Chiropractic Care

Chiropractic is a natural, hands-on healthcare profession focused on the relationship between the spine, nervous system, and the body’s overall function. Your nervous system controls how your body moves, feels, and adapts to daily life, and the spine plays a key role in protecting it. Chiropractic Family Care aims to support your body’s ability to heal, move well, and function at its best — whether that’s helping relieve pain, improve mobility, or support long-term wellbeing for you and your family.

Chiropractic helps restore and maintain healthy movement and communication within the body, particularly through the spine and nervous system. By identifying areas of restriction, tension, or irritation, chiropractic care can help:

• Reduce pain and stiffness
• Improve posture and mobility
• Support nervous system function
• Enhance your body’s ability to adapt to stress (physical, emotional, and chemical)
• Promote long-term health and resilience

Chiropractic Family Care’s approach is always personalised, gentle, and focused on what’s most appropriate for your body, lifestyle, and goals.

This is one of the most important questions in chiropractic care, and the answer might surprise you. The truth is, only about 10% of your nervous system is dedicated to feeling pain. The other 90% is busy controlling and coordinating everything else in your body—your digestion, immune function, breathing, healing, movement, and countless other processes that happen without you even thinking about them. Pain is actually your body’s last-resort alarm system. By the time pain shows up, dysfunction has often been present for weeks, months, or even years. This is why we focus on proactive, preventative care rather than just waiting until something hurts.

We start with a thorough history, examination, and scans. We often review imaging before providing care. Your findings and tailored plan are explained at your report visit, where we lay out timeframes, fees, and options and typically begin adjustments. In some cases, timing may vary based on your presentation and recent care.

While many people feel relief or lightness after an adjustment, it’s also normal to experience temporary soreness, fatigue, or mild discomfort — especially early in care. Think of it like starting a new exercise or working muscles that haven’t moved well for a while. Your body is adapting, tissues are changing, and your nervous system is recalibrating. These sensations usually settle within 24-48 hours and are part of the healing process. Our doctors will always explain what to expect and tailor your care to keep it as comfortable and effective as possible.

Subluxations develop through three main types of stress in our lives:

• Physical stress – poor posture, falls, injuries, repetitive movements, sleeping awkwardly, or even birth trauma. Many subluxations actually start in childhood from everyday bumps and falls.
• Chemical stress – poor diet, processed foods, toxins, air impurities, medications, and dehydration can all create tension and inflammation that affects your spine.
• Emotional stress – work pressure, relationship challenges, and daily worries create physical tension in your body. Think about how your shoulders tighten or jaw clenches when you’re stressed—this tension can lead to subluxations.

The reality is we all experience these stresses regularly in modern life. That’s why regular chiropractic care helps address them before they accumulate into bigger problems. At Chiropractic Family Care, I’ll help identify what’s affecting your spine and create a personalized plan to keep you functioning at your best.

When a subluxation occurs, the chiropractor is trained to correct the misaligned joint and allow it to return to its proper motion. This procedure is called an adjustment and the adjustment enables the nervous system to heal the body. A chiropractic adjustment is a precise, controlled movement applied to a joint that isn’t moving properly. The goal is to restore normal motion, reduce irritation to the nervous system, and help the body function more efficiently. Adjustments can be performed in a variety of ways — some involve gentle manual pressure, while others use specialised instruments or drop-table techniques. Our Doctors select the method best suited to your body, comfort level, and stage of care.

The iQ Impulse Adjusting Instrument is an advanced technology that has been created to assist chiropractors in delivering chiropracHeading 4tic adjustments. It was ‘developed to provide gentle & precise computer-aided chiropractic adjustments to help relive pain & restore function.’

Some of the unique benefits of the Impulse iQ include:

• Extreme speed:The iQ is twice as fast as other adjusting instruments and 100x faster than manual chiropractic adjustments. The gentle thrust is faster than the body’s tendency to tighten up & resist the adjustment.’
• Controlled Force: It has 3 different force settings for different parts of the body & to treat patients of all ages. The controlled low force thrust of the iQ make treatments comfortable.’
• Computerized Adjustment: High-tech computerized adjustments with the iQ precisely measure how the spine is moving during the treatment so that just the right amount of care can be provided.’
• Research: Years of research have gone into the development of the Impulse iQ Adjusting Instrument to create gentle & specific chiropractic adjustments that are safe & effective for patients of all ages.’

As technology advances, so do chiropractic techniques. Instrument adjusting has become the fastest growing form of chiropractic manipulation due to its ease of use for the chiropractic practitioner and the safety to the patient. It can take quite a bit of effort to perform a proper chiropractic adjustment, and most chiropractors can attest to having suffered any number of shoulder, back and wrist injuries from treating patients over the course of their practice.

An Arthrostim® adjustment involves the use of one of these special instruments. It has an appearance similar to a drill, and is held in a similar manner. What it does is produce a speedy thrust and recoil motion, similar to the way a chiropractor uses their hands to adjust the vertebrae in your back. The benefit of the instrument is that it performs this high-velocity, low-amplitude motion 12 times per second, and is targeted to a very small area. The force of the thrust radiates through the joint and the tissues that surround it, releasing trigger points that are often the cause of muscle spasms.

As opposed to traditional chiropractic adjustment techniques, use of the Arthrostim® does not cause the same popping and cracking noises in the joint that can make some people feel uneasy. It is a gentle, mechanical method of easing the joints back into alignment that is basically an extension of the chiropractor’s hands. Your chiropractor can exert just the right amount of pressure needed by adjusting the force of the thrust up or down from merely a few ounces all the way up to 40 pounds, and it works on a wide range of body areas, not only on the spine.

Several studies have shown that instrument adjusting is just as effective as traditional chiropractic techniques for easing pain and increasing range of motion in patients who have sought chiropractic care. Its speed, gentleness and accuracy are also recommended for populations that may have trouble with the use of traditional chiropractic techniques, such as children and the elderly.

The Arthrostim’s® movement stimulates the patient’s special sensory nerve receptors, called proprioceptors, which are responsible for detecting the proper motion and alignment of the body’s muscles and joints, signaling that all is well; however, at the same time it avoids stimulating the nociceptors, the sensory nerve receptors responsible for sending pain signals to the central nervous system.

The use of instrument adjusting, such as with the Arthrostim®, allows for fewer side-effects and less post-treatment muscle soreness. If this seems like a form of treatment you may be interested in, consult with your chiropractor and ask if it may be possible to incorporate Arthrostim® adjusting into your treatment regime.

The body is a wonderful and intricately designed organism that has the amazing ability to heal itself. If you look at the spinal column, you will see that it houses the Central Nervous System (CNS). The CNS is one of the ways in which the brain communicates to all of the different parts of the body, such as organs, tissues and muscles, and these organs, tissues and muscles also communicate back to the brain.

When the spine is not in its correct alignment the movement in that area is abnormal, the nerves that exit at that point may not function at 100%. So the messages going out from the brain to the rest of the body and back to the brain may be incomplete or unclear.

This in turn will affect the way the body is able to organise, heal and operate. As an example, neck subluxations in children may cause concentration and learning problems, reoccurring ear infections, reoccurring tonsillitis, depressed immune system and an inability to thrive. Another example is an upper back (thoracic) subluxation that may cause you to have poor sleep and be grumpy to those around you.

So, if a subluxation in the spine directly affects the organs and tissues that those specific nerves lead to in the body, the opposite is also true. When a subluxation is corrected in the spine, this gives the body the optimum chance to self heal as the brain is free to communicate with those specific organs and tissues, directing exactly what is needed for optimum healing and function.

Many of our clients not only report feeling better in their necks and backs through chiropractic care, but they notice an improvement in their:

• immune system
• their ability to concentrate
• their mood
• their digestion
• their energy levels
• their ability to deal with stress
• their quality of sleep and much more.

The use of ice and heat can be very helpful in easing pain, inflammation and discomfort in the back and neck.

Ice is used when the client is in acute and chronic pain and there is inflammation in the area concerned. An ice pack should be placed on the area for 5 – 10 minutes and then left off for 20 minutes. This should be repeated for 4 or 5 times in one sitting and then repeated later in the day/night as needed. Ice packs should never be used on the very top of the neck where it joins to the head (an iced towel should be used instead).

Heat packs are used when there is aching or general soreness in the areas of the spine and neck. A heat pack should be placed on the affected area for 10 – 15 minutes and then left off for 30 minutes. This should be repeated 4 or 5 times in one sitting and then repeated later in the day/night as needed.

There is no need for our clients to be undressed for treatments. The chiropractor will do the adjustments through the clothes. Clients will only remove articles of clothing when they are wearing bulky jackets or thick jumpers as is common during the cold winters of the Adelaide Hills.