“If you cut a piece of steak, put iodine and a bandage on it and even give it a shot of penicillin, will the piece of steak heal itself?”

That’s the question my Mississippi chiropractic colleague recently posed in an article of his. The answer, of course, is obvious enough for a child to answer. The answer is no.

And yet as obvious as this answer is, as a society we don’t take it to heart. In 2002, doctors wrote more than three billion out-patient prescriptions, and in 2001 it was reported that 77 percent of Americans took over-the-counter medications to treat everyday ailments. But health does not come from a pill, a mist, a rub, or a syrup. Health does not come from altering your body chemistry by something you take from the outside in. Health comes from within.

It is an inside-out phenomenon. The reason the steak didn’t heal in the example above is because steak is dead — it is not living. And it is this life force — this life energy — that separates living tissue from dead tissue. It is what gives it the ability to heal.

So instead of focusing on chemically altering symptoms to bring about “health,” we should be diverting our efforts to encourage our life’s energy the optimum ability to express itself.

BJ Palmer, the developer of chiropractic, once stated, “Have you more faith in a spoonful of medicine than in the power than animates the living world?”

So, how do we turn this power on and keep it at full throttle? Chiropractors help people do this everyday by monitoring the circuit breaker box of the body’s electrical system — the spine. By ensuring that the bones of the spine are moving as they should, the vital nerve energy that courses from the brain down the spinal cord and then out between the vertebrae is able to communicate and deliver life to the body. And when this is done, the body simply works better. It’s what allows it to heal.

You see, chiropractors operate on the fact that our bodies are self-healing and self-regulating. There is nothing magical we do to the body. We don’t add anything to it or take anything out. We simply remove interference that can occur from everyday stresses to the life energy that our nervous system transmits.

I realize that I’m speaking from a health paradigm that may be foreign to you.  That’s OK, because it was once foreign to me too.  Our society has adopted a fear-based, medical model of health that looks to run away from and escape pain, disability, and death.  The health paradigm of chiropractic, on the other hand, looks to run towards something. It looks to run towards health, healing, and vitality. It looks to run towards life.

“We chiropractors work with the subtle substance of the soul,” Palmer stated.  “We release the imprisoned impulse — the tiny rivulet of force — that emanates from the mind and flows over the nerves to cells and stirs them into life.”

Remember, doctors don’t heal, nor do the medications they prescribe.  Chiropractors don’t heal, for that matter, either. No, only the life force that was placed within you by your Creator is capable of healing.  Chiropractic’s goal is to help release it and then get out of its way.

— Dr. Thomas R. Lamar is a chiropractor at Anchor Chiropractic in the Health Services Center and hosts the Internet radio program SpinalColumnRadio.com.  Lamar can be reached at 360-297-8111.