About Neuro ATL
From the Founders:
Our Practice Philosophy
We founded Billingsley-Luckett Chiropractic Life Center in 1985, and since then we have participated in the healing and recovery of thousands of people, some of whom you can read about in the testimonials. Four pillars uphold our Practice Philosophy.
We believe you can only give away what you’ve got. So to the best of our ability, we walk our talk. We seek the best information about how to be healthy, and as we learn, we put our new knowledge into practice in our own lives. We eat healthy, we meditate, we reduce stress, we’re active and we receive regular chiropractic adjustments. It hasn’t always been that way, and it hasn’t been an easy path to follow. Going through the process of healing ourselves, educating ourselves and continually evolving our health consciousness gives us incredible empathy for our patients and makes us better chiropractors.
Chiropractic doctors, just as medical doctors and other professionals, are not interchangeable. We all vary widely from individual to individual in our level of skill, knowledge and expertise. We believe it’s wise and worthwhile to entrust one’s health only to the best practitioners. So when we use the term ‘chiropractor’ or ‘chiropractic,’ we are referring to our caliber of chiropractic care: We’ve consistently obtained excellent results for patients of all ages, from all walks of life, from all over the world, with all kinds of challenges over the course of 30 years in business. Based on those results, you can rest assured you’ve found the best.
Chiropractic has evolved in significant ways over the years. If you’re still thinking that chiropractic care is only to relieve pain, or only as a last resort when Western medicine fails, or thinking of chiropractors only as ‘bone crunchers,’ then we’ve got even better news for you: Chiropractic is the gateway to optimum health and vitality, and that’s now proven with scientific research (see next section, ‘The Science Behind the Practice’).
Our goal is to deliver excellent chiropractic care to our patients, and to inspire each person to live his or her healthiest lifestyle. A chiropractic adjustment is the art of chiropractic in motion; the science refers to the understanding and application of the principles behind it. We commit to being great at both.
Keeping all of that in mind, we want to introduce the four pillars that uphold our Practice Philosophy.
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Trust the Intelligent Life Force
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Deliver Neuro-Based Chiropractic Care
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Teach our Patients to Seek Chiropractic First
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Disburse Empowering Education
1. Trust the Intelligent Life Force
This refers to an understanding that the same intelligent life force that creates each human body also imbues each one to be self-healing. Our bodies work hard to express health, maintain health and to recover from illnesses and other conditions that threaten our health. We trust the intelligence of the body’s life force: it is the healer, and we are the instruments. We work with it, not against it, to unleash its self-healing functions more fully in our patients with every touch and interaction. This is a 180-degree difference between chiropractic care and Western medicine, which is based on treating symptoms with interventions that usually disrupt the body’s natural healing abilities.
2. Deliver Neuro-Based Chiropractic Care
We have a brain-body based approach to chiropractic care in which the central nervous system is of primary focus and everything else is secondary. When you understand the body as three systems in one – passive, active and control – the significance of our approach becomes clear.
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The Passive System refers to the bones and joints. These provide structure, attachment points and the potential for movement, but do nothing on their own.
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The Active System refers to the muscles. They provide the power for movement, elimination and respiration, but do nothing on their own.
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The Control System refers to the central nervous system – the brain and the spinal cord. This is the central organizing authority that controls the passive and active systems, function, defense, recovery, healing and metabolism.
The focus of our chiropractic adjustments is to affect the control system with the intent to create harmony within all of the body’s systems. Everything in the body is controlled by the brain: When the brain is functioning well, the body functions well. When the body is able to communicate its needs back to the brain without interruption, the body functions well. The importance of understanding this cannot be overstated. For example, where does the body experience pain? Our immediate answer is, ‘in the part that hurts.’ However, consider that a person with an amputated limb often experiences what we call ‘phantom pain.’ The limb is gone, but the person feels pain in it. So what part of the body generates pain? Pain is generated by the brain. It always was and is.
Problems occur when the brain-body’s ability to regulate itself is impaired. There are many causes for this, including compromised air, water, food and chronic stress, but the primary reason is subluxations. A subluxation is when there is less than optimum nerve function somewhere in the nervous system.
Someone can get a subluxation from how they laid in their mother’s womb, through birth, falls, accidents, posture, illnesses, body structure and emotions. We could combine all of these events and call them ‘stressors.’
The reason chiropractic is so effective is that the adjustment increases brain wave activity, which in turn sends an increase of health messages to the body, which then heals and repairs the body. It resets the whole system. When the brain is invigorated, it clears, realigns and re-establishes the self-healing pathways of the Intelligent Life Force.
3. Teach our Patients to Seek Chiropractic First
In addition to the scientifically proven benefits of regular, life-time chiropractic adjustments, we believe chiropractic care is the best support for the body’s self-healing functions when sickness, disease or injury occur. For many people, chiropractic is an after-thought or last resort. However, we know that people will be healthier and have better health outcomes if they seek chiropractic care first, as soon as possible, whenever they detect a problem with their health, including the onset of colds, fevers, flus. We want our patients to receive chiropractic care first, before they seek care that might disrupt or interfere with the body’s self-healing work. When traditional care is sought first, it often suppresses the body’s natural defense responses and also places the burden of additional challenges for the body to overcome, such as side effects.
Western medicine seeks to diagnose and treat symptoms, often called ‘evidence-based care,’ without regard for the cause; our approach is based on neuroscience and ‘cause-based care.’ For example, fevers serve a purpose in the body; yet based on the Western model, most people believe a fever should be suppressed with over-the-counter medicines. Treating symptoms in this manner, or with invasive procedures and prescription medication that suppresses one set of symptoms and simultaneously creates another from the side effects is like playing the whack-a-mole game with your body, and does nothing to heal what’s going wrong in the brain.
As patients become more educated about how the brain and body work and what they need from us to function optimally, it becomes easier to resist the medical and pharmaceutical marketing messages to ‘take a pill’ or ‘get a shot’ or submit to invasive procedures.
We are not saying other care is never necessary; we are saying
‘Try Chiropractic Care First.’
4. Disburse Empowering Education
Accurate information is empowering; ignorance and misinformation are dis-empowering. Many causes of illness and disease we can trace directly back to the health myths and misinformation being disseminated to the masses. This misinformation has led to commonly held beliefs and practices that undermine health on a daily basis.
We can no longer, if we ever could, blindly trust information from medical, pharmaceutical and food marketers, makers and regulators. Because what we eat, use in and on our bodies, and expose our bodies to all have such a direct impact on our brains, bodies and overall health, we have made it a high priority to bust myths and identify truths about how to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle.
We commit to continually research, learn, apply and pass along our knowledge. An entire section of this notebook is devoted to your health education. We believe that true knowledge empowers people to make better choices to support their ability to live healthier, happier lives.
