The phone call the other day from my daughter away at college was wonderful to me.  Glad to hear about her youthful experiences I held the receiver closely pressed to my ear.  After awhile she said she had been ill and that she was so happy to now be back in the swing of things.  Then she passed me over to her room mate and we chatted along easily like old friends.  Finally the story of their “illness” came out.  

Apparently a few weeks ago the two of them were invited to a barbecue at one of their friends places down the hall.  Both my daughter and her friend are fans of mine and  have adopted their health paradigm centered on stress-less nutrition only for themselves.  However this particular night when they got to their friends apartment his patio barbecue was one of spicy peppery meats and sauces.  As young people will more often go along with the crowd rather than be seen as different they dug in and helped themselves to the fare.  

They put their fatigue of the next morning down to the lateness and the wine the previous night, but when that day passed and on the following day it was still difficult to get up and get going they thought they may have been experiencing a passing flu.  With backaches and stiff necks they both went to work at their part time jobs with the “I’m not here to-day” mental sensations many of us experience and put down to stress and fatigue.  My daughter’s roommate is a nursing student and studies hard, clearly wanting to be a health professional.  She remarked that there were no fevers or changes in their systems that supported food poisoning or any other illness.  Then she said it dawned on her, they had been victims of eating food-like-materials that promoted immune system assault just by touching the intestinal surface and the symptoms were from their own cells stressing and trying desperately to clear up what they were interpreting as foreign invaders threatening their very survival.  It was the spicy barbeque foods that had them so severely physically shocked.   

I knew she was right in the diagnosis.  But how does it work and how is it that so many of us eat those spicy tomato sauce products often and don’t seem to be affected by them?  Awareness of injury in the gut is more readily seen and acknowledged as having acutely happened to those of us that enjoy long periods of health from a cool and soothed organ system.   

Overwhelming negative changes in thinking, unusual physical sensations and health loss from eating food-like-materials that injure becomes undeniable only to those that first have awareness of what it is like to not be internally stressed.  “You don’t know what you don’t know until you know what you didn’t know.”  It’s kind of like “you had to be there to appreciate it.”  Many of us are constantly suffering internally but don’t know it.  Or we have labeled ourselves with “irritable bowel syndrome, gastric reflux, hiatal hernia” or some other term to satisfy a need to put a name on the symptoms.  

The fact is that the parts the old brain is running don’t get to be felt by the new brain we are conscious with.  We can be in great internal distress with a part of us and not know it.  Remember we are like a chain being only as healthy as the weakest link. We always degrade in our ability to do work to the lowest level of our systems.  

To summarize You and Your Lower Back Pain we know that we are a whole, not a series of parts independent of one another.  We know that we are governed by an old and constant automatic nervous system located in the floor of the head and inside the central canal of the upper five spinal neck bones.  Connecting the brain stem here in the upper spine with the “Roman Road” the central nervous system influences each and every cell of our body.  The reaching of the old established brain stem through the central nervous system and cranial nerves coordinate fulfilling nutritional needs via the organs and mechanical needs via the muscles.  Muscles work to carry parts and to smoothly guide the motions of our limbs which then gather and place food next to the organs to fulfill our hunger needs.  We “hold on” and “bring in to sniff and lick” to “make blood” and that helps guide decisions of whether or not what we have brought close to us is food.   

Our body works best when none of its parts are stressed and therefore lowered in their ability to function.  Stress is a normal reaction to a stressor.  Our defense against eating stressors are the senses including touch for shape, size and texture.  Then when potential foods are brought in close by our limbs we see, smell, listen and taste them to help further in choosing whether or not they might be a stressor.  Our first childhood experiences with food will dictate how and what we will do to “thrive” for the rest of our lives.  Changing these early lessons in a positive manner is a lifelong journey of intellect and finally wisdom.  

The stomach gets all of the chosen food potentials first.  Our species like so many others thrives on its stomach.  Great generals know that battles are won and armies travel on their stomachs.  Stomach stressors greatly reduce survival chances in our species.  Stomach stress in response to eaten stressors is the single most common cause of lower back pain.  

How does the stressed stomach create the foundation for lower back health failure and consequent lower back pain?  Remember our babies and how the first thing every one of them does upon hitting the surface of our planet is breathe?  Then remember that the second thing every unstressed healthy baby does is hold onto that breath and while his chest muscles and ribs are splinted tightly he then pushes and wiggles his neck and head about looking for mothers nipple.  The driving forces behind every healthy one of us are to first breathe then feed to thrive.  The one-two essential for health is to first breathe deeply and then force our face to find and feed on a diet nourishing enough to thrive with.  

Our great and wonderful body remains sensitive to stomach stressors from its first to its last breath.  In the earlier parts of “You and Your Lower Back Pain” we learned that the muscles of the chest respond to the “lung” meridian.  The parts of the lung meridian include the rib, chest and shoulder muscles which splint the chest wall tight along with the diaphragm.  The inflated splinted chest provides the first part of our capacity to do work with the neck, arms, trunk and legs.  Our grasping thumb evolved to help us feed to breathe.  

Every organ system within us has evolved specific muscle groups to help it share its part of the load of the whole body.  The muscles of our stomach system are those on the front and forward sides of the neck.  Stomach family muscles come off of the top first few ribs and go up to the front and sides of the vertebrae of the neck.  These muscles reach up to the third bone from the top of the cervical spine.  These front neck muscles push and pull down our face onto our groceries.  Any weakness in the front neck muscles allow the muscles of the back of the neck to pull down on the head and pitch up our face, reducing the forward curve in the neck.  Our desperate need to properly position our face again with our eyes lowered to the horizon requires compromising the design and function of the still functioning upper neck muscles.  Under this unique load it doesn’t take long for the upper vertebrae of the neck to wander off their central axis and subluxate.  Subluxation and concomitant shifting of the position of the upper spinal vertebrae interfere with the brain stem and its ability to mesh with and then signal through our body using the central nervous system and the “Roman Road.”   

The consequence of upper vertebral subluxation upon the brain stem is a blocking of the automatic organ and muscle nerve synchronizing capacity which compromises health throughout the body.  By stressing the stomach, and then in turn lowering its work potential, we create subluxation of the upper neck.  We lose more health from further subluxation as the nerves of the upper neck and lower brain stem areas fail to achieve their automatic nerve nurturing necessary to tell muscles to work.  Unhealthy non working muscles in turn fail to keep the bones of the  body in position, including those of the lower back.  Under a load the “back condition” strains and sprains and then becomes a “back problem.” The loss of lower back strength on one side upon manual muscle testing is the most frequent finding during examination of all patients.  By correcting the upper cervical spine vertebral subluxations using manipulation much of the lower back muscle weakness can be reversed immediately.  

Carefully read and re-read the above few paragraphs to get the “big idea” about what you are and how you work.  This information is freely given to you from new thinking about the most common cause of lower back pain.   

Tending to the underlying causes of upper neck subluxations includes elimination of the food-like-materials we are commonly consuming.  Downloading the number of stressors specifically causing stomach stress greatly enhances health, especially of the neck and through it the lower back musculature which in turn allows us to load our backs and do work.   

Our sensitive stomachs do not tolerate spicy caustic components like pepper and chilies.  Curries and hot salsas stress us too.  We are the top mammalian predator on this planet and thriving to be healthy is the goal for survival.  Only the top cuts of meat are good enough for us to thrive on.  Never in our history did we attempt survival on ground up anything.  Hamburgers are stomach stressors.  Pork is a stomach stressor so are peanuts and corn.  Finally we must acknowledge sugars as stressors especially in the cooked tomato berry and fructose from fruit and corn.   

By eliminating these stressors we get to have a chance at having more health.  By using common sense and our innate instinctive senses we can get a lot better in our health potential easily.  Fast food places are a “drive by” not a “drive through.”  Whatever value you place on their salty, sweet, fatty, sour and bitter tastes at the bottom line the food-like-materials they serve are intolerable stomach stressors.  

Bad gas strands a boat and bad food strands a man.  Going to work while malnourished in the stomach will inevitably let us get lower back pain.