It’s 2015, and everyone knows that smoking is insane.
Here are the stats from the CDC – forget Ebola – let’s talk about acrid, flaming tobacco in the lungs:
1. “Smoking causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases (including emphysema, bronchitis, and chronic airway obstruction), and diabetes.”
2. “For every person who dies from a smoking-related disease, about 30 more people suffer with at least one serious illness from smoking.”
3. “More than 16 million Americans suffer from a disease caused by smoking.”
Now, the question is what to do about it. This is an addiction affecting about 20% of all adults in the United States. Obviously, knowledge alone is not the answer.
Quitting is hard. We need more strategies, not more E-cig shops.
Enter the Chiropractor; who would have thought that the back masters could also affect the way we deal with chronic, Marlboro advertised addictions.
Connection Between Smoking and Back Pain
Studies have shown a correlation between lower back pain and smoking. It’s possible that smoking increases the likelihood of disc degeneration, according to the journal Medical Hypotheses.
What’s in question is whether smoking is the cause or an effect.
Having a bad back can be painful, and one way to mask that is by turning to cigarettes. Studies have shown that chiropractic therapy helps people to quit smoking. Again – this may be indirect, based on the general attention to wellness that going to a chiropractor engenders in the patient, or directly through the manipulation and associated alignment and nervous system improvement.
Regardless, if you’re concerned about smoking, for yourself or for someone you love, a great antidote is heading to the chiropractor. More people than you can imagine have some problem with their spine, neck or hips.
Attending to those problems leads to general improvement that can bring strength to huge areas of battle, like the fight against cigarettes.
Cigarette? Stick It In Your Ear
Another technique to ask your chiropractor about is the FDA approved use of auriculotherapy.
That’s the manipulation of pressure points on your ears to help you control the lust for nicotine, as well as the effects of cutting back or going cold turkey, which include crankiness, maxed out stress and the addition of extra pounds.
What Does That Have To Do With A Chiropractor?
Consider that what a chiropractor does is adjust skeletal points that affect other areas of the body.
By changing the angle minutely on one point in the spine, debilitations are positively affected through the nervous system, such as headaches, migraines, asthma and tenderness to pain.
When our bodies work better, we can face more stress and stand tall, reliant on our well tuned spinal columns working wonders throughout our bodies.
All of these manipulations are relatively subtle – even a large adjustment that feels like the joint was moved a mile was really only edged less than a millimeter. Now imagine what a trained chiropractor can do when the full, subtle capacities of the body are unleashed to deliver the natural powers of our pressure points.
It goes well beyond bones and joints, but because it includes our nervous system, where even the seemingly unrelated becomes part of an innate web that can help us overcome stress and addiction.