NSA

Dr. Jennifer DenBleyker, D.C., Dr.

WHAT IS N.S.A.?

A No-Crack Approach to Chiropractic Care that Actually Works:
After fourteen years of education and experience, Fluid Chiropractic has come to rely on Network Spinal Analysis as the chiropractic technique that produces strong, lasting results.

Network Spinal Analysis (NSA), sometimes referred to as “Network Chiropractic” or “networking,” is a chiropractic technique that regards your body as a whole, integrated system, not just bones. It taps into the body’s own potential to heal itself.

NSA employs a gentle touch to the skin along specific areas where the protective covering of the spinal cord connects to the spine. Each touch works to clear up interference throughout your nervous system. With the pathways clearer, your body and brain can communicate more effectively with each other which promotes healing.

Network Spinal Analysis is an evidenced based approach to wellness and body awareness.

Gentle precise touch to the spine cues the brain to create new wellness promoting strategies. Two unique healing waves develop with this work. They are associated with spontaneous release of spinal and life tensions, and the use of existing tension as fuel for spinal re-organization and enhanced wellness.

Practitioners combine their clinical assessments of spinal refinements with patient’s self assessments of wellness and life changes. Greater self- awareness and conscious awakening of the relationships between the body, mind, emotion, and expression of the human spirit are realized through this popular healing work.

NSA is exclusively practiced by Doctors of Chiropractic in relationship to the identification and self regulation of spinal tension and subluxation patterns.

Principles behind NSA:
You’re not an inanimate object that needs to be repaired widget-by-widget. Connective tissue, ligaments, discs, segments of spine are loaded with receptors that have to report back to your brain how much tension each of them is experiencing. The brain then needs to figure out how to respond about what-goes-where with everything coordinating with everything else.

When your body holds on to tension, it causes your body’s communication network to become overwhelmed, sidetracked, or derailed. When the interference is cleared, your brain can pay better attention to the whole system, not just the one that’s yelling the loudest.

How it works:
Your spinal cord is your body’s communication hub. It is where the body passes messages between the body and brain. Physical trauma, mental stress, and environmental toxins can throw your whole system into an overwhelmed state of tension. The tension produces neural traffic jams that disrupt communications and inhibits healing.

Because your spinal cord is your body’s communication hub, it is also your body’s tension hub. So your spinal cord is the place to look for opportunities to dissipate these neural traffic jams.

Research suggests that it doesn’t take much to dissipate those traffic jams – just a slight touch to the precise spots, called spinal gateways, where the nerves underneath the skin and connected to the spinal cord need a reminder to connect with the brain. This touch is called entrainment, because its purpose is to clear the way for your body to train itself to respond to tension in healthier ways.


Spinal gateway:
The spinal gateways are the access points on the spine that the NSA practitioner uses to cue the brain and nervous system to connect with each other.

These access points are not the tense spots where communication has gone haywire. The haywire spots are where the neurotransmitters are too busy being distressed to respond to requests from the outside world with anything other than more distress, which would just result in more tension.

Instead, the spinal gateway is what NSA practitioners call the “peaceful” areas along the spinal cord, the places where nerves will be receptive to contact. The spinal gateway serves as a nexus or hub for interaction among the subsystems that need to work in harmony to establish and maintain spinal and neural stability and integrity. Precise and gentle touch contacts at these spinal gateways assist the brain to connect more effectively with the spine and body.

Research behind Network Spinal Analysis:
In a retrospective study conducted at University of California Irvine’s School of Medicine of almost 3,000 people, Network Spinal Analysis was found to have a direct effect on client self-reported wellness – twice of that expected from healthy lifestyle practices (exercise, risk avoidance, optimal food choices). The study concluded that “effects of Network Spinal Analysis are cumulative and global, affecting all areas of life .… a strong connection exists between Network Care and self-reported positive changes in overall health and well-being.”

Network Spinal Analysis was also found to have a major indirect effect on wellness by promoting healthy lifestyle choices.

The trouble with cracking:
The conventional approach to chiropractic care is to try to realign the spine by forcing vertebrae back into their pre-trauma position so the central nervous system can function properly.
Trying to force bones into a different position won’t help your brain and nervous systems figure out better ways of communicating with each other or responding to stressors.

Why forceful adjustments don’t always work:
Your spine is held in position, not by its bones, but by its muscles, ligaments, discs, and tendons. Forceful adjustments don't always work because they don't work as well with the body as a whole, integrated system.
Your body knows best when and how to let go of tension, allowing the spine to realign itself. Forceful adjustments may not be in the right place at the right time to allow this process to evolve. Through the gentle care at Wilke Chiropractic & Wellness, your body is allowed to do what it knows is best for you.

Forceful adjustments, when administered at the wrong place at the wrong time in a repeated manner can cause microscopic tearing of the ligaments, creating a more unstable spine.

What the cracking sound is – and isn’t:
The sound you hear when a chiropractor performs a thrust on your back or into your neck is not necessarily the sound of re-alignment. It is the sound that the vacuum between the vertebrae makes when they are suddenly separated – similar to the sound a suction cup makes when you pull it off a window.

It’s dramatic. But it doesn’t always mean that the correct adjustment was made.

We only manipulate arm and leg joints (extremities) because we have found it takes people a long time to learn how to self-regulate and self-adjust these areas. The spine however, has such intricate muscular and neurologic control over all movements that it is very easy for patients to learn how to self-regulate and self-adjust the spine and pelvis.

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