Torque Release Technique
Torque Release Technique is a little-known but highly effective chiropractic adjustment technique that is unique in its ability to directly treat the root causes of back pain. This technique is one of the key components of Dr. Noble’s practice, and it helps patients heal in the long term and stay pain-free for years to come.
So what makes the Torque Release Technique so special, and how can it be more effective than other methods of chiropractic treatment?
The Body As An Electrical Circuit
Most people tend to think of spinal injury (i.e. back pain) only as a mechanical problem, in which the misalignment of vertebrae and discs from a physical injury inhibits the body’s ability to move and function properly. This understanding isn’t necessarily incorrect, as physical changes in the spine and the alignment of each section do cause lasting physical pain, and this imbalance must be corrected in order for the body to work as intended. However, what’s often missed about the nature of spinal injury is the role played by the body’s central nervous system: the sophisticated network of electrical circuits that control our ability to move and function, sending and receiving impulses from the brain that tell our muscles and organs what to do and when.
The physical movement or displacement of spinal discs from a spinal injury does more than just damage the nerve and muscle tissue in the surrounding area. One of the biggest effects of this adjustment is that it also disrupts the natural flow electricity up and down your spine, both in the affected area and anywhere else that may rely on electrical impulses passing through that part of the spine – making it more difficult for your brain and spine to communicate with other parts of your body. This especially affects your muscles, which rely on this input to function properly and respond to your brain’s direction.Muscles that receive reduced input from the nervous system naturally contract, and this is what causes the pain we feel from a back or other spine injury. You may not realize it, but the soreness you’re feeling in your leg, shoulder, or neck may be caused by an injury in a totally different place- the area of the spine that is out of alignment, causing inflammation in the surrounding area and impeding the flow of electricity from your brain and spine to that part of your body.
How Torque Release Technique Works
Torque Release Technique is intended to diagnose and treat these electrical imbalances in the spine, allowing the body to more effectively self-heal and return to its balanced natural state. Even though the human body does naturally heal itself, the imbalances in your nervous system caused by back injury won’t go away over time if they’re left alone. The body simply readjusts itself to function in spite of the mismatch, compensating for the imbalance by adjusting the flow of electricity in the opposite direction. This is why we don’t “heal” from such an injury automatically – the body gets used to operating that way, allowing your body and muscles to function, but not adjusting the source of the pain or correcting the imbalance that’s causing it.
Subluxations: The Sources Of Pain
This is where the importance of subluxations comes in. Subluxations are the specific areas of the body that contribute to pain from spinal injuries, each of which play a different role in relaying pain to and from different parts of the body. These are the primary, secondary, and tertiary subluxations.
Primary subluxations are almost never felt by the patient, but they are ultimately the cause of most pain experienced by the patient. The pain itself is felt instead in the secondary and tertiary subluxations, which are connected to and thus directly affected by the primary subluxation.
Treating Subluxations With Torque Release Technique
The goal of Torque Release is to briefly “excite” the neurons at the location of the primary subluxation so that the nervous system’s electrical balance is temporarily adjusted back to normal. This is accomplished by stimulating the physical location of the subluxation on your body with a small tool, in such a way that it sends a burst of electrical energy from that location throughout the central nervous system – briefly restoring the original balance of electricity that was present before the injury.
Because the cause of the pain is essentially an electrical imbalance, the change induced by torque release can be felt almost immediately. The chiropractor will stimulate the subluxation several times over the course of an adjustment, and the repeated rebalancing of electricity throughout the nervous system helps ease the pain in other areas of the body suffering from reduced electrical flow, such as the muscles in your neck, back, and legs.
It takes time for this process to completely take hold – the body is resilient, and will preserve the unbalanced system it has already adapted to for some time – but through repeated stimulation of the subluxation over the course of a treatment plan, the normal balance of electricity will be restored in your nervous system and the pain felt in other areas of the body will subside. For many patients, this is a permanent solution to their chronic back pain.
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