The Three-Legged Stool

In my many years of doing chiropractic all over Massachusetts, I have held firm to my belief that chiropractic goes beyond just massaging and adjusting away low back pain and headaches. Chiropractic is a way to holistically approach so many other issues that attack the human body. The physical afflictions are easy to name and think about, but what about the other more difficult to spot things? I always think about the triangle of care, or what I like to call, the three-legged stool.

The three causes of human “dis-ease”

The three-legged stool reminds us that every issue in the human body can be tracked back to at least one of the three causes of human “dis-ease.” These three legs are physical, mental, and toxic (diet). Older texts will refer to these things as the three Ts, trauma, thots, and toxins. These three things can all cause the human body to react in an adverse way if they are left unattended or allowed to run rampant. This is where the job of the humble chiropractor can come in and help someone with a whole body-minded approach.

I will be going over each individual part of the triangle in the the future, but to quickly go over each one.

    1. Trauma is the easiest one to understand since falling down on your knee will cause your knee to hurt. Blunt trauma and repetitive work injuries will cause the body to physically break down and hurt since it is trying to heal it. This also includes things growing in places that they should not be like tumors and cysts pushing on other parts of the body.
    2. Thoughts are where things start to get tricky.  Things like:
      • self-esteem
      • how we view the world around us
      • uncontrolled stress from our external environment.

Think of things like watching the news and feeling your shoulders hunch when you see something you don’t like, or constantly putting ourselves down because we don’t believe we deserve the things we have. This is a much more difficult part of health to understand since it has SO many different factors that are difficult to properly address in a 7 minute chiropractic session, but it is no less important. A good chiropractor can assess if your emotions are indirectly causing your body to react a certain way. While we are not therapists, if we can give you knowledge you can make much more informed decisions on ways to improve your mental health.

  1. Toxins are more often thought of as Diet, but it does extend to being exposed to things we are allergic or sensitive to. Our body will react poorly to things that cause it to have an exaggerated immune response like prophylactic shock, but it also includes things we are sensitive to that cause an adverse reaction. If we have a poor diet, our pain threshold is much lower and things that we would not have noticed before, could potentially become painful as our body interprets signals differently. Sugar is a very good example of this since it promotes an inflammatory environment and augments our pain perception.

We will go over these more in detail with future posts, but when you look at these three different aspects of our health, you can see that it relates to so many of the things that affect human beings.

And of course if you have any questions about being a human being, you can always ask me! If you or someone you love is in the Lexington, Woburn, Wilmington, Bedford, Burlington, Concord, and Waltham areas and need a chiropractor, then I give us a call and set up an appointment!