Manual therapies like chiropractic adjustments, massage, and osteopathic manipulation lower cortisol, the stress hormone that keeps people stuck in fight-or-flight mode. Chronic pain and inflammation drive cortisol up. Breaking that cycle improves quality of life.
Multiple studies included in the review reported reductions in cortisol following massage, following osteopathic manipulation, spinal adjustments, craniosacral. So this suggests to us that manual therapy may influence the stress response system. Really, really impactful because elevated cortisol, even if you're not like a functional medicine doctor or really do functional medicine in your practice, cortisol levels are a big deal. And somebody that's in chronic pain, somebody that's all of the symptomatology we discussed earlier, hyper-stressed, hyperinflamed, chronic pain, nearly every one of those individuals have elevated cortisol levels. Like they're, they're just living in like fight or flight. They're living in stress response. They're living, you know, minute to minute, so to speak. And that is impactful. That, that really wears people down over time. So anything that we can do and the care that we provide very clearly, as we're going to see and have started to unfold, the care that we provide when we can modulate and influence that, that is a massive quality of life improvement.
