Our body relies on the balance between three elements: structural, chemical, mental. These three elements mutually influence each other and the health of the individual is found when the balance between the three persists. Think about physical activity (structural) that increases dopamine level (chemical) and gives us satisfaction, improving mental health (mental) [1]. Or think about fear (mental) that releases adrenaline (chemicals) that increase tension in skeletal muscles (structural) [2,3]. All health problems involve an imbalance of one part or more of this triad, meaning a correct diagnosis can only be obtained by evaluating all three sides of the triad (Figure 1).
Figure 1 – According to Applied Kinesiology, our body’s health rely on the balance of a triad of elements: structure, chemical, mental, with structure as the base of the triad. All health problems are involved with an imbalance of one part or more of the triad, with five regulating factors: Nerve (N), Neurolymphatic (NL), Neurovascular (NV), Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) and Acupuncture Meridian Connector (AMC). (From [26])As an example, fibromyalgia can have structural causes, dictated by myofascial pain coming from body misalignment [4], with affected dopamine [5] and glutamate [6] levels. Fibromyalgia can also have chemical causes, from metal intoxication [7,8], with consequent physical pain. Finally, who suffers of fibromyalgia also experiences depression and anxiety (mental) [9,10].
It is important to understand that structural, chemical and mental balance is fundamental in preserving the integrity of the body. Our body works to find the optimum balance and when this balance is impaired the consequences are disruptive. It is essential to diagnose and treat the primary causes otherwise secondary problems may emerge. Many medical drugs just treat the symptoms of the diseases and not the cause, with the consequences of disturbing our body’s balance: Ibuprofen (a painkiller) is linked to infertility in men [11,12], Finasteride (a drug for hair loss) causes sexual side effects and depression [13], anti-hypertension drugs have fatigue, dizziness and headache as side effects [14], and so on.
Nature designed and finely tuned our body and what surrounds us. Every aspect is important, from breathing to nutrition, from breast-feeding to walking barefoot, nature gave us all the possibilities to develop at the best potential. Diseases are the signal that something went wrong and many times diseases are caused by human interference with what nature intended for us: highly processed food is linked with cancer [15], while raw food (vegetables and fruit) is linked to a reduction of risks to contract cancer [16]. Bottle-feeding and pacifiers are at the base of malocclusion [17], breast-feeding allows a perfect craniofacial development. High heels shoes cause osteoarthritis at the knee [18], running barefoot allows a reduction of the knee joint torque force [19].
Our body is a complex but perfect system where every single element matters. We have bones, muscles, glands, nerves, organs, blood vessels. All of them play a fundamental role in our body’s integrity and cannot be seen in isolation. We have muscle chains that runs in myofascial meridians from head to feet (Figure 2) [20], keeping upright our bones. Between them, blood vessels bring oxygen in all the tissues, with nerves able to communicate with distal parts of the body, delivering messages to the brain, responsible to smoothly run every task in the body. And all parts in our body need energy to work, that is produced with essential nutrients (coming from the food we eat) and oxygen (coming from the air we breathe).
Figure 2 – Myofascial connections in our body: individual muscles are linked into functional complexes, mutually influencing each other. On the left, Superficial Front lines. On the right, Deep Front Line. (From [20])As any system, our body has many inputs and outputs. The posture is an output of this system, with inputs coming from vestibular, visual and somatosensory systems [21,22], where this last one includes proprioception. Proprioception is the awareness of the position of one’s body, possible with stimulus coming from nerves throughout our entire body. Occlusion is part of the proprioceptive inputs, as you can see from all the nerves’ branches that propagate in our face and teeth from the trigeminal nerve (Figure 3).
Figure 3 – Branches of the trigeminal nerve, propagating in all the face and teeth. This is part of the proprioceptive inputs, determining the postural output. (From [27])Because orientation information from the various senses is not always available (e.g. eyes closed) or accurate (e.g. compliant support surface), the postural control system must somehow adjust to maintain stance in a wide variety of environmental conditions. Under the hypothesis of sensory reweighting, every inputs has a weight when processed by our brain. When a certain input is distorted or missing, the system rebalances the weight of other inputs or even suppresses some of them when they are in conflict, so that the body is always in the most stable position [23,24,25].
From all of this we can truly understand how every part in our body is important and cannot be seen in isolation from the others. A holistic approach is the only way to determine the causes of certain diseases and syndromes. If you rely on reductionist medicine, it is most likely that you end up with treatments involving only alleviation of the symptoms, without fixing the underlying causes of the condition. Although over the short term this may give instant relief, over the long term the problem will worsen, together with other problems arising. So, be aware of considering your body in its totality, because a foot pain may have the causes coming from the head and vice versa.
Our body perfectly functions only if fully aligned. There is no other way! The quality of our life strictly depends on the spinal alignment, so our posture is a key element for being in a good state of health.
The body is a complex system composed by different parts. Although current medicine tends to see every part individually, the reality is that every part has mutual relationship with the others, also when anatomically distant: what happens to the head has repercussion on the feet and vice versa. If you have pain or injuries in…
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TMD - Occlusion 