About Neck Pain and Sensory Motor Function
Scientists know that the brain uses sensory information from the muscles and the joints around the spine in order to help control the balance and posture and ensure that we are moving properly.
When your brain takes sensory information and uses it to help direct the movement and control the muscles, we call this Sensory-Motor Function.
A specific study examined if neck pain impairs proper Sensory Motor functions in the elderly. In this study the researchers carried out various tests that examine sensory motor functions, such as how well these elderly people controlled eye movement, or how their balance was. They took into account the age of the participants and other physical conditions that may be affecting them.
The researchers found that elderly people with neck pain had far worse executive abilities than those who had no neck pain, in the majority of the tests.
Which meant that elderly people with neck pain were far less able to control their eyes or their balance that the elderly people who had no neck pain.
The researchers thought that people suffering from neck pain also suffered from inept communication between the brain and their necks, that is, that they were less adept at sensory motor functioning.
Remember, the brain uses sensory information from the muscles and the joints around the spinal column in order to help with control and supervision of balance and posture and to ensure that you are moving appropriately. Therefore, if the information from the spine isn’t very good, the brain will have a hard time controlling what’s happening in the body. The researchers said in fact, that deficient information from the neck in elderly people with neck pains, prevented their brains from “understanding” other sensory information.
This meant that the problem was also affecting their balance and increased the danger of their falling.
A chiropractic research group at the New Zealand College of Chiropractic, agrees with this as their own studies over the years have indicated that Chiropractic treatment improves the accuracy of the communication between the spine and the brain, thus facilitating the ability of the brain to understand exactly what is occurring in the body and around it.
Moreover, deficient functioning of the spine doesn’t need to be so bad that you feel pain, for there to be deficient functioning of the brain. Thus, gentle adjustment to the spine can adjust the ability of the brain to know what is going on.
Scientists have also shown that chiropractic adjustments to the elderly improve specific sensory motor functions that are highly relevant for preventing falls. For example, they have shown that chiropractic adjustments to the elderly improve the level of accuracy to such a degree that the brain knows where the ankle is even with eyes closed.
They also found that the elderly can walk significantly faster after a period of chiropractic adjustments. They showed a significant improvement in their processing information from the eyes and ears after the same period of chiropractic treatments.
So even though chiropractic helps people with neck ache, there is far more that it has to offer, even if you don’t have a sore neck. Chiropractic treatment deals with improving communication between the brain and the body to enable you to function at your best.
So whether you are suffering from a pain in the neck, or know someone close who does, or if you just simply would like to adjust the communication between your brain and your body, do visit your family chiropractor in order to adjust your spine so that you can function at the top of your ability.
Chiropractic care can be very important in helping you move. The focus of this treatment is to improve mobility and functionality of your spine. This is highly important for correct movement of the spine and it helps the brain know more accurately about everything in the body.
Chiropractic care is recognized in research literature as helpful for people who suffer from back pain, neck pain and headaches. This is most likely since once the brain is better able to read what is happening in the body, it can in fact turn off the feeling of pain since it is no longer needed.
To sum up: if you are suffering from chronic pain, do your best to stay positive. Move as much as possible, eat and sleep well, and go to meet your family chiropractor so that you can get help to retrain your brain without pain.
The information provided here by the Daily Backup Company Ltd., the convenience product manufacturer of Respine4u, developed for home use according to the general [holistic] concept of chiropractic, is provided for educational, entertainment, enrichment, purely for knowledge and information sharing purposes.