There Is No Such Thing as a Headless Human
By Dr. Chris Cormier, DC — The Nerve Health Institute, Lafayette, Louisiana I say that line to patients more than any other, because it settles an argument before it starts. You can do without a great many things in the human body. You cannot do without the brain. People accept that immediately when it is about thinking. Where it gets interesting is when you follow the wire out — because your brain is not only running your thoughts. It is running the power company for roughly 30 trillion cells, and every one of them is on the grid. That is what I want to lay out here: how the brain controls the body, what the line actually carries, and what keeps it open. Power out: nothing moves without a signal first Take something as ordinary as flexing your bicep. One side of your brain sends a signal down through a nerve in your neck, out along a specific pathway, into that specific muscle. That is the only way it happens. The bicep is just a muscle — it does not act on its own and it never has. It works because a line is open between it and your brain. As the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke puts it, “all sensations, movements, thoughts, memories, and feelings are the result of signals that pass through neurons.” That is a remarkable sentence when you sit with it. Everything on that list is the same mechanism — a signal reaching a cell that is waiting for it. Signal in: the line runs both directions The other half matters just as much, and it gets far less attention. Put your hand on something hot. For you to pull it away, that cell has to get a message back up to the brain in milliseconds, and the brain has to send one back down. Out and in, constantly, all day, with no conscious involvement from you at all. That two-way traffic is the whole job. Power out so the body can act, signal in so the brain knows what is happening. When I assess someone, I am interested in both directions — a line that carries well in one direction and poorly in the other is still a line worth improving. Everything is on the grid, not just the parts you move Here is where most people are genuinely surprised. Muscle cells are wired to the brain. So are bone cells. So is your skin. And so are your organs and your glands — the parts you have never once consciously instructed and never will. That is the autonomic side of the system, and it is doing an extraordinary amount of work quietly. The National Library of Medicine describes it as controlling “blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, bowel and bladder emptying, and digestion,” carrying information “to the heart, blood vessels, bladder, intestines, sweat glands, and pupils.” None of that is on your to-do list. All of it depends on the connection being good. It is also why the things we see in clinic range much wider than people expect when they first walk in — our conditions library gives a sense of the spread. Once you understand that organs and glands are on the same grid as muscles, that range stops being surprising and starts making sense. The 88 major nerves, and the three things that load them I describe the spine and spinal cord as the breaker box, with 88 major nerves running out of it like power lines to every part of you. It is a simple picture and it holds up well in conversation, which is why I keep using it. And like any electrical system, the load on it comes from somewhere. In my experience it comes from three directions, and almost everyone can place themselves in one of them within about five seconds: Everything you do sits in one of those three columns, and everything in those columns has a consequence — which is far better news than it sounds. Three columns is a manageable number. Nobody is perfect in all three and nobody needs to be. The goal is simply to be ahead: more going in the good column each day than the other, and a little further ahead each month. The six ingredients: the OWL Method If the brain is the power company, the next question is what the system actually runs on. I teach it as six ingredients in order of how fundamental they are, and the first three give the method its name. O — Oxygen The top ingredient in the entire human body. You can go without a great many things; you cannot go without breathing, and almost everybody knows that in principle while doing very little about it in practice. Most people simply do not breathe enough, and many have lost track of where they are breathing from. That is correctable, and it is free. It is also why oxygenation runs through everything we do — including EBOO Prime, where circulation and oxygenation are the entire focus. W — Water Second most prevalent ingredient in the body, and there are two separate questions in it. Quantity — are you drinking enough? And quality — is what you are drinking being used well? Plenty of people are drinking a reasonable amount and still not getting the benefit of it. Filtration, minerals and timing all matter, which is a whole subject of its own and one we go into in our article on kidney health. L — Light Light energy is how the system communicates. I think of the nervous system as fiber optic — and if that sounds like a stretch, consider that your body is explicitly built to run on a light cycle: bright morning light, dark night, and a rhythm that sets everything from hormone release to repair. That is why light is both something to get right at home — covered in our piece on the best sleep environment