Camden Chiropractic Center

“Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body…A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together…As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it…No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, ‘Get lost; I don’t need you’? Or, Head telling Foot, ‘You’re fired; your job has been phased out’? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the ‘lower’ the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach…The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.”

(Excerpts from 1 Cor 12:12-31 (MSG). < >.)

While reflecting on this sermon at church, it occurred to me that this passage correlates well with chiropractic. Our bodies work as one unit toward either health or hurt. Each part is important, but is also dependent on one of the most basic parts – the nervous system. As one of the first systems formed in our development, the nervous system contributes to the health of our other “different-but-similar” parts. When our spine is healthy and not interfering with the signals our nervous system needs to send to each part of our body, we feel healthy as a whole. When the opposite is true, we start to feel pain, manifested in different areas of our body. We were created this way for a reason. Chiropractic is a means by which we can help the body flourish as a whole, just as we were designed.