Asthma? Chiropractic can alleviate your symptoms

After reading the title you might think: how can a chiropractor help with asthma? Then you’ve probably never thought about the influence a poor posture has on asthma. The collective name for all the bones in your body is your skeleton. This is the structural framework of your body and allows you to stand upright. Your posture is the way you hold your body up when you’re standing, sitting and lying down. The structure of your body determines how well your body functions. When your structural framework collapses and you start slumping this can cause problems in your body.

Your spine protects a very important part of your body: your spinal cord. You can look at this as the highway for nerve signals between your brain and the rest of your body. If your body is slumped or crooked this can affect the nerves that run out from your spinal cord between your spinal bones to other parts of your body. This way a slumped posture may cause all sorts of pain, but it can also play a role in other health problems like asthma.

So a slumped posture can affect the nerves going to your lungs, but the pressure that a poor posture puts on your lungs can also play a role in how well your lungs work. A poor posture can make it more difficult to breathe, because that way there’s less space for your lungs to expand in your chest. Try to breathe in when you’re sitting upright, and also when you’re slumped on your chair. You should notice that it’s easier to take a deep breath when you’re sitting upright.

Unfortunately a lot of people these days have a bad posture. Often this is because we sit way too much and we use computers, smartphones and tablets too often. Falls and accidents can also be a cause for a slumped or crooked posture. Of course your muscles try to compensate for this, but they will quickly fatigue. This leads to you spending most of your day in a bad posture.

Good posture can reduce breathing-related problems. In particular, the correction of forward head positions and downward sagging chests can improve the quality of breathing a lot. So a chiropractor doesn’t ‘treat’ asthma, but can help with any underlying structural problems that contribute to the symptoms of asthma.

I use special techniques that usually show an immediate improvement in posture. Curious? Click here to make an appointment.