Symptoms range from everything like a cough, fever, indigestion, migraines, high blood pressure, to pain – just to name a few. These all have a variety of meanings, but it’s a safe bet that we can call them all annoying, right?
Instead of calling them symptoms, let’s call them body signals, which is what they really are. All of these annoying things are signals from your body trying to tell you something. Now that message can be very different depending upon what is going on.
For example, you make it through half your day when suddenly you feel fatigued, achy, congested, hot, and begin sneezing and coughing. Now yes, this isn’t pleasant, but think of these in terms of signals. What is your body telling you? These signals are all evidence that your immune system has just kicked into overdrive to help you fight off the likely virus you’ve encountered. The sneezing and coughing help get the extra mucus out of your body that the immune system has produced in an effort to rid your body of debris, bacteria, or viruses. The fever comes to help increase your body temperature to a point where that virus can’t survive. Instead of suppressing these signals, we should be thankful for them. Your immune system is doing its job! What we should really focus on when we aren’t feeling well isn’t getting rid of these signals, but how we can strengthen our body and our immune system. Want to hear something cool? Chiropractic care is one of the best things you can do to help support a healthy immune system!
Now what about those body signals that you know are not “normal”? For example, that migraine that you get three times a week. We know that when the body is operating at its best, we should not get frequent headaches or migraines. So what are these signals telling us? Imagine your body throwing up a red flag, telling you “Stop pushing me! There’s something wrong here and you need to figure out what it is. Until you do, I am going to keep reminding you with these headaches!” Obviously, investigation needs to be done to figure out what is the cause of these headaches, instead of just treating the symptom.
This is the objective of a chiropractic check – to see if the cause of these body signals is coming from your nervous system not working correctly. Since the nervous system controls and coordinates ALL function in the body, when there is stress and pressure on it your body can show a variety of body signals.
So next time a symptom shows up, think about things in terms of signals and ask yourself: “What is my body trying to tell me?
