Chiropractic Treatment as “Informational Medicine”
The treatments we do at Lydian Chiropractic can be thought of as a form of “informational medicine.” Informational medicine is a way of thinking about health and injury that draws on concepts in quantum mechanics and chaos theory. What a treatment does, in the informational medicine view, is to supply information to a biological system (i.e., the body) that enables that system to reorganize itself. Homeopathy, acupuncture, energy kinesiology, chiropractic and other modalities can all be viewed as different kinds of informational medicine. We understand our chiropractic treatments as providing information that enables the body’s biomechanical structure to reorganize.
One of the notable differences between biological and non-biological systems is entropy. A pile of rocks is a non-biological system. If the rocks fall down a hillside, they do not try to climb back up the hill. They remain there, the kinetic energy spent. Biological systems are different: if a tree falls over and remains alive, it will try to continue growing vertically – even if it means growing a 90 degree turn! The tree as a biological system adopts a compensation strategy to organize itself as closely as possible to the way it originally was supposed to grow. But the compensation strategy is not as good as the original plan for the whole tree to grow straight toward the sky.
The human body is a complex self-organizing biological system. After any injury, the body will try to reorganize itself back to its original design. This is what healing is all about. But sometimes an injury, trauma or other disturbance to the system is beyond the body’s ability to find its way back to its blueprint. It doesn’t have the information it needs to put the pieces back together again. Lacking sufficient information it will, like the tree, do the best repair it can, but the repair is a compensatory strategy – inferior to the original blueprint. Scoliosis is the perfect example of a long-term biomechanical compensation strategy.
When a biomechanical injury occurs, timely treatment can make all the difference. For a short window of time after an injury (often about a day) the system remains in a suspended state of chaos, searching for the biomechanical map. If we can treat the injury while it is still in this chaotic state, our job is much easier. All those click clicks are information. If the body receives this information in time (and was not already suffering from a long-term compensation strategy), it can often undo the trauma and simply “reset” itself to the state it was in just before the injury!
The body does not remain in a chaotic state for long. If the body can’t find its original biomechanical map and does not receive the information it needs to recover, very soon it begins putting in place a compensation strategy. If an injury remains a long time (years or decades) the body continues piling on more layers of compensations each time further injuries occur. These strategies are never as efficient as the original design and costly for the body to run. At some point the compensations become too much to manage and the jenga blocks begin to tumble: “but I was just leaning over to pick up a piece of paper and my back went out!”
Even after many years of injury, the body can still have an astonishing ability to heal. The original blueprint seems to be permanently available to the body for healing. What we can provide is the information the body needs to find its way back to the original design. Complex patterns of compensation that were developed over decades can melt away!
One of the notable differences between biological and non-biological systems is entropy. A pile of rocks is a non-biological system. If the rocks fall down a hillside, they do not try to climb back up the hill. They remain there, the kinetic energy spent. Biological systems are different: if a tree falls over and remains alive, it will try to continue growing vertically – even if it means growing a 90 degree turn! The tree as a biological system adopts a compensation strategy to organize itself as closely as possible to the way it originally was supposed to grow. But the compensation strategy is not as good as the original plan for the whole tree to grow straight toward the sky.
The human body is a complex self-organizing biological system. After any injury, the body will try to reorganize itself back to its original design. This is what healing is all about. But sometimes an injury, trauma or other disturbance to the system is beyond the body’s ability to find its way back to its blueprint. It doesn’t have the information it needs to put the pieces back together again. Lacking sufficient information it will, like the tree, do the best repair it can, but the repair is a compensatory strategy – inferior to the original blueprint. Scoliosis is the perfect example of a long-term biomechanical compensation strategy.
When a biomechanical injury occurs, timely treatment can make all the difference. For a short window of time after an injury (often about a day) the system remains in a suspended state of chaos, searching for the biomechanical map. If we can treat the injury while it is still in this chaotic state, our job is much easier. All those click clicks are information. If the body receives this information in time (and was not already suffering from a long-term compensation strategy), it can often undo the trauma and simply “reset” itself to the state it was in just before the injury!
The body does not remain in a chaotic state for long. If the body can’t find its original biomechanical map and does not receive the information it needs to recover, very soon it begins putting in place a compensation strategy. If an injury remains a long time (years or decades) the body continues piling on more layers of compensations each time further injuries occur. These strategies are never as efficient as the original design and costly for the body to run. At some point the compensations become too much to manage and the jenga blocks begin to tumble: “but I was just leaning over to pick up a piece of paper and my back went out!”
Even after many years of injury, the body can still have an astonishing ability to heal. The original blueprint seems to be permanently available to the body for healing. What we can provide is the information the body needs to find its way back to the original design. Complex patterns of compensation that were developed over decades can melt away!