Retracing Your Steps

Retracing is a part of the healing process. Typically retracing is the process of addressing the cause of old problems (like injuries) that were never properly attended to at the time, and therefore when the right attention does get applied to them, the body brings those injuries up so the right progression of priorities can allow the body to work toward healing.

It is always interesting to work with a patient when they come in with a specific problem, say low back pain, and after a series of visits they come in and let me know their shoulder has started hurting. As we go through the process of finding out why that could be, we learn there was an old injury to that area that they had forgotten happened. Because of the process of realignment through chiropractic adjustments, we awakened the muscle memory to that area, allowing for the injury to “reawaken” and therefore to be opened to be addressed and healed. Again, remember that chiropractic adjustments open the pathways of the nerve system, allowing body to talk to brain, and brain to talk to body.

Sometimes the injuries in the retracing process that come back up can be fairly difficult to work with because of the years and years of adhesions and scar tissue that have built up around those areas and ultimately have shut down that area or system. It is like the body has created its own mask for that area over time. As we peel away that mask, we work toward reorganization of the neurology and physiology of the area that is being addressed.

It is amazing how effective the body is at bottling what should be a painful situation and pushing it aside or encapsulating it so that you go on with your life doing function after function. This does not mean that you will have optimal function in that area, or in your body, but the body’s ability to respond to allow you to do the task at hand in some manner is absolutely incredible.

With that said, retracing really becomes an important aspect of the healing process because without retracing, we could never really reach our true optimal function. Spending the time to retrace old injuries that were never addressed can allow for enormous improvements in the overall function of the system as a whole.