Traditional Chiropractic vs ABC

What is the difference between traditional Chiropractic and Advanced BioStructural Correction?

This is a question we get asked in the office every single week. Often, most of our clients have previously been to a chiropractor at some stage, if not people have heard stories from friends or family members who have been to chiropractors. This question usually arises once they realise the experience at Posture HQ is very different to what they previously experienced or thought they would experience.

Advanced BioStructural Correction was developed by Dr Jesse Jutkowitz in the late 80’s early 90’s and came to Australia in around the early 2000’s. Traditional chiropractic was developed in 1895.

Before we understand the difference between traditional chiropractic and ABC, we must first understand traditional chiropractic, its philosophy and methodology.

Traditional Chiropractic Traditional chiropractic, in the forms of gonstead or diversified, focuses on the analysis of misalignments in the spine known as subluxations. The analysis is designed to determine which bones of the spine are stuck or not moving correctly. Once these stuck bones have been identified the adjustment is a quick, short thrust into the spinal segment, which is designed to get it moving correctly again.

Traditional chiropractic is very split, it either has some fantastic results and changes for people, or it doesn’t. Most people have heard stories of both sides of the coin, people who see improvement and people who don’t.

The goals of traditional chiropractic are to increase range of motion of the spine, reduce muscular spasm and to reduce pain. These are very useful goals and can show great results.

The founder of ABC, Dr Jesse Jutkowitz, asked“Why do some people get better and others do not, some even get worse with traditional chiropractic?” He was determined to find out the answer to this question. He spent many years looking for the answer, conducted many cadaver studies and many studies using x-ray analysis. What he found was the five axioms of ABC. The five axioms of ABC will give you a great understanding of how ABC differs from traditional chiropractic.

AXIOM 1 – The body is not a TOTALLY self-correcting thing or machine but can self-correct many of its mechanical and other Pathologies.

This is very self evident, there are many things that the body has the ability to correct itself. Take a cut on your finger for example, your body has the innate ability to correct and heal this cut. If the body could fix everything however, there would be no need for doctors or specialists as no one would ever get sick or injured. If you take a look at society today, you will see this is not the case.There are many people out there struggling with health conditions. The body can fix some things, but not everything.

AXIOM 2 – Health of a body is defined as a body working optimally on a mechanical basis – even the chemistry comes down to the mechanics if you look at it from a small enough viewpoint – shapes of molecules and atoms fitting together (self evident by observation)

This is pretty self explanatory…

AXIOM 3 – To keep bodies healthy or get bodies healthy one must make sure that the things the body cannot self-correct are corrected by some outside agency. (By definition – if bodies cannot self-correct something else must correct them.)

If the body can not self-correct something that means someone else needs to correct that. This is where ABC starts to differ from traditional chiropractic.

AXIOM 4 – Regarding what the body cannot self-correct: On the grossest scale, what the body cannot self-correct are bones out of optimal mechanical position in a direction the body has no muscle or combination of muscles that can pull in the direction needed to retrieve and replace the bone into its position of optimal mechanical advantage for the body.

Here is where things get interesting. The human body has somewhat of a design flaw. If you feel your spine you will notice that at the back it is all just bone, either side you have muscles. So, if a bone gets knocked from behind in the forward direction, there are no muscles or combination of muscles in this location to correct a bone that is misaligned FORWARD. This is something that can go wrong with your body and that your body has no ability to correct its self. These types of misalignments are the focus of ABC.

AXIOM 5 – Regarding treatment of a body: Doctors should only correct things that the body can not self correct.

This is the main difference between ABC and traditional chiropractic methods. With ABC we only correct bones that have been misaligned in a FORWARD direction (the direction the body has no ability to correct).With traditional chiropractic, many of the bones that are ‘stuck’ or not moving well are apart of the bodies compensation pattern. To put simply, they are bones that are out of place in a direction the body CAN self-correct. However they are out of place for a reason, to compensate for other misalignments the body can not correct.

Understanding the UNWINDING Process Over the course of your lifetime, if you have lived a physically active lifestyle you have had the ability to misalign bones out of place in the direction your body cannot self-correct. Each time this happens the body needs to formulate some form of mechanical compensation for this problem.

After many of these misalignments and compensations, eventually your body has many layers or mechanical twist or compensation. This results in your body becoming very twisted, bound, tight and rigid.

At Posture HQ by focusing on only correcting the bones that are out of place, in a direction the body cannot correct itself, we are able to honour and work with the bodies innate ability to correct things on its own. Once you begin to correct bones that are out of place in a direction the body has no ability to self-correct, it frees the body up to be able to begin to correct the things it is able to or release the mechanical compensations that it developed for these bones out of place in a direction it is unable to correct.

Our focus is not to simply relieve pain, increase range of motion and decrease muscular spasm which are the goals of traditional chiropractic. Our focus is to take our clients through the process of ‘unwinding’ to progressively correct the bones out of place, that the body cannot self-correct and allow the body to release layers of twist. This not only helps people to move and feel better but it allows the body to become less twisted and rigid which results in far greater function of the human body and an overall improvement in quality of life.

Improved posture (and all the health benefits of improved posture) is a nice side-effect of having less layers of twist through the body. To understand what other problems are associated with poor forward posture check out this blog post.