Alterations of Sympathetic Vascular Tone in Arteries

We are jumping into a very complex and in-depth discussion of something that may be a little confusing so I will try to go slow and not go off on a tangent. As we start the most important thing we need to talk about is a little bit of the anatomy and how the body works. I'm sure you know that tone and texture of the inside of your arteries and vein are very important. The veins are on the lower pressure side and the arteries are on the high pressure side. The veins are very distensible so they can act to store large amounts of blood in a time of relaxation and contract and push the blood into the arterial side when the heart needs to increase cardiac output. The arteries are relaxed or constricted  based certain physiological needs to that tissue. If a tissue needs more blood it constricts arteries to other areas that do not need blood at that certain time. Hormones also play important roll in this system as well, hormones like cortisol causes an activation of the sympathetic system. When the sympathetic are active under either hormonal or neural control the arteries increases their muscle tone to slow the blood flow from organs which are not used in a period of distress or intense activity. This is how the system should work properly.

The way this system works in a lot of people is problematic, first people are stressed, stress causes the release of cortisol, the release of cortisol causes the increase of the sympathetic nerve system systemically. The activation of the sympathetic nervous system causes a decrease of lumen diameter, thus increasing overall blood pressure. You see how this is a slippery slope of how the body works. I will say that arterial lumen pressure is inversely proportional to diameter, meaning as the lumen gets small pressure goes up. There are two ways the body can increase blood pressure, increase the cardiac output, and decrease artery diameter. The only way the heart can increase cardiac output or work is to do two things, first increase the force of contraction of the ventricles and increase the amount of blood pumped by the ventricles. So if you are always running on your sympathetic system invariably you will have a higher blood pressure, but how do we fix this?

With the sympathetic nervous system on overall you must break the brain-body communication so to speak we must reboot the system but how? How about we preform something that going to overload the whole system to restart, something call afferent barrage, now I'm using afferent barrage very loosely. When I use this term it is in the context of applying numerous sensory stimuli to a certain area in the body. It's possible to reset the system from sensory input. When spinal manipulation is applied to a segment, it's creating many synaptic connection, which could reset the system, of course more evidence is needed to fully valid the effectiveness. The afferent input could in turn lower the force of heart contraction, reduce the amount of blood pumped for contraction, and dilate the arterial lumen. There have been studies that show spinal manipulation could decrease blood pressure but they have some decrease of bias. However, it's exciting to see the possibility of an external stimuli causing a sympathetic change.            

Can Chiropractic Help Me With My Shoulder Pain?

Shoulder pain is a very common symptom we find in our Plano Chiropractic office, as we spend more and more time in front of a computer and at our desk. You are probably at a computer right now or perhaps your phone reading this article. Take note of your shoulders, do you see how your shoulders are protracted frontward and your head is over the keyboard, which is call forward head carriage because you carrying your head forward from the normal line. The muscle that makes the shoulders protract forward are the pectoralis minor muscles which are a tightness prone muscle and conversely the rhomboids which counteract the pectoralis minor muscles are weakness prone muscles. The scalene muscles are the muscle group in the neck that is responsible for forward head carriage and tend to tighten up in the neck causing pain and compressing anatomy.

The best way to treat shoulder pain is to find the pain generating tissues, where is the dysfunction coming from? In my experience we tend to find that shoulder pain is usually caused by dysfunction in the cervical spine as well as in the shoulder joint and shoulder girdle muscles. The problem typically involves the cervical spine first, as the cervical vertebra can get misaligned and cause improper nerve impulses to the shoulder muscles which than function improperly and the improper muscles cause the shoulder joint itself to have improper biomechanics due to the muscles not working in synergy during normal motion. Treatment would include removing the cervical dysfunction in the cervical spine as well as stretching the tightness prone muscles of the scalenes and pectoris minor. Equally it is also important to strengthen the rhomboid muscles in the back to stop the shoulder protraction. Once the muscles are working proper the shoulder joint itself should start to work with correct biomechanics which will help the pain. If the pain is still present pain modalities can help to easy the progression along.