Looking for a good laugh...NUCCA

rulerboyz said:

I think that for anyone with a mathematical background, Jonah's explanation ought to make perfect sense. You see, if you can focus on one particular segment of the spine and palpate that structure, if you think about it in a particular way you can suddenly discern the entire biomechanical relationship of the global spine. It's something that you can feel in the pit of your stomach. It's a chiropractic instinct.

When I began to realize the nonlinearity of the phenomenon of the spinal subluxation, I realized that my chiropractic education had taught me nothing useful. It was not until I attended a Nucca seminar in Fourth quarter that everything finally started falling into place. I then realized that the next step for me would require that I read through as many texts on nonlinear flow and oscillation that I could get my hands on. In order to arrive at a working model that could describe the oscillation of Atlas, I had to work with the only computational equipment that I could afford: a pencil and paper.

It just so happened that the simple equation that I had learned in 10th grade math class, the one used to graph a parabola would unlock the door to an important chiropractic discovery. This equation can be written as y=r(x-x^2). Every value of x produces a value of y, and the resulting curve expresses the relationship between the two numbers for a range of values. When x is small, then y will be small, yet larger than x; the curve rises steeply. If x is the middle of the range, then y is large. But the parabola levels off and falls, so that if x is large, then y will be small once more. That is what produces the oscillatory frequency of Atlas that leads to an interruption of nervous flow, and hence makes it unrealistic that mankind can achieve it's full potential without routine matenance adjustments to Atlas by a Nucca practitioner.

In the brief history of chaos, this one innocent looking equation provides the most succinct example of how different sorts of scientists looked at one problem in many different ways. Very much in the same way that many chiropractic techniques addressed the problem of detecting and correcting spinal imbalances and subluxations in different ways. To the chiropractor, this is an equation with a message: simple systems can do complicated things.

In 1998, I had looked at the parobola as being a metaphor for a deep question about how the a subluxated atlas could be corrected by the introduction of a very small, and in fact imperceptible quantity of force and supplied at a specific frequency. The question was so deep that almost no chiropractor had thought to ask it before: do subluxations exist? That is, is there a such thing as a spinal lesion that has a long term effect on the outcome of a patient's health. If such a condition exists, is there a specific remedy that can reverse it's course?

Then one day, as I continued to explore the everchanging phenomenon of the role that Atlas plays in the Nucca paradigm of the balance of health and wellbeing, I was abducted by aliens. When I was aboard their ship an electronic chip was surgically implanted into my brain. It would provide me with the key that would finally understand why all chiropractic techniques work regardless of laws and principles upon which any given chiropractic system was built.

An outside observer might perceive one one kind of behavior over a very long period, yet a completely different kind of behavior could be just as common to that system. The title we give to this system is "intransitive". It can stay in one equilibrium or the other, but cannot occupy both states simultaneously. Only a kick from an external body can force it to change states. That external force is provided by the chiropractor in the form of a specific adjustment performed by hand. In a trivial way, a standard pendulum clock is an intransitive system. A steady flow of energy from above down inside out comes in from a wind-up spring or a battery through an escapement mechanism. A steady flow of energy is drained out by friction. This is very similar to the creep loading process of intervertebral discs. The obvious equilibrium state is a regular swinging motion. If a passerby bumps the clock, the pendulum might speed up or slow down from the momentary jolt but will quickly return to its equilibrium. But the clock has a second equilibrium as well. A second valid solution to its equation of motion. It is that state in which the pendulum is hanging straight down without moving. A far less trivial intransitive system, perhaps with several distinct regions of utterly different chiropractic behavior, could be the vertebral subluxation complex itself.

So... what I'm getting is that chiropractic is a skill set for rewinding of the clock of people so that they don't "run down". Sophisticated clock rewinding - cuckoo clocks/cuckoo clock tenders?

diane said:

rulerboyz said:

So... what I'm getting is that chiropractic is a skill set for rewinding of the clock of people so that they don't "run down". Sophisticated clock rewinding - cuckoo clocks/cuckoo clock tenders?

Is your spinal clock running 15 minutes too fast? If so, then it's time for you to get an adjustment. Only a trained cuckoo doctor can make the precise adjustment needed to get your spine back in sync with God's atomic clock. In other words, innate intelligence: the universal lifeforce that flows from above down inside out.

Chiropractic Is Specific or It Is Nothing.

Get all the Chiropractic you can; can all you can get; and you will
have more in your can than a physi-can can can in his can.

Wrap Mind about Thing You Do; Study, Analyze, Finger It with
Tentacles of Your Brain. Concentrate so Long that All Parts and
Details Stand before You.

Innate Being with Us, Who Can Be against Us? We Welcome
Responsibilities, Crave Difficult Work, Seek Dangerous Duty. These are Divine Opportunities for Service and Growth.

Every Innate man is a library, if you know how to read him.

Outer expression is a crude visible symbol of what is happening
inside with Innate. What is Innate inside is divinely projected history.

Right now you are making a choice to become a disappearing fossil or join the great forward Innate parade.

One's education must be as broad as Innate if it is to interpret Innate.

If ONE hammer (adjustment) will drive (correct) all kinds, sizes,
and shapes of nails (dis-eases), why is it necessary (?) to give ONE HUNDRED kinds, sizes, and shapes of hammers (treatments) to drive (correct) ONE nail (dis-ease) ?

I Can...I Will.....I MUST!

The Idea that A education Contacts Innate Is Wrong. Innate
Contacts Education. This Idea that Education Contacts Universal
Intelligence Is Wrong. Universal Intelligence Contacts Innate and
Innate Contacts Education. This Idea that Education Must Tell Innate how to Run a Human Body Is Wrong. This Idea that Education Must Tell Universal Intelligence How to Run the World Is Wrong.
Universal Intelligence Directed Functions of the World before You and We Were Educationally Born. It Will Do so after You and We Are Educationally Dead. Innate Intelligence Directs Functions of Composite Organized Natural Beings, Insane, Imbeciles, Morons, More than You and We Imagine. Get Wisdom! It Is later than You Think.

[John Bridges, D.C.]

NUCCA, schmUCAA. You want to see something funnier, just look up what my state (WA) considers to be viable chiropractic techniques. You'd literally laugh so hard people would think your Parkinson's is flaring up.

[johan]

Yesterday I got a call from an old patient. He was wondering about the segment he saw on " Good Morning America" regarding the NUCCA high blood pressure study. I took a look.... its good news for those of us who have converted to Soliton palm. We always knew "it works"
now there is proof and national TV to boot.

hk.youtube.com/watch?v=5TTzKwvNbP0

[TEO]

REPOSTED for the chiropractically impaired:
************************************

johan said:

As one who has received NUCCA training, I want to attest to the high standards NUCCA practitioners adhere to within the limits of their practice. NUCCA people are very conservative. They attempt to do only one thing and the one thing that they attempt to do, they do as well as they possibly can.

There was an Indian musician who spent 17 YEARS (johan) learning to "count" four different tala (one with each hand and one with each foot) while singing in a fifth. The discipline, the practice --you can't even imagine what this involves. Notably, it represents a completely arbitrary undertaking having nothing to do with anything -- not even Indian music, really. Just a guy in India with 17 years to kill in one of his many thousands of lifetimes.

Precision and focused practice directed at an arbitrary activity -- whether it be NUCCA or nose-picking --only means that you will, after some amount of time and experience become that much more precise and skilled at this particular arbitrary activity. The activity itself, however, will remain arbitrary. You might, for example, learn to "pulsate" the palm of one hand, apply this Healing Palm** to a patient's forehead, let's say, and sell this treatment as a remedy for an arthritic knee or any other patient complaint from dandruff to heart disease. When it's this arbitrary, you are only limited by whatever you can imagine and your own credulity.

**See TEO's Healing Palm

Admittedly, to the uninitiated, NUCCA technique appears to be quintessential magical/ cult practice and it appears laughable...

What do you mean, appears to be laughable -- NUCCA is as stupid and arbitrary a "chiropractic" as it gets. It's the pure stuff -- unmitigated and unabashed.

The NUCCA triceps pull generates a "soliton" wave that creates a points of lowered pressure in the tissue and the tissues generate that sound as things shift into balance.

Right -- the "triceps pull" creates a soliton wave ...

soliton: a quantum or quasiparticle propagated as a traveling nondissipative wave that is neither preceded nor followed by another such disturbance. (Webster's)

You know, why bother to argue stupid when someone is so willing to step forward and volunteer such a specific example. You might as well have said bearing down on your stool creates a soliton wave.

Whether the biomechanics are valid or not is beyond me....I happen to believe the biomechanical ideas of Steven Levin, MD www.biotensegrity.com are closer to the truth.

Well, I happen to believe that a poke in the eye with a burning stick seems unpleasant.

That should give you skeptics some more material to hammer on.

Not really -- Just something to do while I have my morning coffee.

~TEO.

[johan]

And above we can view the to be expected knee jerk response from TEO. Nothing to be said that at least some of his medical
superiors are excited by this study.

Of course that might put a cramp in your style, it might mean filling less prescriptions for blood pressure medication.

[Allen Botnick DC]

What a load of malarchy! I didn't realize that NUCCA was really promoting this soliton wave nonsense. Thanks for enlightening me. What rubbish will they think of next.

[johan]

Let me clarify... the soliton wave rubbish belongs to me....not NUCCA. NUCCA is totally empirical and they don't have a theory on how their adjusting technique works. So I am responsible for that nonsense. I happen to believe that its the only theory that fits the data.
Soliton waves are also hypothesized as an explanation for nerve conduction because nerves apparently don't generate enough heat ( little or no heat) to fit the current model based on
ATP.

If you can come up with a better theory on how the NUCCA people do what they do or for that matter how nerves function, I am all ears.

In finishing I will quote my friend TK who told me this when I was 17 about smoking pot:
"Don't knock until you've tried it."

[Allen Botnick DC]

>If you can come up with a better theory on how the NUCCA people do what they do or for that matter how nerves function, I am all ears.

Johan,

I don't take Nucca seriously because it is based on inaccurate biomechanics. It's flaws are:

1. It demands a perfectly aligned neutral position regardless of asymetrical bony structures and lower kinematic chain problems. This completely invalidates their x-ray analysis which is why Blair invented his method that images the atlas lateral masses.

2. It fails to account for x-ray distortion.

3. It has no way to deal with ligament shortening.

So with no biomechanical correction occurring we end up with other explanations for it:

1. Placebo
2. Transient nerve stimulation
3. Inaccurate reporting by chiropractors

[johan]

Even if we were to assume the above points were not arguable ... and to a great extent the
NUCCA crowd has addressed biomechanical points 1 and 2....

How do you explain the results of the blood pressure study where half the patients received
a sham adjustment and half did not. The half that received the sham adjustment did not
exhibit any significant lowering of blood pressure. ie. no placebo. Whereas the half that did
actually receive a NUCCA adjustment had significantly lower blood pressure for 2 months following one adjustment. That would eliminate transient nerve stimulation and since the
reporting was done by MD's who have no real vested interest in the success of a chiropractic project... that eliminates your third point.

That leaves only one tentative conclusion: "there is something goin on and we don't know what it is......" do we basketball jones?

[Allen Botnick DC]

How exactly did they address the biomechancial problems? I'd like to understand their new method if it was changed.

I looked over the NUCCA website. It mentioned three dimensional x-rays but the remainder of the analysis was unchanged.

Another thing that bothers me is there rationale that the first cervical vertebra is prone to misalignment due to a lack of bony stabilization. In their video they mention that care never seems to end. I don't see how a musclular/ligamentous problem could be stabilized with just passive care and no rehabilitation.

It will be interesting to see if the results of that study can be replicated in a larger trial with more chiropractors.

[johan]

How exactly did they address the biomechanical problems?

Everything they did it by error and trial. When Grostic started practicing, upper cervical was dogma from the source of all things truly chiropractic. What they started out with was the mess known as HIO. The real biomechanical breakthrough was the reproducibility of the x-ray analysis. That aspect seems to be something of a art form. I never came close to mastering it. Dickholtz, who did the blood pressure study, was/is a master of that and wrote the manual on it. There are some things biomechanical that have to be accepted as primary in order to buy into upper cervical. You have to believe that the cephalo-caudal organization of the anatomy is the rule. The head leads. X-rays are static and only provide limited information but reproducibility of the views is what offers statistical information: Reproducibility and post x-rays. After tens of thousands of cases ... where the same protocol is followed and x-rays are posted, clear sets of data begin to emerge.

There is no such thing as three dimensional x-rays. The analysis is essentially the simple relationship of the whole head and neck structure to the vertical axis. But what I conclude from looking at that work is that traditional spinal manipulation moblilizes individual vertebrae on the x-axis whereas the Grostic camp moves with the whole spine along the y-axis. Its a completely different approach. Blair technique aside from offering an excellent critique of Grostic's work offers little more than the mobilizing individual segments.

One of the most dramatic things I have seen demonstrated in the upper cervical world is a little study done by Bo Rochester who looked at changes in the cervical curve brought about
by traction like Harrison's group as opposed to the changes brought about by upper cervical adjusting. He used computer morphing software to demo the series of changes seen on the lateral x-rays. The grostic changes looked natural . Harrison's changes looked forced which is how it is.

When you try to quantify what might be deemed a quality of life service, its strikes me as absurd that care can ever come to an end. In a living dynamic rough and tumble world, would you expect a person only to need to exercise just once and never need to exercise again? Of course what is even more absurd is the idea of putting a person on some sort of artifical schedule like 3 times a week for the first 3 weeks and so on.

On the ligamentous/muscle issue.... there is no doubt that among many upper cervical dox that theirs is not a one size fits all approach. I certainly do not believe that upper cervical work can adequately address muscle, tendon and ligamentous issues.

If chiropractic makes it as a separate and distinct clinical discipline, it will only be because there are a few highly disciplined dcs who can reproduce their success like the NUCCA people.
Frankly, this study looks like bad news for chirovile. What I think may happen is this little cherry is going to be picked by the medical profession like Microsoft picks software. Once some real medical brains get hold of this, it could easily find brand new home in their world where they are always looking for novel developments.

There is no such thing as three dimensional x-rays.

There is, but it is not available to clinicians. Harrison makes the claim that one cannot reposition bones, according to the traditional chiropractic listing system, based on these 3D X-ray studies.

Interestingly, Harrison makes no reference to Grostic in the relevent paper..... And to the best of my knowledge, only rotational movement of C-1 has been demonstrated. The atlantodentate ligament prevents attempts at correcting a superior or inferior atlas (which is clinically irrelevent anyway), just as the ligaments of other segments prevent gross movement.


And who is to say that perfect alignment is the most natural, "lowest energy state" for a particular person?


Chiropractic Cuts Blood Pressure

Eight weeks after undergoing the procedure, 25 patients with early-stage high blood pressure had significantly lower blood pressure than 25 similar patients who underwent a sham chiropractic adjustment. Because patients can't feel the technique, they were unable to tell which group they were in.

X-rays showed that the procedure realigned the Atlas vertebra -- the doughnut-like bone at the very top of the spine -- with the spine in the treated patients, but not in the sham-treated patients.

Compared to the sham-treated patients, those who got the real procedure saw an average 14 mm Hg greater drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure count), and an average 8 mm Hg greater drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom blood pressure number).

Let's suppose these drops in BP among the 25 hand-picked subjects are a fair representation of what NUCCA can do. Is it really worth the comparitive risk given that HBP is a risk factor for VAD? I have little doubt I could get these numbers through having a client walk 30 minutes/day.

Spinal manipulation, it seems, has very generalized, nonspecific effects....this may have nothing to do with "aligning" a vertebrae. The sham "adjustment" had to move the bone to rule out this generalized effect.

[drj]

"Misaligned atlas"? ""Relative" brain stem ischemia"? Some patients who've had neck surgery have had lower BP... so...we make this leap? The 84 year old former head of the nucca club performed all the "real" and "placebo" adjustments?

Its all so stupid. And I don't care if an MD was involved. Its garbage.

Just when we thought that high blood pressure was caused by things like cardiovascular disease and obesity, we find out that its really caused by miniscule "misalignments" of the top vertebrae.

And its not like these nucca nuts are now going to treat only hypertensive patients....they'll continue to treat any patient with any disease just like they've always done.


FYI...nucca claims to realign the top vertebrae by LIGHTLY torquing the side of the neck...Yes, through an inch or two of epidermis, muscle, fascia and vessels. Lightly torquing......again...... lightly torquing with hardly any pressure. Hello!!!! Its all so STUPID.


Do this....lightly torque the back of your hand...Now, does anyone think theyve misaligned their carpal bones?

[johan]

It may be stupid but it's receiving some serious attention from some people with more social leverage than I've ever had.

I doubt anyone really believes high blood pressure is caused by miniscule misalignments of the head, but there is something I recall known as postural hypertension or is it hypotension.
I will have to look that up.... I don't remember.

Personally the no salt low salt approach works for me, but there are a lot of people out there who need their excess salt consumption.

You've seen " Supersize Me" haven't you.... and what about "Sicko"?

By the way: When I learned about NUCCA in my last year a Western States I thought I had
already heard everything and the person who told me about it, said: " There is this Chiropractor in Chicago who adjusts people from six inches off the spine." That was Dickholtz. That made me curious and we all know where curiousity can lead.......

[klutzo]

I was a patient of an Atlas only D. C. . I realize this is anecdotal, but that so-called research isn't exactly properly done either.

I have unstable high blood pressure, and only one drug works on it, a drug that is incompatible with other meds I should be taking for a chronic illness, but can't take because of the interactions. I was hoping this study was true and Atlas adjustments would help me get off the BP medication. After 28 Atlas adjustments my blood pressure is still the same. If anything, my systolic is a bit higher than before.

klutzo

Jul 21, 2008 17:51:49 GMT -5 klutzo said:

I was a patient of an Atlas only D. C. . I realize this is anecdotal, but that so-called research isn't exactly properly done either.

I have unstable high blood pressure, and only one drug works on it, a drug that is incompatible with other meds I should be taking for a chronic illness, but can't take because of the interactions. I was hoping this study was true and Atlas adjustments would help me get off the BP medication. After 28 Atlas adjustments my blood pressure is still the same. If anything, my systolic is a bit higher than before.

klutzo

To my knowledge the NUCCA organization has never claimed that an atlas adjustment cures all cases of blood pressure, but rather that there may be many causes. How does your experience have anything to do with the research that appears to be getting a good deal of attention from the medical community?