How often should you see a chiropractor? Once you start going to a chiropractor, do you have to keep going forever? Is it true you can get addicted to chiropractic?

The quick and easy answer to this question is: it depends.

• It depends on what reason you’re using the Chiropractic Adjustments for. 
• It depends on the benefits you’re looking to achieve. 
• It depends upon your current demands and stress you place on your well-being.

The truth is, no you do not have to keep going to the chiropractor once you start. It’s your body, and ultimately, you are responsible for making the decisions that lead you towards or away from more well-being. 

The decision to continue regular chiropractic adjustments after your initial visit is not up to someone else such as your chiropractor, even though they play a part in the recommendations. Just because the Chiropractor is recommending something that can benefit your well-being doesn’t mean you have to do it. 

The decision to keep seeing your chiropractor is your choice on how you want to benefit from the results seen with consistent chiropractic adjustments. 

Before we discuss the misinterpretation about regular chiropractic care, it’s important to remember that chiropractic is within the health care system. One of the principles of health care ethics is autonomy, which is considered to be a fundamental practice of any health care approach. Autonomy can be defined as the ability of a person to make his or her own decisions. In chiropractic, that means you as the consumer of the chiropractic services must be involved in the conversation about receiving as well as returning for chiropractic care.

Let’s discuss the typical reason people use Chiropractic.

A good percentage of people start Chiropractic because they have neck pain, back pain or some sort of ailment that they just can’t kick and they are looking for additional help. Just search back pain and you’ll see a whole list of Chiropractic Ads in the search results.

When the body is in a symptomatic state, it’s more than likely you’ve reached your outer adaptability to current stress load. If you have too much stress within your day to day living and you compound that over time you might find yourself sooner or later in a tipping point or outer limits of adaptation. If and when you are unable to adapt to current or compounded stress load, symptoms such as neck and back pain can be your body’s intelligent way of saying it needs help.

The interesting thing about neck and back pain though is that it’s not always a good indicator to whether you need a Chiropractic Adjustment. You can have no neck or back pain and be compensating for stress and demands putting your overall quality of life in a deviation pattern away from wholeness and optimal function. 

The misconception about when to start or how often to continue on with chiropractic care after starting can stems from the purpose of the chiropractic adjustment.

To address the question about how often do I need to continue to see the chiropractor after I start, consider the viewpoint that chiropractic can be in the same arena as healthy lifestyle choices like nutrition and exercise. If you replaced nutrition or exercise into the question “how often should I exercise or how often should I eat good nutrition?” you will notice a trend that points towards where the answer to our Chiropractic Question points. 

For example, once you start eating healthy, do you need to eat healthy for the rest of your life and how often. Or, once you start exercising, do you need to exercise for the rest of your life and how often. Let’s imagine that your personal trainer recommended you come back to the gym three times a week, as well as ditch fast food and replace it with good nutrition to help you reach your health goals daily. They would likely encourage you to incorporate these recommendations into your lifestyle habits and you would likely accept these recommendations due to the validity that lies within the recommendations.

If you alter your viewpoint towards chiropractic being a part of your lifestyle habits to help you achieve a higher quality of life, you can see why millions of Americans annually choose regular chiropractic adjustments.

Regular Chiropractic Adjustments restore proper relationships within the spinal joints due to misaligned vertebrae that can negatively affect the functional state of the neurological system. 

The goal with regular chiropractic care is finding a consistently that correlates with your stress load so that the Chiropractor can facilitate the process from adjusting to a negative functional state to a positive functional state with each adjustment. The necessity and frequency of chiropractic care is relational to your stress and your ability to either adaptation to it or compensate to it. If your body is not adapting to the demands placed on it, compensation can and does result and one form of that is vertebral subluxation. When compensation and vertebral subluxation result from your stress load, that equals the necessity to visit the Chiropractor.

Vertebral subluxation is the Chiropractor’s primary domain and when they recommend a plan of consistent chiropractic adjustments to restore proper relationships within the spinal joints for your overall well-being. 

The Chiropractor will make recommendations to frequency for visits that match your current state of condition and stress load, but the final choice on whether or not to continue to see the chiropractor after you start, and how often, is up to you! The choice to how you live your life is ultimately up to you and you are responsible for which direction you take.

Considering chiropractic? Schedule your first visit to consult with a chiropractor to help answer any question you have about the potential benefits that can be found within the chiropractic adjustment. Chiropractic can enhance your quality of life and choosing to utilize it on a regular basis can impact your choice on how far you want to take your journey towards more well-being.