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Your spine does two jobs at once. It holds you upright, and it houses the cord that carries information between your brain and the rest of your body.
How well it does both jobs depends on how it’s put together. Chiropractic work centres on the spine’s movement.
The spine is made up of 33 individual bones, stacked one above another to form a column. They’re connected by discs of cartilage, which turn the column into a series of joints rather than a single rigid pillar.
This flexibility is what lets you take up so many different positions. You can bend to lace a shoe, twist to reach into the back seat, or stand still for an hour. The same structure manages all of it, and it surrounds and protects the spinal cord while it does.
Take any two neighbouring vertebrae, and you have what’s called a spinal segment. Each one is connected by three joints.
The largest of these is the intervertebral disc, which sits between the two bones and acts as a shock absorber. Behind it, one on each side, are two smaller joints known as facet joints.
Every level of the spine is built this way, from the neck down to the lower back, which means movement is shared across many small joints rather than being concentrated in one place.
Chiropractic care works at the level of the segment. Each of those small joints has its own range, and they don’t all move in the same way along the column.
As chiropractors, we look at how each one is moving and whether any have become restricted. A joint that isn’t moving through its normal range will change how the ones around it have to work. This is why an assessment covers the whole column rather than only the place that feels sore.
There’s a good deal of variation between people, and what’s normal for one spine isn’t necessarily normal for another.
The spinal cord begins at the base of the brain and runs down through the canal formed by the vertebrae. It ends in the lower back, where it separates into bundles of nerve fibres.
Together with the brain, the spinal cord makes up the central nervous system. Think of it as a highway, with information travelling in both directions, from the brain out to the body and from the body back to the brain.
Nerves leave the spinal cord in pairs. There are 31 of these pairs, and they exit on either side of each segment and branch out into the body.
The cord also isn’t the same width the whole way down. It’s thicker at the neck and the lower back where the large nerves supplying the arms and legs branch away.
Your spine also isn’t straight.
The five lumbar vertebrae create a backwards curve in the lower back, and that curve is part of what makes upright walking possible. It sits your upper body above your hips.
Without it, your torso would tend to fall forward. And you’d be relying on the muscles of your hips and back to hold you up. Constantly, whenever you stand or walk.
Most of us only think about our spine when it doesn’t feel easy, or it’s sore. The rest of the time it holds us up, lets us move, and protects the cord running through it, without asking for any attention at all.
Knowing what’s in there makes it easier to understand why stiffness in one part of the back can change how another part behaves. The column works as a whole.
