A chiropractor is a type of electrician. We assess how the brain and body communicate with each other, much like in a house where the electrical wiring system sends signals to turn the light on or off.
Blockages in our nervous system, spine and/or nerves prevent the brain and body from communicating properly. It is the job of the chiropractor to find and resolve these blockages.
It is important that your brain has a good picture of your body and so being able to keep an eye on what is happening within your body. If there is poor communication due to the lack of nerve impulses from a certain part of the body, the brain does not know how that part of the body is doing.
For example: Take the difference in sensitivity between your palms and the bottom of your feet. The bottom of your feet is much more sensitive than your hands in most people.
Why?
The answer is simple. Our feet are hidden most of the time in socks and shoes, so the skin of the foot receives less stimulation (nerve stimulation) than the hands. The part of the brain that corresponds to the sensations of the feet becomes smaller and smaller over time, after all
you require less ‘storage space’.
The same happens with other parts of the brain.
Another example: a stiff back. If a back joint is barely moved, it will not send any stimuli to the brain. The storage space for communication with the back remains empty and a ‘blind spot’ is created. Then, one day you ask a lot of movement from your body, for example during a company outing to paintball. That’s where things often go wrong.
Proprioception
Receiving stimuli from the nerve endings in the skin, muscle, tendon and joint is very important, Without these stimuli (feedback) the brain cannot control or control correctly. The technological (fancy) term is called our proprioceptive ability.
The word proprioception (the position of the body in space, also called position sense) is composed of the Latin words proprius (own) and perception (perception). It is the ability of a person to perceive the position of his own body or parts therefore registers how much force is used in a movement. The better our proprioception, the better the brain can make a picture of the body. That picture is called homunculus.
Homunculus
A homunculus is a representation of body parts in the motor and somatorsensory (sensation area) cortex of the brain. These representations make it possible to distinguish between the different parts of the brain. For example, controlling your fingers separately or being aware that your feet are on the floor. The part of the cortex that is assigned to a certain part of the body depends on the extent to which this part is used. For example, the fingertips in the somatosensory areas are much larger than the arms, as they are often used to feel small details. You can imagine that these areas are even larger in people who read Braille.
A similar distribution can be seen in the motor cortex, but then there are over representations of other areas. Consider, for example, the representation of the legs that we use to move around, both walking and cycling. What is remarkable about the homunculus is that areas that are close together on the body are also close together in the homunculus. The representations of the fingers are therefore next to the representations of the hands. In addition, a homunculus is actually an inverted picture of the body: the feet are represented in the dorsal part, the face just in the ventral part. In addition, a homunculus contains only representations of half of the body, as we often see in the brain. Thus, a homunculus in the left hemisphere has only representations of right body parts.