Welcome to this week’s Weekly Reset.
Every week I share one thought about health, one challenge to improve your week, and one reflection that has been impacting my own life. This week is about a 3-minute read.
Health Insight: Why Does Your Body Create Inflammation?
When most people hear the word inflammation, they immediately think something is wrong.
But inflammation itself is not necessarily the enemy. Imagine you accidentally cut your finger. Within minutes, the area may become red, warm, tender, and slightly swollen. Blood vessels in the area dilate and immune cells begin traveling into the injured tissue.
Why?
Because your body recognized damage and immediately began responding to it. Acute inflammation helps clear damaged tissue and creates the conditions necessary for the next stages of repair. Researchers describe inflammation as a fundamental part of successful tissue healing. In other words: The redness and swelling isn’t your body forgetting how to work. They are evidence that your body knows something happened. What concerns me is when simple functions like inflammation don’t happen.
Your Joints Respond to Injury Too
Now think about a joint. Joints are surrounded by capsules, ligaments, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and other tissues. When those tissues are injured or irritated, they can initiate many of the same basic inflammatory processes seen elsewhere in the body. Research on ligament injuries shows an early inflammatory phase where immune cells move into the injured area before repair and remodeling begin. Joint injuries can similarly produce changes in inflammatory signaling within and around the joint.
Inflammation is the body's response to a problem - not the problem itself.
When a joint becomes subluxated, as we often say in chiropractic, the ligaments and joint capsule respond the same way a finger cut would. Inflammation and blood surround the joint capsule and nerves which produce heat. That is our job to find and remove as chiropractors.
How I Look at This Through Gonstead Chiropractic
One of the things I love about the Gonstead System is its emphasis on finding where a problem may actually be occurring rather than simply chasing wherever someone feels discomfort. When I evaluate someone, I am combining their history with visualization, palpation, movement, instrumentation, and X-ray findings. Those are some of the core components traditionally used in Gonstead analysis.
The goal is specificity. If the examination suggests that a particular spinal joint is involved in the patient's problem, I want to address that area specifically, not simply adjust everything because it happens to be there. And then comes an important part: Give the body an opportunity to respond.
The philosophy isn't to continually irritate an area simply because it still feels sore. It is to make a specific intervention when appropriate, reassess, and respect the fact that healing itself takes place within the patient. That distinction matters. My job is not to “heal” someone's body for them. My job is to identify what I can help with, provide appropriate care, and create a better environment for the body to do what it was designed to do.
Reflection: We Don't Always Understand the Process
This brings me to a verse that has been on my mind lately.
Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us to trust in the Lord with all our heart and to “lean not on your own understanding.”
I think about how quickly we label something as bad simply because it is uncomfortable. Inflammation hurts, so we assume inflammation itself must be bad. A difficult season arrives, so we assume something has gone wrong. A door closes, our plans change, or we don't understand what God is doing, and immediately we want an explanation.
But our perspective is limited. Sometimes the very process we are trying to escape may be accomplishing something we cannot yet see. That does not mean every painful thing is good or that we should ignore problems. A cut still needs to be cleaned. An injury may need treatment. Wisdom still requires action. But we don't have to understand everything in order to trust God with the next step. We can do what is ours to do, seek wisdom, and trust Him with what we cannot see.
Three Questions
Where in your life have you been assuming that discomfort automatically means something is going wrong?
When your body produces a symptom, do you only ask how to make it disappear - or do you also ask why it may be happening?
What is one situation right now where you need to stop leaning entirely on your own understanding and trust God with the process?
Weekly Challenge
This week, when something in your body feels uncomfortable, resist the urge to immediately label it as “bad.”
Instead, get curious. Ask: What might my body be responding to?
And then take that same question into the rest of your life. Not every uncomfortable season makes sense while you're standing in the middle of it. Sometimes our responsibility is simply to take the next wise step and trust God with the path ahead.
If you've been dealing with neck or back discomfort, headaches, an old injury, or you simply want to better understand how your spine is functioning, I would genuinely love the opportunity to work with you. If you'd like to get on my schedule, simply reach out to me or contact Y Wellness. (763) 543-9080
And as always, if someone came to mind while reading this week's Reset, forward this post
to them. I'd love to have them join us.
Preston Hetland
