This week I was adjusting a lady (let's call her Angela) who was relatively new to me. I had only seen her a couple of times many years ago. As chiropractors, it takes time to learn how someone's body works, their stress patterns, how best to adjust them, and how to help them heal. So with this particular lady, I had yet to learn how her body communicates.

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I adjusted her neck and didn't feel as grounded as I could have been. I wasn't very satisfied with the adjustment and thought I would need to find a better way to ease her body the next time I worked with her. Nonetheless, Angela immediately sat up and said, "oh wow, I can hear again! Is that normal?" She kept saying, "oh wow", and was quite shocked. When she calmed down a little, Angela said she could hear much more clearly now; she didn't even mention during our appointment that her hearing was an issue.

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So, what are the takeaways here? Did I give her the adjustment designed to restore hearing? No, I didn't even know that she was having issues. I simply found where the subluxation was, adjusted it, removed the interference to the nervous system, and the body did the healing. There is no magic button to restore hearing.

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When someone asks, "does chiropractic help with hearing problems?" (or tinnitus or kidney disease or hernias or high blood pressure or whatever), my answer is always the same - chiropractic helps your body heal better. I have seen people who get better vision, better hearing, fall pregnant after being unable to, lower blood pressure, better-functioning kidneys, tinnitus going away, kids who stop wetting the bed, and many more life-changing stories under my care. However, the paradigm of the adjustment is always the same. Remove the subluxation to allow innate intelligence to heal.

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Reflecting on this experience reminds me of William Harvey Lillard, the first chiropractic patient in 1895. After 17 years of being almost completely deaf, his healing was restored following two adjustments by the first chiropractor, D.D. Palmer. I am grateful to both of these men for the courage to explore and test the boundaries all those years ago, without which I wouldn't be in a privileged place to witness these life-changing stories in my practice every single day.