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Visceral Disease
Visceral Disease
Let's take a minute to quickly review some of the literature. In 1921, Dr. Henry Winsor M.D. published a study in the Medical Times titled The Evidences of the Association of Visceral Disease with Spinal Deformities. In medical research the term visceral simply means organ or gland. In this study, Dr. Winsor and his team began evaluating cadavers with spines that had minor changes in the normal spinal curvatures. Dr. Winsor was specifically interested in the autonomic nervous system, which is that part of the nervous system that regulates organ function. From a structural, anatomical point of view, this part of the nervous system starts in the brain but has a column of nerve cell that reside along the spine. Dr. Winsor’s theory was that physical changes in the spinal position, would cause physical changes in the nerve cells residing on the spine, which is turn would affect the structures that the nerve cells communicated with. In this study, Dr. Winsor identified 50 cadavers with 139 diagnosed organ pathologies. These diagnosed organ diseases included conditions of the heart, lungs, liver, gallbladder, prostate, and a host of others. Dr. Winsor stated in this article that there was 100% correlation between area of disease and the area of spinal malposition. It was such an unexpected result that they repeated the study. In the second study they identified 221 organ based diseased and found that in 212 of those cases there was a malposition of the spine that would affect the level of the autonomic nerve traveling to that organ. Dr. Winsor stated that in no cases was there complete block of the nerve observed. In other words, the malpositioned spine did not completely pinch the nerve. His conclusion was that irritation of the autonomic nerves altered the blood supply to specific parts of the body. Obviously, any body tissue that does not receive adequate blood is not going to be healthy. It only makes sense that unhealthy tissue is more likely to become diseased. Obviously, spinal issues are not the sole cause of disease. But studies like these do give us some insight into how disease can develop.
