How Does the Body Work?

To understand the importance of being fit and healthy, and how it can contribute towards the body's health, you must first understand how the body works.

Before you were as big as you are, you started as two little cells. Thank your mom and dad. As development happened, your first organs developed. Those original organs were the brain and spinal cord. It is interesting to note that the only organ fully covered in stone are your brain and spinal cord.

So first, know that all the information that you need for your body to actually work is coming from your brain. It is your brain that tells your heart to pump blood and oxygen around your body; it tells your limbs to move and your throat to swallow, as well as a hundred other orders every second or so.

How do the messages get to the right areas? Simply put, information comes from the brain and goes down a spinal cord and into all these different nerves underneath.

These nerves branch out like the branches of a tree. In fact, the nervous system of our body is similar to an upside-down tree. Information travels from the roots along the branches of the tree and to the fruit at the end of those branches; when it comes to the human body, simply substitute the fruit for bodily organs!

To start a book out this way I wanted to get back to basics. Our health care is so confusing that we stepped away from the basic fundamentals. I have discovered after seeing so many cases that the hardest problem sometimes, have some of the easiest solutions.

So looking back everything starts with the brain, the nerves, and spine. When giving lectures to patients they often think that the heart controls everything, it doesn't. However, the heart is still very important. The brain and spinal cord control everything in your body. I am at a disadvantage. This book will never win against the things you know. 120 pages or so is competing against 3000 or more hours of drug ads, commercials you will see at the end of a year. If at times I repeat an idea I know I am, to illustrate a point not to be a nagging grandmother.

The Role of Stress in the Body

What is stress? Why, regardless of where we live or what we do, are we surrounded by it? Think about it, even people who live in areas where you would think there is no stress because of the beautiful weather and an amazing lifestyle that they too are subject to stress. Stress has the ability to creep up on the richest people's doorsteps and the poorest people's doorsteps, equally.

There are three types of stress commonly known: physical, chemical, and emotional. A lot of research has gone into exactly that topic; after all, if we know what contributes to ill health, we'd do everything we could to prevent it from taking hold in the first place wouldn't we? The next step of researchers was to work out why people were getting sick in the first place.

So what did they do? Doctors started looking for this thing they called 'Dis–ease'— a lack of ease in the body; nowadays we know this as stress. (It makes sense doesn't it? What else is stress but a lack of ease in the body?)

It's the one thing doctors of all branches of medicine, be it dentistry, medicine or any other branch, agree on — that 'dis-ease', or stress, is the cause of all sickness. Stress on the feet — bunions. Stress on the teeth — cavities. Stress on the heart — heart attacks. Stress on the mind — mental illness. Stress on the spine — nerve and organ problems.

That's because even though our bodies are designed to cure themselves, stress gets in the way. Stress causes lack of ease in the body, which in turn interferes with the body's ability to heal itself or to run smoothly, which in turn causes sickness. Remember the upside-down tree?

So 'stress', all doctors agree, is what makes people sick!

Different health disciplines just vary in the way that they treat it.

Fine Tuning the Body

So, let's expose the three types of stress. One of the more objective diagnostic tools is the very common and still very effective radiograph, also known as x-ray. Patients may complain for a short period of time about a particular problem they have, however, their x-ray clearly illustrates the problem has been there much longer, sometimes 10-15 years prior to their complaints.

Despite all stresses possibly creating this, let's first look at physical stress. So, let's think back to the beginning of our first days outside the womb. It is hard to believe, but our first common stress may have been a passionate and willing doctor pulling us out of our mothers, to lead us to our first breath of air. This pulling may have lead to a stress directly at the tip of the neck. Mothers and those responsible for the delivery of your first day don't check for this physical stress. Let's continue looking at our physical stress may have an effect.

Next, we learn to crawl and lift our heads. Some studies show that we fall up to 1500 times just learning how to walk.

We want to know why a person gets sick. We know that the underlying cause of any illness is in the brain and spinal cord — so what do we do? We actually go and fix that. We fine-tune the body!

Even the father of medicine, Hippocrates, told us to look at the spine as the cause of many diseases — and that was as long ago as 360BC!

You already know that the reason why the bones in the spine are so important is that they are right next to the spinal cord. If you put a pressure at the spinal cord a lot of things can happen. Even if there is 1% pressure on the spinal cord, it's enough to cause problems in the health of a person.

Let's take an example:

Picture if you can, your brain. Marvelous things, brains! Now, if you can, imagine that your brain has a 100% life in it — they check whether a person's living or dead through their brain activity, after all!

Luckily yours is 100% alive; now you just need that life or energy to get to the rest of your body. How this would happen — namely, is that it passes down the spinal cord, into your nerves and into the organs that they connect to. Great!

Except ... sometimes not all of that life or energy makes it to where it is supposed to go.

Remember that stress earlier in this book? As we grow up and live our lives nowadays, we are subject to a lot of stress. Some of it comes from normal 'wear and tear' on the body, while in...