Posture Perfect
How Sitting Up Straight Can Change Your Life
Dr. Jennifer Dorn
Take a second to check in with your body - does your neck or back hurt at all? If it does, you aren't alone, as over 16 million people in the United States suffer from chronic back pain and stiffness. With the COVID-19 pandemic, this number is bound to skyrocket as adults and children alike find themselves working from home or attending Zoom High School/University. And while Zoom or Google Hangouts may keep us safe from a virus, there's another looming epidemic on our hands: bad posture.
This might feel like an overstatement, however, new research is pointing at a future filled with musculoskeletal disease and skeletal malformations linked to poor posture. I'm not going to pretend I'm perfect - I find myself constantly hunched over while adjusting my patients or checking my social media! My husband is also a chiropractor, and he always reassures imperfect-posture patients that "posture is a lifelong battle". And it is an extremely important battle at that.
Spinal Anatomy
Your spine plays a large role in allowing you to be you! It houses our spinal cord, which contains all of the somatosensory and motor nerves that control our body. From brain to eye to stomach to leg, every part of our body is dependent on our nervous system's well-being. When the spine is out of alignment, this leads to all sorts of issues, even ones you would never really think is something CHiropractic care can help, like increased lung volui conditions, as the mechanoreceptors responsible for detecting the stretch of your back muscles and maintaining your posture are bombarded with signals from the misplaced vertebrate. The most common presentation of the bombardment is usually felt as headaches or muscle spasms.
Good posture allows for all of the reflex arcs located within the spinal cord to adequ