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Imagine walking across a room with a stack of plates when someone bumps you. You manage to hold on and not lose any of the plates, but now the plates aren't neatly stacked anymore. That's exactly what can happen to your spine in a car accident. Unfortunately, you can't often realign your own spine. That's where the chiropractor comes in.

The spine is a stack of bones separated by discs and the whole thing is held together by muscles around the outside. If something gets dislodged, those muscles act like rubber bands to hold it together. Here's an example: take 5 spools of thread and string them on a piece of twine. Now, take a large rubber band and put it lengthwise around the spools. The rubber band keeps the spools together. Now, push one of the spools out of alignment. Notice that the rubber band is still pulling and with that one spool part way out of the stack, it tends to throw a curve into the line of spools. That's what that car accident does to you.

The reason to be so careful about the spine is the bundle of nerves carried by the spinal cord that runs down the middle of the whole affair. Protected by the disc rings and the bones, if one of the bones or discs is dislodged, the spinal cord is vulnerable to pressure. Depending on where the out of place thing is, you could get numbness or pain in your hip, leg, or foot. If it's let go too long, you may have permanent nerve damage and could lose feeling permanently in that limb. Plus, it's no fun being in pain. You could always take the pain pills prescribed by your family doctor, but that's treating the symptom, not the cause.

The hospitals used to solve the misalignment problem by putting people in traction. This meant strapping them on to something, attaching a halo to the skull, and adding weights to it to actually pull the spine apart so the vertebrae and discs could realign themselves. Chiropractic does the same thing in a different way.

A chiropractor will first take an X-ray of your spine to see exactly what's out of whack. He (I'm just using he' because all my chiros have been men) will then position you on a table and use pressure to pop those bones back into place. Unless you also have muscle damage, this is a painless procedure, though it is a bit disconcerting to hear pops and crackles coming from your spine.

Neck injuries are treated differently. I had one chiro with whom I dreaded this realignment. He'd stand in back of me and hold my head in both hands and wrench it one way or another. There

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