Accidents and injuries over a lifetime create wear and tear on our ligaments and tissues allowing our joints to slip into a misaligned position. When this occurs in the upper neck it triggers a cascade of postural reflexes that activate different muscles along the entire spine to maintain you in an upright posture, similar to the action of strings moving a puppet.
The imbalanced muscle action leads to an uneven distribution of weight on your joints, which, if left uncorrected, can cause inflammation, pain, and degeneration. This adaptive postural reflex can contribute to common conditions, such as neck pain and headaches, jaw dysfunction, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, and even feelings of dizziness and brain fog.
In addition, your posture also affects the function of your internal organs. The region of the nervous system that is most impacted by misalignments in the upper neck is called the brainstem. The brainstem is responsible for a lot of functions that don’t require conscious thought, such as blood pressure and heart rate, breathing, digestion, sleep, and our subconscious postural control system. An upper cervical misalignment may disrupt communication between the brainstem and downstream organs resulting in abnormal function.
