Neuroplastic Treatment: How it Might Work For You, Even if Nothing Else Has

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"One of my greatest joys is to observe how a series of NSA entrainment sessions can enable some people to experience a transformation of their health, mobility and quality of their life in ways they did not know were possible. I have written this article to help you understand how this might also be possible for you."
Canberra chiropractor
- Dr Jason Barritt

Nature has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself.
- Norman Doidge

If you have serious long term stubborn pain or mobility limitations related to musculoskeletal issues that have not responded well to other treatments, then this article, which explores Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself, could provide valuable new information for you. His book originally popularised the term Neuroplasticity.

Our world does change, and we have to adapt, especially when we are injured or have a new health challenge. However, the good news is, no matter what’s going on, our brain can usually find new strategies and abilities to not only help us cope but possibly also to help us thrive. Sometimes, it does need some outside assistance in order to stimulate it to take that action. .

Some people who have almost given up hope of improving their mobility, find they can achieve this with an effective neuroplastic method.

In some cases, I am able to help people access their neuroplastic capacity for change and repair in ways that can assist them to recover from severe injury or long term physical wear and tear, so they can reduce stubborn pain as well as physical limitations. 

“Change is the only constant in life.”
- Heraclitus.

When I studied neuroscience at UNSW in the late 1980s, I had never even come across the term neuroplasticity until I was offered a position as an honours candidate to research "Neuroplasticity in the Trigeminal System" of rats. Prior to that, universities still taught that the brain was unchanging and that, if damaged, it could not recover. This mindset limited the way treatments were designed and contributed to why so many people with injuries such as strokes or car accidents would have their treatment cut off too soon. I find this can certainly still happen, but armed with research similar to what Doidge presents in this book, I have been able to convince certain insurance companies and other third-party payers to approve further treatment in cases where they had previously stopped paying for treatment.

How To Increase Your Chance Of Making Deep, Long Lasting Stable Progress

At the time Doidge wrote The Brain That Changes Itself, he was a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher on the faculty at the Columbia University Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. 

With just slight movement, the joints in your body send multiple messages every second to your brain for processing so it can maintain your balance. These messages must travel via the spine. Problems in the spine may interfere with these messages.

In chapter one, when I read Doidge's account of the woman who perpetually fell everytime she stood up, I learned two new terms that scientists use in the field neuroplasticity. It was exciting and a great relief to read about these terms because I had observed the processes they represent in numerous patients but did not have the terminology to describe or explain it.

Picture by Megan Ruth, http://Pexels.com

Refractory Period: The first term is refr actory period, referring to the length of time the benefits from my particu lar neuroplastic treatment lasts. I found this exciting, not only because i t helped me to understand what I had observed so many times with my patien ts, but also because I knew it would help me explain a common and very fru strating experience my patients often encounter. That experience is for the m to feel like they are going backwards after noticing progress. I find th at to be very sad, because I have seen many times how that kind of regression may then, in some cases, be followed by further progress if the person continues to receive the treatment consistently. However, until I read The Brain That Changes Itself, I did not kn ow this aspect of the scientific understanding for why their progress can be so erratic. I felt excited when I read about the refractory period as I knew this new understandin g would help me to encourage my patients stick with their treatment program long enough to get a better idea of whether or not I was going to be able to help them ma ke deep, long lasting and stable progress.

Unfortunately, some people stop care before I can explain all this, which is one of the reasons I have written this article. My goal is for you to understand this process of healing and recovery, so if you experience regression (i.e. your symptoms return), you will be less likely to conclude "This treatment is not going to help me after all." Please let me know if you do ever get frustrated in any way. I realise that for some people, the progress is rapid and does not go up and down much at all. For them, it is easy to stay motivated. For others, it is more challenging, not just in time and effort, but also cost. Please feel free to share any of your concerns with me before you get to the point where you feel the need to give up.

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard, work, and learning from failure.”
- Colin Powell

Period of consolidation: The second term I found helpful is the period of consolidation. Doidge explained this as a period of time where progress does not appear to be happening. For example, in sport, we often hear that the athlete has reached a plateau. I find this an unfortunate term because the shape of a plateau is a rise, then a flat area, and then a decline, whereas in sport and in healing, as well as at school, what we want is overall progress towards a goal. The term period of consolidation helps us understand that progress is usually not a consistently straight upward slope. Instead, it includes periods where the body and/or the nervous system are changing and developing in ways that will soon advance to the point where we will be able to notice the benefits of that change.

That unseen change is like trying to measure progress while watching a large building being erected. If we are just measuring progress by what we can see looking from a distance on the ground, we would not be aware of the dozens of people and machinery working hard below ground level to create a solid foundation. Once that is done, have you noticed how quickly the building progresses upward?

We can't always measure progress by what is above ground and obvious. During a program of care with neuroplastic treatment, your body will be working on construction of new neural pathways before you notice all the results.

Usually, before a building starts to shoot up many floors within a few weeks, there will be many months of work in the planning, negotiations around finance and approvals, deciding which contractors and subcontractors will be involved. All of that takes a tremendous amount of work, yet no progress appears to be made on the physical building. Then work starts and it requires digging the dirt and rock, putting in pipes and laying lots of cement to make sure the building stays upright for many decades. Without that solid foundation, the building will deteriorate much more quickly. Having treated hundreds of injured people and others with chronic pain as well as many more with physical disabilities over the past 25 plus years, I have observed how a very similar process can occur in humans.

The term period of consolidation has been used in education for some time and by scientists studying memory. For example, a 2015 study states,

"Conscious memory for a new experience is initially dependent on information stored in both the hippocampus and neocortex. Systems consolidation is the process by which the hippocampus guides the reorganization of the information stored in the neocortex such that it eventually becomes independent of the hippocampus."

I know that sounds like scientific jargon, but it’s not as difficult as you may think. The hippocampus and neocortex are just the names for two different parts of the brain with different functions. My point is to give you a better idea of how much we do know about the way this process of consolidation works. Learning about this will perhaps make it easier for you to accept and be patient during times when it appears you’re not

The idea of being patient when getting well or recovering from injury is not new. After all, that is where the term 'patient' comes from!

making progress in whatever quest you are on, whether that's learning something new at work or embarking upon a treatment program to help you feel and be healthier.

Treatment frequency: Those same scientists also explain the temporary instability of new memories. This knowledge also helps us to understand why it’s important to have a sufficient level of treatment frequency to serve as reminders, just like we do when trying to learn any new complex task. So it's not surprising that when receiving a neuroplastic treatment, it can be a complex task for the body to learn to do more sophisticated repair work, therefore the treatment sessions, which can be thought of as the lessons needed in order to learn this process, usually need to be repeated more frequently at first. We all inherently know that if we learn a new task and don’t get back to it for a few weeks, it is likely to then feel like starting all over again. Yet, if we repeat it frequently enough, we can learn the new task more quickly and not forget it. Learning a language is a great example of this process. It’s better to study a new language three times a week for 15 minutes (a total of 45 minutes) than 90 minutes once a week.

Here's another quote about consolidation from the scientific article I quoted above:

"Memory consolidation refers to the process by
which a temporary, labile memory is transformed
into a more stable, long-lasting form."

Even with our best intentions we can still forget things. Our body also forgets what it has learned if it is not reminded. At the start of a neuroplastic treatment program it usually needs to be frequent, especially if the old patterns have been there a long time and are deeply hardwired.

This accounts for “the phenomenon of retroactive interference in humans, that is, the finding that learned material remains vulnerable to interference for a period of time after learning.” When I read that, it helped me further understand why it is that, when a new person comes in for their first neuroplastic treatment session with me and is very pleased with the results, but waits an entire week before returning for the second session, their nervous system is more likely to have forgotten what it learned.

By forgotten, I mean the nervous system is not "holding" the improvements as well as it would for someone who returns two to three days after their first session. This can make those people incorrectly conclude "This treatment is not going to lead to long-lasting results, so there's no point continuing." A similar process of consolidation happens on and off during a treatment program. People will often notice great progress in short bursts only then to have periods of apparent lack of progress in between those bursts of progress. But Doidge points out in his book how these periods of consolidation, where the nervous system is building new networks that will enable it to take the next leap forward in function, do of course represent very real progress within the nervous system but it may not be noticeable functionally or symptomatically. He points out that with repeated treatment sessions, further progress can be noticed again.

Working with Neurodiverse Brains

“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”
- Frank Lloyd Wright

The Brain That Changes Itself has been a source of great encouragement to many people with serious challenges. For example, Doidge tells the story of Barbara. “It is rare that a person who makes an important discovery is the one with the deficit, but there are some exceptions. Barbara Aerosmith Young is one of these.” At school in the 1950’s, she was regarded as retarded in some areas of mental function while having brilliance in other areas.

As Doidge puts it, Barbara reported having had trouble with questions like “Is an elephant bigger than a fly?” He reports that she said, “All I could figure out was that a fly was small, and an elephant is big, but I didn’t understand the words bigger and smaller.” Doidge describes her journey of figuring out how to help her brain overcome these kinds of limitations. She went on to develop many brain exercises and in 1980 started a school to help children with learning disabilities. He writes, “At the school, children who, like Barbara, have been unable to read a clock now work at computer exercises, reading mind-numbingly complex ten-handed clocks (with hands not only for minutes, hours, and seconds but also for other time divisions such as days, months, years) in mere seconds… By the time they finish, they can read clocks far more complex than those any normal person has to read.”

That's me learning to garden with Grandpa.

Babara’s story is a particularly interesting and important one for me personally because as a child I had learning disabilities. I struggled with spelling and writing essays. I found it hard to get the words and concepts in order. Today I would likely be diagnosed as dyslexic. To make matters worse, I had a prominent birthmark like a very large blister under my nose with blood vessels just under the skin with red and purple colours.

How I overcame my learning disability

If I had not been blessed with parents who never gave up on me by providing constant encouragement as well as multiple costly tutors, I doubt I would have ended up being able to go to university, which turned out to be something I really enjoyed and excelled at. In my final year I achieved ten high distinctions, first class honours, and a university prize. Achieving that required a lot of extra practice in the art of study over many years. It also required a good supply of grit and determination that enabled me to get up extra early at ages 13 to 15 so I could walk to the local station, catch a train, and walk a couple of kilometres to my reading and mathematics tutors. When finished, I would walk to high school. I also had help in primary school. Having now read about the benefits to the brain of learning an instrument, I realise that playing guitar from early primary school also played a big part in developing my brain that later enabled me to overcome learning impairments.

This is Mum at age 95 reading to me while I garden. As I write this, she is about to turn 98! I think good genes play a part in that achievement but there are also other things that we can do to support our heath.

Just writing that last paragraph brought back so much emotion that I could hardly read the page for tears — tears from being teased by the other kids, feelings of isolation in the playground because nobody wanted to play with me, tears of feeling stupid. I remember thinking, “I will beat this,” and so sat by myself under a comforting big pine tree in the playground and read the entire Alfred Hitchcock series while I was in fourth and fifth grades. Being different even led to being bullied for being gay in year 7 (although back then that was not the term they used).

Most of all, as I write this, I know these are tears of deep gratitude to my parents and all the love and guidance I received from incredibly devoted teachers starting very early through to the end of year 12. I can still play the scene in my head (one of my abilities) where my year 11 economics teacher explained to my parents that, while it took me a long time to complete my essays, the essays were getting really good, and while slowness made it hard for me during exams, she said “He has aspects of brilliance and will do well at university.” I reminded myself about those words many times when needing to push myself to do more hours of study. Without those reminders it would have been easy to think “What’s the point of trying?” just like the story below of the woman with two daughters.

I invented my own study scheduling system which I endeavoured to stick to. I somehow had a lot of optimism aided by an ability to forgive myself and promise to do better when I did not stick to the schedule. The schedule included getting up extra early in the morning to study. It also included precisely when I would start and stop studying different subjects as well as when I would exercise. For example, every 25 minutes, I would have a five-minute break and turn on some rock ‘n roll really loudly in the next room and do chin-ups on a beam that was part of the ceiling. It got to the point where I could do 20 full chin-ups in under 25 seconds.

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after 30 seconds.“
- Malcolm Gladwell

Just like muscles, the brain can also be trained to become more efficient and effective. That improved efficiency can be aimed at healing the body and resolving symptoms. As BJ Palmer, the developer of Chiropractic, said, "We never know how far reaching

Just like muscles, the brain can also be trained to become more efficient and effective.

something we may think, say or do today will affect the lives of millions tomorrow." I have appreciated that statement for decades and yet, on a less grand scale, I would say that... We never know how what we think, say or do today will benefit ourselves and others in the future. For example, doing all those chin-ups really built up my physique, which accomplished my goal at the time of being noticed by girls.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
- Peter Drucker

I'm confident that I would not have made that effort if my parents and teachers had not been so supportive. Setting myself goals and rewarding myself when they were achieved were also great drivers towards making further progress. That experience is one reason why I take extra time to learn so much about each new patent I see. I quantify each new patient's symptoms or other health concerns and then monitor them with periodic re-evaluations. That helps people to become more aware of their progress and to literally celebrate each win. Otherwise, when people have more than two or three symptoms, they can miss noticing some of this progress altogether. Without that, they may miss out on the reward of realising how much they are succeeding towards their health goals.

Doidge wrote the following about Barbara’s work:

Because so few others knew about or accepted neuroplasticity or believed that the brain might be exercised as though it were a muscle, there was seldom any context in which to understand her work. She was viewed by some critics as making claims – that learning disabilities were treatable – that couldn't be substantiated.

A Sense of Hopelessness

That example of Barbara being criticised for making unsubstantiated claims also describes what I have experienced many times, not only from critics but sometimes from new patients who have long-term stubborn pain, especially when combined with significant physical limitations. These people can develop a sense of hopelessness. Having talked with dozens of patients

Just because you've had spinal stiffness for a long time, and just because it has been getting worse, does not mean it can't be helped. Would it be worth the effort to find out?

with that sense of hopelessness, too many have either been told, “We have done all the tests and cannot find any problems, so it’s probably all in your head,” or “Your test results show some serious problems which you are going to have to live with because there are no treatments.” This experience can cause people to lose confidence in their own body’s ability to heal due to well-meaning practitioners who have only utilised what they know within the more traditional and well-understood methods. These treatments may work well for most people, but that does not mean they will work for everybody.

In other cases, not following through with treatment is blamed on a lack of finances and resources. I have seen many cases where the insurance company or hospital protocol restricts treatment due to limitations from cost cutting measures. Doidge tells the story of a man who had a stroke and was only given several weeks of physiotherapy in the hospital and then sent home. He was told that was all that could be done for him. Yet he still had severe disability from the stoke. Decades later he applied himself diligently to a neuroplastic treatment approach over many months that helped him regain much of his lost function.

Unfortunately, many people have never heard about the potential effectiveness of treatments with a strong neuroplastic component and some of those may continue to experience pain and/or physical limitation unnecessarily. I think it is particularly sad when this happens due to giving up as a result of developing a sense of hopelessness. A classic example of this was when practicing in Colorado, two sisters in their thirties brought their mother to see me for a chiropractic assessment. Sandra had severe pain and difficulty walking. She also had serious sleep disturbance due to pain waking her up, and had been like that for so many years that she had decided nothing could help her. I can see how people come to that conclusion when, as was true for Sandra, she had received all kinds of diagnostic studies such as x-rays, CT scans and MRIs and had been told by numerous doctors that she just needed to learn to live with it. After hearing that, she had understandably learned to accept her situation, which can be a good thing if it is true, but in this case it unfortunately resulted in her not being open to trying a very different type of treatment.
To the frustration of Sandra, here were her daughters suggesting that I might be able to help her. They told her about their own experience receiving neuroplastic treatment and wanted their mother to see it could help her. I performed a few tests on Sandra to see if certain dysfunctions were related to problems in her spine. That testing is something I still do as part of the Low-cost Initial Consultation. I discovered that at least some of her more significant problems were related to specific issues in her spine. I explained how these issues in her spine were affecting communication from her brain to her symptomatic areas. I also explained that my approach would not be to adjust (manipulate) those areas because, while that can be an incredibly effective way of helping spinal problems, she had already received that type of chiropractic care and it had not helped her.

Spinal stiffness is like water in a water logged field, pushing it out will usually mean it can return. Instead, I have found that stiffness is best reduced by teaching the nervous system how to let it go.

I then shared with Barbara that I believed the reason why adjustments had not worked for her was likely because her primary issue appeared to be extremely high levels of guarding deep within the spine and spinal cord causing very high levels of spinal stiffness. NSA practitioners call this finding "passive spinal stiffness". To me, passive spinal stiffness is like water in a swamp; you can't just pump it out and expect it to be gone, you must provide a constant drainage system; otherwise the water will come back. You can also correct the cause of the swamp by diverting the spring water somewhere else. For humans, the source of stiffness can be worry and stress, so that may also need to be worked on with assistance from other health professionals.

The residual effect of many years of worry and stress, as well as physical injuries on top of that stress, can often be released to a large extent utilising the strongly neuroplastic method I can provide. I explained to Sandra that in most cases (but not every case) on the very first detailed initial evaluation, I can objectively measure and demonstrate the release of that tension, as well as its positive ramifications in terms of reduced tenderness, muscle tightness, increased strength, and range of motion.

“That’s the problem with letting the light in—after it’s been taken away from you, it feels even darker than it was before.”
― Kim Liggett, The Grace Year

If we think of the light Kim is referring to as the hope that comes with any level of improved heath, then for some people, the fear of being let down if it were to go away again, can be too daunting to even risk trying.

I can still see and hear this dear woman’s response as well as the look of sadness and frustration on the faces of her two daughters when she said, “Oh Dr Barritt, you can’t help me, nobody can help me.” Sandra was so resigned to her condition that she would not even allow me to perform the initial thorough consultation. That consultation would have involved a detailed evaluation as well as neuroplastic treatment involving gentle touches to the spine and body. I then would have re-measured the same functional tests after treatment and have written it all up in a report to show and discuss any functional improvements at her follow-up visit.

To some extent, our ability to be active in our seniors years, may be increased and prolonged by our choices in our younger years.

We Can Create Our Own Sense of Optimism
By Taking Action

“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.“
- Vince Lombardi

I shared Sandra’s and my personal stories with you in the hope that these may help you understand the way our mindset can negatively impact our ability to benefit from utilising a different approach to our health care. For example, you might find that my initial thorough consultation, as well as my treatment, is different to anything you have tried thus far. That might be just what you need but if, based upon your past experience, you have already decided that nothing can help you, then you might never find out if that conclusion is true or not.

The most important message I hope you get out of this article, is that no matter what you want to achieve, if it involves overcoming a significant challenge, you’ll need to acquire at least some knowledge, seek assistance, make a plan, and accept the fact that it will usually require effort, consistency and persistence. To further ensure your success, I also recommend you find sources of encouragement and monitor your progress.

A Valuable Reflection That Could Change Your Life

Many people know what they can do to improve their lives, be it further study, a career change, regular exercise or some intensive care with a health practitioner. They have the knowledge but not the courage to face it head on and so instead choose to avoid it. Do you have the courage?

Here's a way that may be able to nudge you past your fears and concerns enough to take action. Earnestly ask yourself "What would my life look like and be like, and what dreams would I be more likely to achieve, if I were to make a stronger commitment to finding solutions to my health issues?

If your quest is to reduce long term stubborn pain or physical limitations, I commit to supporting you to the best of my ability in multiple aspects of your healing journey.

Jason Barritt B Sc. (Hons), DC

To learn more about the chiropractic method I use, including how it works to create positive change in the nervous system and body, please feel free to check out this article titled "LIVE BETTER with Pain Reduction and Enhanced Performance by Unlocking the Power of Neuroplasticity". You will also learn why it can be considered to be a powerful form of neuroplastic treatment.

Click here to learn about my Low-cost Initial Consultation.

References:

Squire, L.R. et al. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. V.7(8): 2015 Aug.

 This is why using chiropractic care to reduce pain, increase strength, flexibility and endurance can be so important.

Having More Than One Symptom May Impact Your Chiropractic Care

Something I have seen many times, is when a new person presents to me declaring only one problem, it could be headaches, low back pain or even leg pain, when I ask them if they have any other health concerns, the majority of people say "yes". However, sometimes the person will say they only have one or two problems and I will end up being able to document over a dozen symptoms. This can end up being very helpful in helping the patient which is why the title of the Danish study I'll discuss below got my attention.

The way chiropractic care can, in some cases, positively impact so many seemingly unrelated conditions never fails to amaze me. That’s why I think it's so important for me to spend the time to find out about all the “other” issues people might have, and to monitor them in detail from time to time during reevaluation sessions.

On their initial visit, people usually have two or three primary problems that they share because these are the issues most affecting their life. It may be that a particular symptom is affecting their golf game or ability to sleep. However, knowing about their other symptoms which are not as big a priority may help me to better understand the cause of their most bothersome symptoms.

Further, it maybe that their body responds to the treatment I provide by reducing their "other symptoms" first. I find for deep healing to occur, rather than just superficially covering up symptoms, we must respect the needs to the body. While this maybe frustrating at first, it usually provides encouragement for the person to know that positive change is happening and to be "patient" while the body does its healing work. After all, the need to be patient is is a very old word for people with health issues.

The body will often be able to minimise or even resolve the minor symptoms more easily and faster than resolving the primary symptoms. This then provides encouragement to the person to persists with chiropractic care long enough for their more stubborn primary symptoms to have a chance to improve.

A Danish study of over 2000 people seeing chiropractors observed that for those with low back pain, there is a 20 - 49% chance that they would also have other health conditions. These issues would include things like fitness, strength, endurance, balance and chronic health issues along with the pain that was usually the primary motivation to come in and see a Chiropractor.

More symptoms tends to decrease the rate of healing.

Comorbidity is the term used when a patient is suffering from multiple health issues at the same time. If you have a comorbidity, then you are more likely to require more treatment over a longer period of time. The Danish study reported that “patients with high lower back pain intensity combined with multimorbidity showed a poorer recovery than patients without chronic diseases.” This doesn’t mean improvement isn’t possible, however it does indicate it may take longer to achieve the desired outcomes because of the complications of having multiple health issues.

It’s interesting and helpful to note that the researchers also found that “generally speaking, people with multimorbidity and co-occurring musculoskeletal pain report high levels of disability, as well as more mental health problems, physical inactivity and obesity.” It’s not clear if the low physical activity and obesity caused

the low back pain, or if the low back pain caused the low physical activity and obesity. However, if we stop to think about it, we know that it can go either way, and can start a downward spiral towards poor health. Therefore, reducing pain while increasing strength, flexibility and endurance using chiropractic care and gentle exercise can be a very effective way to improve health and quality of life for those with multiple symptoms. To see the full study, please feel free to click here.

Dr Jason W. Barritt B.Sc (Hons) DC
Chiropractor

Move better. Feel better. LIVE BETTER.

Reference: Rafn, B.S., Hartvigsen, J., Siersma, V. et al. Multimorbidity in patients with low back pain in Danish chiropractic practice: a cohort study. Chiropr Man Therap 31, 8 (2023).

Pain reduction study compares chiropractic care with nerve root injections using MRI

If you have pain, numbness, or tingling in your back or running down an arm or leg, you might have ridiculitis. Chiropractors taken care of people with this condition for over 100 years. This study provides scientific evidence for anyone with these symptoms to consider, particularly if they've had the symptoms for more than just a few weeks.

“Radiculopathy is caused by a pinched nerve in your spine. More specifically, it happens when one of your nerve roots (where your nerves join your spinal column) is compressed or irritated. You might also see it referred to as radiculitis. Radiculopathy will cause the area around your pinched nerve to feel painful, numb or tingly.”

(Accessed 19 Nov 2023) https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22564-radiculopathy

Just in case you are not familiar with these terms, acute means “characterised by sharpness or severity of sudden onset, having a rapid or short duration, or being marked by keen awareness or perception.” The word chronic means “continuing or occurring again and again for a long time chronic pain chronic illness chronic” (Miriam Webster dictionary Nov 2023)

This study returned decisive results. 86.5% of the spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) patients reported, “clinically relevant improvement at 3 months compared with 49.0% of cervical nerve root injection (CNRI) patients.” Interestingly, there were some differences depending on whether the patient was acute or subacute/chronic. The two groups were comparable when it came to acute patients. But when evaluating the subacute/chronic patients alone, “78.3% of the SMT patients reported clinically relevant improvement at 3 months, compared with 37.5% of CNRI patients.” Click here to read more.

Check this page to find out about my consultation options.

Dr Jason W. Barritt B.Sc (Hons) DC
Chiropractor

Reference:
Peterson, C., Pfirrman, C.., Hodler, J., Schmid, C., Anklin B., and Humphreys, K., (2016). Symptomatic, magnetic resonance imaging-confirmed cervical disk herniation patients: a comparative-effectiveness prospective observational study of 2 age- and sex-matched cohorts treated with either imaging-guided indirect cervical nerve root injections or spinal manipulative therapy. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics. Vol. 39, Iss. 3., P210-217, March 2016, DOI 10.1016/j.jmpt.2016.02.004.

LIVE BETTER with Pain Reduction and Enhanced Performance by Unlocking the Power of Neuroplasticity

Canberra chiropractor asks...
Are you suffering from long term stubborn pain in any part of your body?

If so, you'll likely get a lot out of this article!

More and more people are finding that chronic pain, physical dysfunction and limitation in mobility, which has not responded to other types of treatment, may still respond well to various types of neuroplastic treatment. There are now a wide range of neuroplastic treatments to choose from. The method I use as a chiropractor is NSA care, which is a powerful neuroplastic treatment. My objective in writing this article is to help more people learn about the new possibilities available with Neuoplastic treatments. In this article I will also explain what neuroplasticity is, how NSA care works, and why it can be considered a neuroplastic treatment. I will also present research that found some very positive potential health benefits that may be gained by receiving NSA care.

Being a chiropractic method, NSA care targets musculoskeletal conditions. If this is something you would like assistance with then you may like to consider having a low-cost initial consultation with me. After that, if you decide NSA care is not applicable to your needs, I hope this article will have still helped you to want to explore other neuroplastic treatments that may be right for you.

This Neuroplastic Treatment may provide a noticeably different approach to pain reduction and enhanced musculoskeletal performance.

I have been asked by hundreds of patients ‘What is NSA care?’ and ‘How does it work?’ I answer these and other questions in this article, while also providing some of the scientific understanding that supports NSA care.

One of these principles includes using very gentle touches to "match the force" from one specific part of the body to another. Dr Donald Epstein, the developer of this chiropractic method extended the work of Dr Logan, also a chiropractor, who discovered how gentle contact to the sacrotuberous ligament, can stimulate the nervous system to recognise a second location anywhere in the spine and make corrections at that second area. Epstein has developed this method further and called this process an entrainment.

In a conversation I had with American neuroscientist, Dr Bob Blanks, he said he was fascinated by the predictability of the NSA method to create what he called "a strategy of self-correction". While he and I watched people receiving NSA entrainments, he pointed out the predictability of the observable responses created by touching one place in the spine and affecting another location via the nervous system.

What is neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is what makes learning possible. Like throwing a ball, accuracy can only be improved with practice. This happens because our brain has the ability to develop new neural pathways (also known as neural networks).

The understanding of neuroplasticity and its potential clinical value is explained by Norman Doidge, M.D. in his popular book, The Brain That Changes Itself.

Doidge wrote “I became interested in the idea of changing the brain because of my work as a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. When patients did not progress psychologically as much as hoped, often the conventional medical wisdom was that their problems were deeply “hardwired” into an unchangeable brain..."

He continued with "I began a series of travels, and in the process, I met a bunch of brilliant scientists, at the frontiers of brain science, who had made a series of unexpected discoveries. They showed that the brain changed its very structure with each different activity performed, perfecting its circuits, so it was better suited to the task at hand... If certain 'parts' failed, then other parts could sometimes take over. Scientists began to call this fundamental brain property ‘neuroplasticity.' Neuro is for 'neuron,' the nerve cell in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for changeable, malleable, modifiable."

Perfecting your circuits

I invite you to see if we can help you work towards "perfecting" the neural circuits in your body by utilising NSA care. Improving the performance of neural circuits involved in coordinating function after injury appears to be an effective way to assist recovery. Injury in the body may have been sudden and traumatic or due to repetitive injury caused over time due to poor habits. I have found NSA care can, in some people, be a very effective way to minimise dysfunction and symptoms in the body because it is a powerful form of neuroplastic treatment. I will provide scientific evidence of this assertion in this article.

Here's how NSA care can, in some cases, be used to significantly reduce symptoms and potentially help you live a happier, healthier, more productive life.

With over 30 years studying and practising NSA care, I have found that it can support some people to reduce the musculoskeletal aspects of a wide range of conditions, including:

• improved mood

• enhanced physical performance

• increased flexibility and strength

• reduction of overall symptoms, such as many types of deeply entrenched pain syndromes, including long-term chronic tenderness.

See the scientific references at the end of this article for evidence of the above.

In some cases, NSA care can provide a very different approach to other forms of chronic pain treatment. It appears to do this by enabling a change in the communication between the brain and body as well as developing feedback from the body back to the brain.

BRAIN FUNCTION: The brain has a role to play in controlling every function of the human body.

This is achieved by:

• sending messages to the body via the spinal cord and nerves;

• receiving messages back from the body, including the muscles, organs, joints and even the skin must give feedback to the brain which processes and responds to that information.

BodyMind MindBody Interaction: throwing a ball is a great illustration of just how important the feedback loop between the brain and body is for enabling the extraordinary ability we have to move though our day while avoiding injury and to heal when we do get injured. The thousands of functions our brain and nervous system must initiate and coordinate is mind-blowing (pardon the pun). Let's imaging you are throwing a ball. Here is what would need to happen:

• You first need to set the objective. In this case the ball to hit a very specific small target 20 metres away.

• Your brain must make complex calculations and choose a neural network that you already set up as a child;

• The chosen neural network will receive new instructions based upon the calculations that take into account the weight of the ball and the distance it has to be thrown as well as the cross wind etc;

• In order for those calculations to be accurate, the brain must first receive information about the exact position of every joint in your legs, back, neck, shoulders and arms.

• a decision is made that you are ready and the messages are released;

• the messages must be sent in the form of nerve impulses down the spinal cord, out though small gaps between the vertebrae via nerves to the muscles;

• if left just up to chance alone, without learned input from your brain and neural pathways, the likelihood of you hitting the target would be close to zero. But if you have done this many times before, practicing to refine those neural pathways then you will be much more likely hit the target!

To have accomplished that amazing feat is something just about all of us can do with practice. Some of us are wired in such a way that it's easy to achieve accuracy like that, and for others, it could take many dozens of hours of practice. But in my experience, nearly anything is possible if we put our mind to it. And it can happen much faster if we have a coach. In the example above, our brain would have needed to monitor the changes in position of all the joints of your neck, shoulder arm and hand. It must calculate the distance to the target as well as the speed you are moving toward or away from the target. It must do all this while you are in the process of throwing the ball. Can you imagine what an incredibly complex task that is? That’s why, the more times you practice throwing that ball at that target, the more your brain can refine your neural networks which will improve your accuracy. This is the process called “learning” and it applies to anything we want to learn.

To get the ball into the hoop his brain must receive information from almost every joint in his body.

Spinal Problems

Problems in the spine such as misaligned vertebrae (or back bones) can interfere with the vital communication pathway between the brain to the body, as well as the feedback messages that must constantly be rushed back to the brain. There are dozens of different chiropractic methods which can help restore optimal brain/body communication.

An artists impression of nerve cells interacting together as part of a neural network.

A core goal of NSA care for me, is to develop new neural pathways in a way that helps the brain to improve its ability to coordinate the body. I think that's why NSA care may provide hope to you even if you have not yet achieved the results you’ve been looking for.

Nerve messages jump between the nerve cells called neurons. Messages are sent down a part of the neuron called the axon and received by a neighbouring neuron in an area called a dendrite. Messages move through a single neuron in the form of electrical impulses. These electrical impulses must 'jump' between the ends of axons to the dendrite of another neuron. The transfer of information from one neuron to the next is achieved via the release of chemical substances into the space between the axon and a dendrite. These chemicals are called neurotransmitters.

How might NSA care be able to help you?

As a form of neuroplastic treatment, NSA care may help you with a wide range of long-term stubborn symptoms by improving the way your nervous system and body functions. Not only do I find that NSA care can be an effective way to reduce certain symptoms, but every day in my practice I measure the way it enhances the body’s performance. I do this by performing a range of functional tests (please see my video called "What to expect on your first two visits."

Here's a list of symptoms and conditions I find NSA care may be able to assist people to reduce and in some cases resolve:

• neck pain

• shoulder pain

• arm pain

• wrist and hand pain

• leg pain

• lower back pain

• upper back pain

• some types of headache

• facial pain

• jaw pain

• scoliosis

• numbness and tingling.

Please note, results cannot be guaranteed and individual results vary.

Here's more on how NSA care can be used to effectively reduce symptoms and potentially help you live a happier, healthier, more productive life.

With new patients, my initial focus is to:

• develop greater ease and fullness of breath to the spine and body.

• reduce passive spinal stiffness and asymmetric restriction of movement

• encourage the spine to realign itself, rather than rely on me to correct spinal misalignments

• help you optimise your strength and range of motion.

With NSA care, the development of this response is known as ‘creating a strategy of self-correction’. The first time I heard that term, it was used by Professor Bob Blanks in the early 1990s when he sat beside me during an NSA entrainment session at a Transformational Gate event that involved at least 40 people, all receiving NSA entrainments at the same time.

Professor Blanks, a neuroscientist and the first author of a study that looked at data from 2818 people receiving NSA care, said at the time that it was the largest wellbeing study ever conducted¹.

I remember Professor Blanks commenting on the predictability of self-corrective responses generated by the NSA practitioners as they entrained people. For example, his passion was neuroscience so I saw him get quite excited a few times saying things like (and I paraphrase) "look, look, the practitioner is touching that point in the sacrum but vectoring up to the neck and it's going to respond in the upper cervical spine" and sure enough it would!

How I first became interested in neuroplasticity.

I completed my degree in anatomy at the University of New South Wales and received first-class honours in 1989. My thesis was titled “Neuroplasticity In The Trigeminal System.” During my research, I discovered a nerve that helped to answer questions that had puzzled scientists for years. I have attended over 40 seminars and workshops on NSA in the United States and Australia between 1990 and 2017. In the early 1990s I made the link between NSA care and it being a form of neoplastic treatment.

What is an entrainment?

Instead of the word ‘treatment’, NSA chiropractors use the word ‘entrainment’ to describe what we do to achieve specific results for our patients.

‘Entrainment is defined by a temporal locking process in which one system's motion or signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system. This process is a universal phenomenon that can be observed in physical (e.g., pendulum clocks) and biological systems (e.g., fire flies). However, entrainment can also be observed between human sensory and motor systems.’ ⁸

Similar research has now been published about NSA care³. However, rather than using sound, NSA research shows how touches to very specific locations in the spine can entrain self-corrective spinal movement patterns, resulting in numerous health benefits.

An NSA entrainment involves gentle touches to the spine and/or body.

That definition comes from a team of researchers who were studying music therapy. They showed that inherent periodicity of auditory rhythmic patterns could entrain movement patterns in patients with movement disorders.

Similar research has now been published about NSA care³. However, rather than using sound, NSA research shows how touches to very specific locations in the spine can entrain self-corrective spinal movement patterns, resulting in numerous health benefits.

How does the entrainment work?

In order for the second crystal glass to be entrained by the first glass and start vibrating, both must be identical. Even the two gasses in the picture above might not be identical, so if you try this at home, whether or not it works will depend upon the quality of the glass.

To answer that question I'd like to use a common example of entrainment. Have you ever put two identical crystal glasses near but not touching each other then tapped just one of them gently with something like a teaspoon? If you have tried this, you may have noticed that when you stop the vibration of the one you tapped by touching it with your fingers, you’ll be able to hear the other one making the same sound that the original glass made. This happens even though you did not touch the second glass. It is because the second glass picked up the vibration from the first glass. This can only occur if both glasses are exactly the same size and made of the same material. Only only then will they have precisely the same pitch and be able to respond to the vibration of the glass that was tapped by the spoon. When this happens, we say the first glass entrained the second glass.

I used to do this a lot as a child and most people I ask say they have done this as a child because they were fascinated by the process. It will also work with two identical tuning falks. If you have not tried it please give it a go and please let me know how it goes!

In NSA, we utilise this entrainment process to achieve something similar in the spine and body by matching the force at one point in the spine with the force (or tension) in the target location. When done correctly, it will create a self-corrective response at the target location. It can take a while to achieve this which is why you'll notice the practitioner's finger or thumb contact will be used in different locations and for different lengths of time. It takes longer for this to develop in some people compared to others, yet many people find it exciting when their body learns this process, even if they are one of the people that has so much stiffness and other issues that must first change before these powerful mechanisms of self-correction can begin to appear during the NSA entrainment session. In these cases it can require more visits per week over a longer period of time before the brain can learn to overcome those barriers to change.

Think of it like learning anything worthwhile like playing an instrument. We have a term for those that learn some specific task more quickly than others and we say "She's a natural". And we also know that just because someone does not "pick it up" right away, it does not mean they won't learn to play the instrument beautifully if they work harder at it.

Practice members versus patients.

Another curious aspect of NSA care terminology is that instead of using the word ‘patient’, which implies there is something wrong with the person receiving NSA care, NSA partitioners will often use the term ‘practice member’. This is because, while many people with severe pain and physical limitations benefit therapeutically from NSA care, other people without any symptoms at all, choose to receive NSA care because it helps them in other ways. This can be things like stress reduction, enhanced muscle strength, less sense of stiffness and greater flexibility. In fact, the Blanks study listed below concluded that NSA care led to a very large improvement in quality of life. I discuss the types of benefits that were seen by those researchers in my article called Gentle & Effective Chiropractic Care in Canberra.

Can neuroplastic treatment deliver results even when years of trying other methods have not?

In my experience, if you’re in this situation and have not yet given up hope, you may already be looking for a very different treatment approach. An effective neuroplastic treatment such as NSA care might provide a solution because it can be very different to conventional treatments.

A primary objective I bring to the way I utilise NSA care is to correct the cause of symptoms. Many other practitioners also look to correct the cause of symptoms, but if that has not worked for you, then it may be that the methods used did not sufficiantly change the way your nervous system is functioning. That is, it may not be a strongly neuroplastic treatment.

Why might a neuroplastic method work for you?

Your brain plays a vital role in controlling every function of your body. Together with the spinal cord and nerves, the brain not only controls things like balance and movement but regulates our level of sensitivity to painful stimuli. This is known as our 'pain threshold'. NSA care appears to be very effective at reducing tenderness levels. I test and document tenderness levels on all my patients, therefore I can say with confidence, that at least nine out of every ten people notice reduced tenderness in over a dozen points in their spine and body immediately after their first NSA entrainment session.

For some people, physical and/or emotional trauma, whether as a one-off event or repetitive trauma, has unconsciously taught their brain and body to be overly guarded. This could also be the case for you.

Being overly guarded can lead to a lower pain threshold which results in having more pain because a lower pain threshold means you only need a very small event such as a bump or even emotional stress to trigger pain.

My hypothesis

Please note, that having a hypothesis is just the start of the scientific method. To prove a hypotheses usually takes many years of research. There is an interesting discussion on this concept here that states "When a (certain IT) function was designed, the developers feared that some errors might occur. However, these errors never occur and workers have used it for years." They then go on to explain that the function had never been proven because it may still fail. These discussions go on in philosophical circles, yet for practical purposes, I think it is important to test these things for ourselves if there is evidence it may work when there is a need and the risk of injury is low.

My approach to clinical practice, which includes carefully measuring and documenting multiple functions before and after NSA entrainment, has led me to an important observation. This clinical approach revealed to me, that people with long-term severe pain in multiple areas of their body, often have abnormally low pain thresholds. This has meant they experience pain for either no apparent reason, or they experience pain in the area of old injuries that, according to medical assessment, have "healed well". Even when pain or dysfunction still exists, I have found that I have been able to retrain the brain-body communication in some of these people, so that their pain reduces or, in some cases even resolves. My hypothesis is that the NSA has either helped their nervous system increase the pain threshold and thereby ignore stimulation from minor bumps or other forms of stimulation with the help of NSA care, or the NSA care has reduced the tension in the spine and body resulting in lowered inflammation levels. It could be a combination of both.

To illustrate the connection between tension and inflammation, imagine for a moment that you are carrying a 5kg bag of potatoes in each hand. Instead of just letting it hang by your side, you bend your elbow to 90 degrees and hold it like that for 5 minutes. Can you now imagine the pain building in your bicep muscle? The tension creates inflammation and inflammation creates the pain. The pain reduces within seconds after you put the bags down. Try it out if you have not done something like that in a while and I'm sure you'll experience that for yourself. Three of the tests I perform during the initial consultation are to measure spinal stiffness, muscle tightness and tenderness levels. The stiffness and muscle tightness nearly always reduce to some extent after the first NSA entrainment, which helps to explain why many points of tenderness also very often reduce at the same time.

Evidence for this pain threshold hypotheses has been formulated from:

• combining my traditional chiropractic training, which utilised objective measurements such as tenderness, muscles strength and range of motion with new NSA measurements.

• quantifying and documenting specific points of tenderness on new patients and at re-evaluations,

• rechecking these scores immediately after their first NSA entrainment and observing that tenderness scores noticeably reduced in over 95% of patients during that first NSA entrainment.

• adding up all the tenderness scores for ten consecutive patients and finding an average improvement of over 50% in tenderness during the first treatment. I am currently working on publishing the data I have gathered from more than 100 patients.

I also paid close attention to Dr Donny Epstein, the developer of NSA care. Epstein had discovered a way to teach the brain and nervous system to enhance its ability to communicate with the body and also for the body to give improved feedback to the brain. Research found that NSA care can teach the nervous system to develop more complex strategies in order to heal more effectively.¹

NSA care as a Neuroplastic Treatment

A neuroplastic treatment is one capable of significantly altering neural pathways which can result in positive changes such as helping the body to gain greater function, repair damage and improve performance.

PAIN THRESHOLDS: Chronic pain can be a result of an abnormally low pain threshold. This is where even a small stimulus, such as a mild irritant, or a minor bump can cause significant prolonged pain. Any treatment that can help the brain to raise an abnormally low pain threshold can be considered a neuroplastic treatment. As noted above, I observe that NSA care appears to be able to achieve this in very effectively in some cases.

Similarly, treatment methods that can help the brain to learn how to strengthen and coordinate movements of the spine, as well as the arms and legs, would also be considered neuroplastic treatments. I have also observed that NSA can achieve those functional changes effectively in some cases.

Every day in my practice, I document the way NSA care, in some cases, can make changes in all of those functions. However, not all neuroplastic treatments are equal in terms of the range of problems and conditions they can address or the consistency of their effectiveness. For example, some types of neuroplastic treatment focus on very specific problems such as balance or vision.

What does the NSA practitioner actually do to generate self-corrective neurological responses in the body?

NSA chiropractors usually avoid putting direct attention (i.e., extra stimulus) into symptomatic areas of the body. This means instead of adjusting, rubbing, doing surgery or injecting the area that is painful, the NSA practitioner endeavours to find ways of encouraging the brain to develop a new self-corrective strategy in those problem areas.

We do this by using the NSA system of spinal analysis to identify and monitor a range of indicators for spinal dysfunction. Some examples of these spinal health indicators include passive spinal stiffness, ankle tension and pelvic distortion. For my evaluation, I also consider other spinal health indicators, including range of motion, tenderness, muscle strength and posture.

Spinal health indicators

I use the following four indicators to find out how to apply gentle thumb or finger pressure along the spine and body. Close attention must be paid to each of this indicators for the person's body to respond.

1. Location of NSA contact: A further system of analysis tells the practitioner exactly where in the patinet’s body, the practitioner’s finger pressure needs to be applied. If this is misplaced by even 1 cm, the response of the patient can be greatly reduced or not occur at all.

Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

"Profound healing is initiated in my patients by gentle touches that can be as light as a feather."

Dr Jason Barritt, (Chiro)

2. Amount of force applied: This force ranges from between being “as light as a feather” to being quite firm. However, this is usually not more than the finger pressure we can tolerate when pushing on our eyelid when our eye is closed.

3. Length of contact time: In order to develop the desired NSA self-corrective response, the length of time must be varied. Sometimes this needs to be less than a second, while at other times this may need to be held for many seconds.

4. The patient's defensive mechanisms: The patient's defensive mechanisms: We have all had various emotional and physical stresses in our past. I have observed how parents are often surprised to see how much their child’s body has responded to stress by tightening up the muscles in the back and neck. That can then cause pain and even reduce strength and coordination. Increased stiffness between the vertebrae (bones) in the back is another common result of stress. The older we get the more time we have to build up this tightness and tension in our body so it becomes a deeply rooted defensive pattern that can take considerable time and effort to change. This is where a neuroplastic treatment method can be an ideal choice.

Long term tension and tightness can create resistance to positive change. In some cases, this can be due to tension in the nerves. Some people can release this type of tension very quickly, while others need considerably more "brain training" in order to learn a new way for the brain and body to interact before the stiffness and tightness can be released.

If you were to receive NSA care form me, one of my primary goals would be to retrain parts of your brain and nervous system so your body could learn how to reduce or even eliminate abnormal function that may be the cause of your current symptoms. The Blanks study found NSA care resulted in not only symptom reduction, but also a large improvement in overall health and well-being for a high percentage of people.

This very gentle method is designed to:

• teach the body to develop well defined, self-corrective spinal movements;

• create proactive self-correction of the spine and body, which in a high percentage of people leads to profound improvements in health, even in cases where the person has not been able to make progress in the past;

• redefine how the body and brain communicate, underpinning the concept that positive change can occur in the nervous system, even with a non-intrusive and gentle approach such as NSA care. Researchers have found that NSA care can achieve this, for example, “...the sEMG (surface electromyography) signal of NSA reveals a new class of complex nonlinear dynamic behaviour..." ²

• develop increasingly stronger and more complex self-corrective spinal movements.

Improved human function, performance & health

The more complex these self-corrective movements become, the more your nervous system will learn new ways of refining how it functions. I have discovered how to help the brain and nervous system to target problem areas in the body. In some cases, this approach can then lead to enhanced capacity for extraordinary functional and symptomatic improvement.

Flexibility is one of the human spine's important attributes. Chiropratic care can help to maintain your range of motion and overall mobility.

This ability of NSA care to create positive neuroplastic change is well illustrated by the following excerpt from another scientific paper:

‘...the synaptic strengths are adjusted, the neural pathways are established, and consequently, the signal becomes less random.”³ In essence, these scientists are saying that potentially, there can be very positive neurological changes resulting from NSA care.’

Many practitioners say they are treating the cause, not just the symptom. Here’s a few things to look out for that may help you to better asses whether or not there is actually evidence for that assertion.

A major difference between NSA care as a particularly strong neuroplastic treatment approach compared to some other treatment methods, is that the practitioner seeks to help the patient's body identify areas of dysfunction and develop a proactive process of self-correction in order to minimise those dysfunctions. A process that, over time, most people will feel happening within their spine and body as well as be able to see it happening.

Imagine that you have injured a part of your back or neck, or perhaps your shoulder, wrist, hip, knee, ankle or even your jaw. My approach would be to help your spine learn to respond to NSA care, which involves creating spontaneous self perpetuating contractions in the spine. This usually starts by the person responding to my gentle touches with increased breath in a stiff area of their back or neck. When this is repeated one, two or three times per week for a few weeks, it can develop into movements between individual vertebrae (AKA backbones). These are points of oscillation. Once that occurs, my goal is to direct your nervous system's attention into the problem area and develop self-corrective movements in that location. In my experience, this process can create some very positive results.

This approach can be an ideal way to correct the cause of stubborn debilitating symptoms and/or mild to severe physical limitations. I think this is because NSA care utilises very different physical assessment tools. I also use several more traditional chiropractic assessment tools. These tools help me, as the practitioner, to identify both obvious and subtle dysfunction in the spine that may not only be causing symptoms like pain, numbness and tingling etc, but to also identify spinal dysfunctions that are causing performance limitations. The following physical limitations that may improve with this approach includes poor physical endurance, weakness, non-optimal coordination, as well as mental/emotional, life enjoyment that diminished overall quality of life. Those performance limitations are discussed in my article titled “NSA Care Research at Irvine College of Medicine”

You may be like many of my patients who notice improvement in at least some of these dysfunctions immediately after their very first consultation. For example, given symptoms are the body’s alarm bells alerting us to abnormal function, when NSA care enables the brain to improve the way the body functions, the body is in a better state to be able to reduce symptoms, even if they have been present for many years.

The NSA care approach can also be different to may other methods of health care in the following way. Rather than look for a tight muscle and rub, stretch, dry needle it or inject a drug into it, with the goal of forcing the muscle to relax or the inflammation to go away without necessarily having corrected the cause of those issues, the NSA practitioner utilises a system of analysis and treatment consisting of gentle touches done in a special way, so the brain and body can learn to make its own corrections.

Downside Or Benefit?

Please note: Some people find there is a down side to the neuroplastic approach. This is because in come cases it can require more frequent treatment sessions in order for the nervous system to "learn" how to function differently. NSA care can pose the same challenge. While sometimes it will deliver very rapid symptom relief when other methods did not deliver any relief, but for many people it is slower to achieve this. In some cases, I think this can happen because my main focus during the first few entrainment sessions, is to identify and minimise dysfunction, not just to suppress symptoms. That approach can be particularly problematic if it allows the cause of those symptoms to fester in the background only to come back with a vengeance later. Having studied and practiced chiropractic and worked with thousands of people for over 30 years, I have come across many people who, quite understandably, find themselves in a situation where they can’t afford the time or money to thoroughly identify and resolve their issues by focussing on the enhancement of function and performance. They simply need to get back to work by minimising symptoms and choose to worry about the deeper issues later.

If that might be a concern for you, it does not mean I am not going to be able to give you rapid relief and perhaps provide that more quickly than some other approaches to health care. Therefore, it could still be a good idea to take a look at my website’s Services Page for the article called consultation options. You may then decide between the Low-cost Initial Consultation or my Full Initial Chiropractic Consultation. Some people have found it useful when I am bale to show them areas of dysfunction in their body because this can then help them make decisions about their treatment going forward, even if that is with another practitioner.

How long will It take to feel better?

I'd like to make one last comment about this issue of how quickly you might respond to NSA care. I estimate that well over 50% of my patients notice some symptomatic improvement after their very first NSA entrainment. I can also confidently say, and indeed all clinical records of hundreds of my patients document, that at least 90% of people do gain some degree of noticeably improved function on their very first NSA entrainment, even if they didn’t notice positive symptomatic changes.

The fact that some people can gain significant functional improvement and not reduce symptoms on their very first NSA entrainment session, is why I always set up an extended consultation 3 to 4 weeks into the treatment program so we can discuss your progress. I find, that even for those few people who have not yet noticed symptomatic improvement by that time, they will do so during that discussion. How do they do that you may be asking? It's because when we look at my detailed notes quantifying their symptoms from the first consultation, I am usually able to help them see that they have in fact made significant symptomatic improvement. While this only happens in a small fraction of cases, it can be because they initially had multiple symptoms, and when a couple of those improve, the remaining symptoms dominate their awareness and they didn't notice the progress.

Some people continue with NSA care well after their symptoms are gone. The gentle forces applied by the NSA practitioner is given in a special sequence that can stimulate the brain to improve the way it is communicating with the parts of the body that are functioning abnormally. This means the abnormal pattern of communication between the brain and spinal cord with the muscles, tendons and potentially even the organs of the body, which initially led to symptoms, may then start to normalise. What many of my patients have discovered, is that while they no longer have symptoms, they can still make further progress toward a state of greater wellbeing with NSA care. This is like a musician who already plays the piano very well but wants to feel the joy of playing even better. Please note, your health insurance usually only pays for “treatment of symptoms” and not for “wellness care”.

Creating an active strategy of self-correction with 'The Network Wave’

A 2016 study investigated the spinal wave phenomenon termed The Network Wave. This involves a visible undulation and specific rocking movement of spinal segments, which is elicited through gentle contacts in a defined sequence to the spine at specific areas.”³ The Network Wave phenomenon has been developed within NSA protocols. The word ‘wave’ comes from the fact that the recipient can experience, and the observer can see, an obvious wave-like movement that runs from one end of the spine to the other during an NSA treatment session in people who have achieved a higher level of response from their NSA care.

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When walking, a horse has three hooves on the ground most of the time. Trotting, cantering and galloping each use totally different CPGs resulting in changes to the patterns of leg movement.

When galloping, like the horse in the picture above, there are times when there are no hooves touching the ground. This never happens when walking or trotting.

Measuring "The Network Wave" – a new scientific discovery

The Network Wave has been studied⁴ since 1998 ‘through the use of surface electromyography (sEMG) to measure the electrical changes in the muscle system. Since 1998, sEMG has been used as a window into the central nervous system.’ ³

Researchers have analysed the sEMG signal to determine whether The Network Wave had different attributes based upon the NSA levels of care.⁵ Another study published in 2009 concluded that ‘the objectively established fact that the signals become less random and more predictable can be interpreted to reveal a better “organization” of the neural circuitry at advanced levels of care.”⁶

New mathematical approaches were developed by Irvine College of Medicine scientists to further understand the phenomenon of The Network Wave⁷. Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) are found in all vertebrate animals, of which humans are a member. A CPG enables complex patterns of movement to feel automatic to the person or animal engaging the movement.

NSA researchers discovered a CPG in the human spine that was previously unknown. It was first reported in 2016 by Senzen et.al.³

You can think of a CPG as being like gears in a car. Let’s use a horse as a way to understand this more easily. A horse has 4 CPGs in its nervous system that predetermines its four unique patterns of movement. These are walking, trotting, cantering and galloping. The horse selects totally different CPGs, for each different speed range. That is similar to what we do when we change gears in a car. However, unlike gears, each CPG does not simply determine speed through ratios between cogs. Instead, this is achieved in horses and other animals, by being able to choose between different patterns of leg movement.

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Practice makes perfect

At the beginning of this article, I quoted researcher and psychiatrist Dr Norman Doidge. He was talking about the early discoveries in the science of neuroplasticity. He wrote "They showed that the brain changed its very structure with each different activity performed, perfecting its circuits, so it was better suited to the task at hand." I find that I am able to document at least some functional improvement in the very first NSA entrainment for at least 90% of my patients.

“There’s no way around hard work. Embrace it. You have to put in the hours because there is always something you can improve on”
Roger Federer

These people are also usually able to observe those functional improvements during their first NSA session. However, it's also important for me to let you know that, just as Dr Doidge points out how it's a process of perfecting the neural circuits; in other words, something that people need to learn over time and it's usually not an immediate magic bullet, so too is NSA care a learning process. The positive changes tend to become more significant and last longer with repeated 'lessons'. This means regular NSA entrainment sessions are usually needed over a period of several weeks in order to learn the self-corrective process.

If you are looking for someone to “fix” you in one or two sessions, then NSA care may not be for you. While I have had cases where a severe long term symptom has disappeared on the first session and never returned, that is unusual.

If you have stubborn long term health issues such as ‘chronic pain’, ‘severe generalised tenderness’, ‘pins and needles’ or scoliosis, just to name a few, and are looking for a very different approach that may offer a solution, then NSA care could be a good fit for you. A primary goal of mine is to help your body learn an enhanced strategy of self-correction. This is how I have been able to help many hundreds of people to heal from old trauma or dysfunction that developed from so called 'bad' habits. Bad habits can be things like poor posture, sitting on your wallet, spending many hours in a chair or matress that does not support you properly.

Another positive feature of NSA care is that once your body learns its strategy of self-correction, then this learned strategy tends to remain so the reduced symptoms as well as improved function enables you to perform better. This is why, at the Body Mind Empowerment Centre, we say that we want to help you to Move better, Feel better, and LIVE BETTER.

The choice will always be yours:

• Some people still find it beneficial and enjoyable to receive NSA care regularly, even after their major symptoms have abated. This is usually at a reduced frequency such as once a month.

• Others feel like it has helped them to meet their health goals and so stop care all together.

Dr Jason W. Barritt B.Sc (Hons) DC
Chiropractor

© Optimal Health Centre Pty Ltd February 2022 (All rights reserved)

Further reading

• View NSA entrainment demonstrations in our video library.
• Read my summary of the Blanks study ¹. In this summary article, I explain the evidence that supports NSA care and how it can reduce symptoms and enhance overall performance, such as strength, endurance, flexibility and range of motion, as well as support positive mental and emotional states. While individual results cannot be guaranteed, the Blanks study found 95% of 2018 NSA research subjects reported their expectations had been met.

Book your initial low-cost consultation

During my 20-minute low-cost initial consultation you will receive:

• several gentle, non-invasive tests that can help me know if you have spinal problems that may be the cause of your symptoms, and

• demonstrate how your overall physical performance may be connected to specific problems in your spine.

If I am able to find that connection, then I am confident in my ability to use NSA care as an appropriate and potentially very effective next step for you on your healing journey.

Request your initial consultation now...

References:

(1) Blanks, R.H.; Shuster, T.L.; Dobson, M.A. Retrospective Assessment of Network Care Using a Survey of Self-Related Health, Wellness and Quality of Life, Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, 1997,Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 15-31.

(2) Jonckheere, E.A.; Losoonthorn, P.; Boone, R. (2003). “Dynamic modeling of spinal electromyographic activity during various conditions.” Proceedings of the 2003 American Control Conference. 1:465-470.

(3) Senzen S, Epstein D, Lemberger D. The Network Spinal Wave as a Central Pattern Generator. J Altern Complement Med. 2016 Jul 1; 22(7): 544–556

(4) Bohacek S, Jonckheere E. Chaotic modeling in network spinal analysis: preliminary report. Nonlinear canonical correlation with alternating conditional expectation (ACE). J Vert Subl Res 1998;2:188–195

(5) Jonckheere E, Bohacek S. Chaotic modeling in network spinal analysis: mathematical classification of levels 1, 2, 3 patients. Los Angeles: Department of Electrical Engineering and Department of Mathematics, University of Southern California; 2000

(6) Jonckheere E. Network spinal analysis. J Altern Complement Med. 2009;15:469–470

(7) Jonckheere E, Lohsoonthorn P. Dymamical modeling in network spinal analysis: bursting versus background mode discrimination. Los Angeles: Department of Electrical Engineering Systems, University of Southern California; 2002

(8) Michael H Thaut 1, Gerald C McIntosh 2, Volker Hoemberg 3

Neurobiological foundations of neurologic music therapy: rhythmic entrainment and the motor system, Front Psychol, 2015 Feb 18;5:1185