What is a spinal adjustment?
A spinal adjustment or manipulation is a highly specialized procedure your chiropractor uses to free your body from a serious form of health-destroying stress called the vertebral subluxation complex (also known as subluxations.) It takes years of training for a doctor of chiropractic to master the techniques needed to locate and correct subluxations.

What is the correct adjustment?
When you first visit your doctor of chiropractic, you will receive a spinal analysis to determine where and how many subluxations are in your spine. Then he/she will determine the location of your vertebral subluxation(s) using various tools of spinal analysis.

While only your body knows exactly where the vertebra needs to be, the chiropractor can make a reasonable determination of the force and general direction of an adjustment using analysis tools such as X-ray, motion palpation, study of the electrical quality of the muscles (S-EMG), imaging tools such as MRI, X-ray and other spinal analysis instruments. Then he/she must determine how best to correct your problem.

An experienced chiropractor also has a certain “feeling” when an adjustment is just right. This “feeling” can’t easily be put into words, but when the chiropractor has you under his or her hands, intuition and experience come into play. This includes sensitivity to the patient, knowing that every person is unique. No two adjustments are ever the same.

Artistic and scientific
All chiropractors have the same goal in common – the elimination or reduction of their patients’ subluxations, reducing the stress on the nervous system and permitting them to unleash their inner healing ability. Yet, an adjustment from two chiropractors may feel different. One reason for this is that each chiropractor is physically unique; some are tall, some are short, they have different sized hands and they use different spinal adjusting techniques. These differences are natural when dealing with adjusting, for it is an artistic as well as a scientific procedure.

Chiropractic adjusting techniques
Not all chiropractors work alike. The chiropractic profession has developed nearly a hundred different methods, referred to as techniques, used to analyze the spine for subluxations and adjust or release the vertebral subluxation complex. Most chiropractors are familiar with at least a few of them. Each chiropractor usually has a favorite one that he or she employs for the majority of patients. Why not ask your chiropractor what type of adjusting technique he or she uses and why?

The body is always trying
Your body is always trying to realign or adjust your spine and return to a state of ease or relaxation. Areas of stress or tension are unnatural states and need to be released. The back muscles are continuously working to pull the vertebra back to where it belongs. The chiropractor doesn’t actually put the vertebra back in place. He/she supplies just the little bit of force needed to free the vertebra so your body will realign it.

It’s like when your car is stuck in the mud and the wheels are spinning and spinning. Then along comes a friend who pushes the car so the wheels finally catch and push the car free. Now, did your friend really push your two-ton car out of the mud? Of course not! He just supplied the right amount of force in the right direction that the car needed to dislodge itself.

The chiropractor’s adjustment unlocks the jammed or fixated vertebra and nearby tissues from their “stuck” or fixated positions and frees them to move where the body wants them to go.