“Your heart, while not shaped like the familiar symbol, is sort of like an upside-down pear, and it’s a testament to how AMAZING your body is! Your heart is a fist-sized muscle with a rounded bottom, smooth sides, and a thick arch of blood vessels at the top. It sits in the center of your chest more than on the left as is commonly thought but leans toward the left. Like any other muscle in your body, it contracts and relaxes to do work. In fact, in just one hour your heart produces enough energy to raise a ton of steel 3 feet off the ground!! It beats an AMAZING 100,000 times a day without the slightest help from you and will beat 3 billion times during an average person’s lifetime. 3 BILLION!!! And as AMAZING as that is, it isn’t magic. It’s how your body is designed. It’s organized and it’s intelligent.” – Dr. Judy Nutz Campandale, ICPA (What’s Love Got to Do with Your Heart?
We always see the classic heart shape symbols and the lovie-dovie gifts and candies this time of the year, but how cool is the actual human heart?! Dr. Judy’s piece in a recent ICPA newsletter is a great reminder of how amazing our bodies were designed! You are so intricately woven together, every single cell has a purpose and they work together so beautifully. I hope after reading just a little bit of what your body does on the daily, you are encouraged at how awesome your body truly is, and that you would love and appreciate it more!
And as amazing as the heart is, the heart is dependent on the nervous system. The brain is the master; telling your heart when to beat and how much blood to pump. When we run, or get scared, our heart rate goes up right? This is the action of the sympathetic nervous system – or better known as our “fight or flight” system. In these times of “stress”, we need more blood pumping to our muscles to keep fighting or keep running, and so the brain tells the heart what the body will need! Or the opposite, when we are resting, enjoying company with friends and family, watching a movie, this is when our parasympathetic system dominates, or the “rest and digest” system. Our heart beats softly and slower than in the first, because the demands on our bodies are reduced in this scenario and can focus on other important processes like digestion and repair. The brain again tells the heart what needs to happen. All the more reason we want our nervous system to be in check and functioning optimally, right? We want these messages from the brain to the spinal cord to the nerves to the organs to be in tip top shape so you can function and feel the best you can. One of the WVCWG Chiropractors would LOVE to help you reach your goals and help your nervous system to work the best that it can.
SO, how cool is the human body? It truly is amazing what it does day to day for us. That is something to love this Valentine’s day!
Dr. Jessica Tamminga (Kempton)
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