Health is something you are given at birth and is should be maintained throughout your lifetime.  Unfortunately, we are never taught what we need for health and what specifically needs to be maintained.

We are all born with a genetic health potential.  If we understand what can interfere with that potential we can avoid such interferences and keep it as its highest level.  When we buy a brand new car, we get a manual to maintain it.  This tells us how to make the car last the longest possible time and run at its optimum potential with minimal problems.  Yet, when children are born there is no manual in the "glove compartment" to know when to "change the oil, rotate the tires and get tuned up."  In other words, we are not taught what to maintain or how to maintain it.  To understand how to obtain our highest optimum health potential we first have to know what the essentials of health are.

To understand the essentials of health we need to understand the essentials of life.  Many things could come to mind in different categories such as physiological, psychological or social.  However, in terms of basic physiological essentials for survival we can name four: Food, Water, Oxygen, Nerve Impulse

What makes these essential is that if any of them were to stop, you would die.  If any of them were interfered with, your health would not be at its optimum
potential.

FOOD
Food is the fuel and building blocks for growth and reproduction of cells and tissues.  It consists of proteins, fats and carbohydrates.  If any of these were to stop you would die.  If their balance is interfered with your health potential would not be at its optimum.  For example, if you ate high fat foods (french fries, doughnuts, etc.) what would be the possible condition of your arteries in 10-20 years?  If you said more closed with fat, you are probably right.  Result-- lowered health potential.

WATER
(Fluids) -- Seventy-five percent  of your body  is water.  It is used in almost every body reaction.  If you stop fluid intake, you die.  If drink unhealthy fluids (caffeine, alcohol, pollutions, additives, preservatives, dyes, etc.) or not enough fluids your body's health potential is decreased.

OXYGEN
Oxygen is also used in almost every reaction if the body and is carried by the pulmonary (lungs) and circulatory (blood) systems.  Interference to these systems could stop oxygen and result in death.  We should exercise and breathe deeply to increase our oxygenation to cells.  Researchers sat that oxygen deprivation can cause almost anything from fatigue to cancer.  If oxygenation is not at it's optimum, neither is your health potential.

NERVE
            IMPULSE
Nerve impulse is the most commonly overlooked essential for life and health.  Nerve impulse is an electrochemical charge transmitted by the brain through the nervous system to he body.  It is the life force that keeps us alive and "charged".  All body function is dependant on this life force or brain impulse.  Cells must be electrically charged in order to vibrate and function.  If your brain stopped (generating these electrical impulses)  you would die.  In fact in order to be legally dead,  brain impulse must stop.  If you severed the nerve to you heart, would it stop?  How about your stomach, lungs or hand?  What if you just interfere with the normal nerve transmission?  Would these organs and tissue function at their optimum potential

One of the major causes for such nerve interference is a misalignment of the spine commonly termed by chiropractors as a subluxation.  Subluxations can interfere with the nerve, the spinal cord and reflex nerve pathways resulting in abnormal function and a lower health potential.  If your spine is subluxated you cannot be at your optimum health potential regardless of hoe good your food, water, and oxygen is, because you are still interfering with one of the essentials of life and health.

The chiropractor's primary role is to locate and correct subluxations, thus removing nerve interference and allowing the body to restore its normal function.  It is not a treatment for symptoms or a cure for disease, but merely a way of improving the bodies optimum health potential, through proper nerve integrity.  This is why everyone should see a chiropractor from the time they are born, and regularly throughout their life.  Maintenance of a healthy spine means optimum nerve integrity  and optimum health potential.