve areas, almost without exception, degenerated, dead and severed nerve fibers are shown at all spinal levels.

To recap: infantile colic in a high percentage of babies suggests an association to pandemic GI troubles in adulthood; the majority of infants with cervical misalignment and strain syndromes possibly presaging the way for extensive neuro-musculo-skeletal complaints in at least 80% of the adult population. Can the picture be any clearer?

As we examine the body’s two most extensive systems (GI and musculo-skeletal) from this whole(-istic!)-life perspective, a distinct developmental “health devolution” seems to be taking place. It is a continuum of health decline which shows the following sequence: Earliest life imbalances (nerve and inner communication interferences and dysfunction, from birth through teens) define a Stage of Dysfunction. Uncorrected, this leads to complications and progression of problems in adulthood through mid-age, defining a Stage of Disorder. Continuing failure of correction of original cause creates the conditions for deterioration and breakdown into the illnesses of aging, or the Stage of Disease and Degeneration.