In 1975, Ronald Pero, Ph.D., chief of cancer prevention research at New York’s Preventive Medical Institute and Professor of Medicine in Environmental Health at New York University, began developing scientifically valid ways to estimate individual susceptibility to various chronic diseases. Pero and his colleagues found strong evidence linking immune system responsiveness and the absence of certain DNA repair enzymes to disease susceptibility and limited lifespan. At the same time, he followed his fascination with the relationships between certain hormones and carcinogenic agents. The nervous system is responsible for regulating hormone balance, so it is necessarily involved in cancer susceptibility.

This reasoning led Pero to investigate chiropractic as a means to affect the risk of immune system breakdown and disease. A small group of individuals who had received chiropractic care for a period exceeding 2 years were studied. All chiropractic patients studied were labeled ‘genetically normal’ and showed no genetic reasons for increased susceptibility to disease.

In addition, the long-term chiropractic group demonstrated a 200% greater immune competence than those not receiving chiropractic care and 400% greater immune competence than those with cancer or other serious diseases. Surprisingly, this improved immune competence was uniform across age groups, not declining with age. He concluded that “chiropractic may optimize whatever genetic abilities you may have.”

STOP. Some of you may be reading this and wonder how we got from the back pain relief that chiropractors are famous for and all of this genetics and hormones and immunity stuff. While it is true that Chiropractic is well established as an effective means of addressing back pain, what most people do not realize is that those results barely scratch the surface of what people are experiencing in Chiropractic offices all across America.

The human body is self-healing and self-regulating. At our very best, chiropractors act to honor and restore this Law of Life by adjusting the spine to correct vertebral subluxation. Subluxation interferes with the restoration of the maintenance of health by interrupting active organization at the level of communication through the nervous system.

We must face a stark reality. “Health Care is going to change from treatment-based to prevention-based discipline,” says William Haseltine, Chairman of Human Genome Science.

This means that we are going to have to recognize that our reliance on crisis-based strategies is too little, too late. Western medicine is too often helpless in resolving the high number of chronic and disabling conditions including cancer, various syndromes and other instances of poor health. We treat disease as an entity that must be choked with toxins or cut and burned away in the hope that our body will survive the assault. Certainly battles have been won, but the war is being lost.

Short-term strategies will have to give way to long-term strategies that are congruent and free of contradiction. The nervous system is the conduit of environmental comprehension and change. The endocrine system, controlled by the nervous system, functions to activate or deactivate genes based on environmental factors and response. The genes contain the parameters through which adaptation can occur. All of this happens in an ongoing process we call life.

Chiropractic has been at the forefront of this idea long before birth became an automatic emergency med   ical procedure, long before antibiotic abuse had created the very thing it set out to destroy, and long before “a pill for every ill” meant that 1 in 2 adults in the US is on a prescription along with 1 in 4 children. Give your body a fighting chance to heal and thrive. Make the most out of your genetic potential and seek to truly be your best.