Mainstreaming healing arts: chiropractic and acupuncture provide holistic help.

• Author: Stomierowski, Peg
• Position: HEALTH & MEDICINE

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Many Alaskans who use chiropractic and acupuncture services under their health insurance plans are following a time-honored tradition by exploring healing arts to help treat often persistent spinal and cervical conditions resulting in pain, reduced function and loss of vitality.

Chiropractic practitioners emphasize the relationship between the spine and the nervous system in maintaining health. Acupuncturists explore how energy flow throughout the body is related to greater vitality or to problems where there are blockages. Both are considered holistic health providers.

While it seems that many of the most passionate advocates of these and other alternative remedies were exposed to them while growing up, practitioners in Anchorage and elsewhere report many ailing patients come to them for the first time primarily seeking to avoid surgery.

CHIROPRACTIC CARE

Chiropractors view vertebral misalignments, or subluxations, as significant sources of physical discomfort and disease, and perform manipulations, or adjustments, in an attempt to bring the body back into more natural balance. Today, many offer lab testing, X-rays and such other diagnostic imaging methods as MRIs in assessing the complaints they hear in office sessions.

Indeed, it's no coincidence the American Chiropractic Association (ACA) lists back pain as the fifth most common reason for visits to doctors in the United States. In most cases, it's not caused by such serious conditions as inflammatory arthritis, infection, fracture or cancer, and Americans spend at least $50 billion a year looking for answers, according to the group's Web site.

Good spinal hygiene generally means getting an adjustment at least once a month, said chiropractor Treeka Sullivan at Alaska Healing Arts Chiropractic in Anchorage. Sullivan equates spinal health with general immunity, saying, "Your nervous system is your immune system."

A certified pediatric and pregnancy specialist whose mother, now 87, started going to chiropractors at age 13, Sullivan always was interested in healing modalities. She was a massage therapist for decades, met her husband in chiropractic school, and has been enthusiastically practicing as a chiropractor for 15 years.

Seventy percent of the clients she sees are pregnant, she said, or are bringing their children in with them for treatment. She begins seeing some infants just days after birth, and she may do craniosacral work with them. Birth, she said, is...