Saturday, February 10, 2007
Chiropractic’s greatest challenge and opportunity
The central theory of biology is evolution through natural selection. Frankly, if we assume a stationary environment, natural selection improves the ability of an average organism to reproduce fertile offspring. Consequently we arrive at the notion of evolution as an energy efficiency optimization process. These plastic changes have to happen at the microscopic cellular level (DNA expression).
Since the CNS controls and regulates all physiological process of the human body, these optimizations must occur at the microscopic cellular level in the nervous system first.
All these changes can be explained by considering the process of energy efficiency of neural communication and neural processing. Energy (available ATP) is finite. It is reasonable to assume that the limiting factor for this energy efficiency optimization process is the use of available ATP. Thus, to optimize neurological programs, the CNS will shunt and mobilize ATP to the areas of greatest physiological need in the CNS. This is neurophysiological partitioning.
Immediate energy-efficient processing of information can explain seemingly independent physiological processes. In the context of energy, neural processing is rather expensive. The adult human brain accounts for 20 percent or more of our total energy use. In young children, whose brains are nearly as large as an adult, the energy use by this organ can account for nearly 50 percent of the ATP use. Recent studies have shown that 85 percent of the energy used by the brain goes toward restoring the ion fluxes across neuronal membranes that are the biophysical basis of computation and communication in the neocortex. Thus information processing, although perhaps five or six orders of magnitude more energy efficient than man-made computation, is a considerable expense for the organism. Our survival and dominance as a species is dependent on the energy efficiency of CNS processing.
This is chiropractic’s greatest challenge and opportunity for increasing human potential. Increasing the efficiency of CNS processing is the chiropractor’s true goal.
