Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/1526510
Page 12 | Abby's Magazine | instagram.com/abbyshealthfood Did you know the brain's storage capacity is virtually limitless? It is estimated to have a storage capacity of around 2.5 petabytes, which is equivalent to about 3 million hours of TV shows. What is the importance of the brain? What are the main functions of the brain? Does the brain really control everything for our body? The answer to all of these questions is that the brain is probably the most important organ in your body, and it has everything to do with the fact that it's the control center for every organ or physiological function. If you ask the dictionary, the main functions of the brain are sensory processing (sight, sound, touch, etc.), motor control (writing, walking, etc.), cognitive functions, emotions, memory, homeostasis (temperature, hunger, thirst, etc.), language and communication, perception, autonomic functions (heart rate, digestion, respiration, etc.), learning, social behavior, consciousness, and awareness. That's quite a lot of tasks for one organ to be responsible for. So why would we not want to make our brain's health a priority? Studies have shown that humans have routines and perform very similar behaviors from day to day because it's what they are familiar with and what they have practiced over and over before. It requires less thinking, less cognitive reasoning. This is because you already have a trained neural pathway that is firing axons with the same information every day or every time the behavior is acted upon. Yet, imagine if one day you took a different route to work, brushed your teeth at a different time in the morning, or drank your coffee in the afternoon instead of the morning. Your brain would start to make a new neural pathway and increase the folds in your brain. This same concept works with chiropractic care and receiving chiropractic adjustments. When you go to the chiropractor for the first time and receive your first adjustment, it's important to understand your walk of life and how different your spine structure is compared to the person next to you. Your fall when you were 3 years old, your trip when you were 6 years old at the park, the stress of your birth, the stress from the divorce you went through, the fact that you slept on your left side for 15 years, etc. These all impact your nervous system and how each vertebra of your spine has shifted and been stuck in these positions for so many years. When these vertebrae get fixed in a position, it puts pressure on the nerves that come out at that vertebral level, sending false information to the brain. Therefore, you may have 5 fixed vertebrae that have been positioned this way from different traumas or stressors in your life and have not allowed your brain to interpret several messages from that vertebral level, causing an entire interference in the nervous system. Many times, you start with your first misaligned vertebra at birth. When you are born through the vaginal canal, for example, some doctors will assist with the process by pulling on the baby's head, and this may cause the first bone, called the atlas, to get misaligned. Now the atlas sits right next to 3 major vessels that are so important for our brain health. In front of the atlas sits the carotid artery (in charge of all the blood flow to the brain), the internal jugular vein (in charge of all the blood and waste drained from the brain), and the vagus nerve (which is in charge of the majority of your digestion and your parasympathetic nervous system). So let's break it down. If your atlas gets misaligned, occluding some of the flow from these vessels, do you think that maybe there may be some dysfunction regarding the functions these vessels are in charge of? Or if the atlas misaligns, Chiropractic and Brain Health By Dr. Dan Durrieu and Alexandra Durrieu