Chiropractics

When a vertebra goes out of alignment, the surrounding tendons and muscles are tight and contracted. In that state the nerves passing through the vertebral space are compressed, which produces the radiating pain, referred symptoms, and organ dysfunction that chiropractic seeks to address. A chiropractor can snap the vertebra back into its correct position. The mechanical correction is real. But the problem Aajonus identified is this: if the muscles and tendons remain tight, the vertebra will simply migrate back out of place within minutes, hours, or at most a day or two. The adjustment without prior softening of the surrounding tissue is therefore a temporary fix that must be repeated over and over, sometimes several times a week, because nothing has changed in the structural conditions that allowed the vertebra to go out in the first place.

He identified two root causes of displacement and constriction. The first is inflexible tendons and muscles attached to the vertebrae, which maintain chronic tension and prevent the vertebra from staying seated. The second is toxins stored in the vertebral joints causing swelling, and this swelling, combined with inflexible tendons and muscles, produces constriction. When poisons are moving out of bone marrow, bones, or cartilage, he explained, more joint swelling will occur, accompanied by irritation to the tendons and nerves, which creates more constriction and therefore increases the need for more frequent adjustment. In this situation, more visits to a chiropractor are not a sign that chiropractic is failing; they reflect the body attempting to detoxify. The mechanical displacement follows the biochemical event.

The most specific and consistent protocol Aajonus gave around chiropractic was the requirement to apply heat before any adjustment. He was insistent and direct about this: without a hot bath prior to the adjustment, the adjustment usually does not relieve pain for long. With a hot bath, the muscles and tendons relax and expand, relieving the pressure on the nerves that pass through the vertebrae, and then the adjustment can be performed on tissues that are actually loose enough to hold the new position.

His prescription was a hot bath for thirty minutes before going to a chiropractor. The temperature he specified for baths in the context of detoxification and spinal relief was 102 to 107 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to produce profuse perspiration, which he said helps the body eliminate toxins quickly through the skin. Alternatively, he described using hot water bottles placed along the spine while lying in bed for thirty minutes before the appointment, which accomplishes a similar warming and loosening of the tissues. Either method serves the same purpose: making the surrounding soft tissue warm, expanded, and pliable before the bones are moved.

He described this as the difference between an adjustment that holds and one that does not. The adjustment is a purely mechanical intervention and the spine is embedded in soft tissue. If that soft tissue is chronically contracted from toxicity, poor nutrition, or unresolved metabolic damage, the bones will not stay where they are placed. The hot bath changes the state of the soft tissue before the mechanical correction is made, giving the adjustment a real chance to hold.

Beyond the pre-adjustment bath, Aajonus recommended applying a hot water bottle to the spine at any time, and especially while sleeping, as a continuous support between adjustments. He explained that this ongoing heat increases relaxation so that more nutrients can be delivered to the area for proper detoxification and healing. The mechanism he described is that heat improves local circulation, and circulation is what delivers the raw materials the body needs to repair tendons, clear toxins from the vertebral joints, and rebuild the structural integrity of the spine.

He used this method himself extensively. After stopping regular chiropractic care, he described placing a medium pool hot water bottle on the floor and rolling his back up and down and around on it to put a displaced vertebra back in place without needing an appointment. He credited this technique, along with yoga postures, as the combination that finally allowed him to stop going to chiropractors altogether.

Aajonus was critical of certain adjunct treatments used within chiropractic offices. He described one approach in which the chiropractor first applies heat treatment and electrical treatments to loosen the patient up before an adjustment, and he described this as a terrible way to do it. His objections were specific: the massage involved in such preparation bruises the tissue, and the electromagnetic fields produced by electrical stimulation devices damage the cellular structure of cells. He was not objecting to chiropractic manipulation itself, but to the particular warming and preparation methods some chiropractors use.

His critique of deep massage was extensive and appeared repeatedly across sources. He described it as one of the worst things that can be done for a lymphatic system. Hard or abrasive massage on tissue that is dry, hardened, cracked, and brittle will break that tissue, create bruised areas, and release toxins into surrounding connective tissue, potentially producing lupus, fibromyalgia, or chronic fatigue. He specified that the only appropriate massage for someone with lymphatic problems or toxic connective tissue is an extremely light, barely-touching stimulation of the skin, something he described as a tickle massage that excites the nervous system without breaking veins or capillaries. He explicitly categorized deep tissue massage (Rolfing and similar methods) as never good.

He contrasted this with chiropractic itself, which he regarded as a legitimate structural intervention when performed on properly prepared tissue and without abrasive technique. His precise phrasing in one exchange was that chiropractic is good "as long as you have applied heat to your back prior to an adjustment and the adjustments are not abrasive."

Aajonus went to chiropractors sometimes three times a week during the years when his back problems were most severe. This continued for approximately twenty years. In the worst periods, following the radiation-cauterized spinal damage, he was crawling on the floor unable to sit, and he would seek chiropractic adjustment as one component of managing the condition. He described the nerve damage as producing pain not only in the spine itself but radiating through the sciatic nerves all the way down to his feet, into his knees and thighs, and generating constant soreness and achiness throughout his body with every movement.

He stopped going to a chiropractor approximately fifteen years before speaking about this at workshops, meaning he had been self-sufficient in managing his spinal alignment for that period. He credited the transition away from chiropractic to the development of his own methods: yoga postures performed after thorough heat application, and rolling on a hot water bottle placed on the floor. He stated that by the mid-1990s, once he learned to roll his back on a hot water bottle, he got the final results he needed and never went to a chiropractor again. He described this not as a rejection of chiropractic but as a natural progression that the diet and self-care made possible.

He described his trajectory in detail: going from chiropractic adjustments twice a day at the most painful period to needing only one chiropractic adjustment a year for the last four years before he stopped entirely. He attributed this improvement directly to the combination of the Primal Diet, particularly eating lots of butter and cream with meat, and the consistent use of hot baths, hot water bottles, and yoga postures. He experienced twelve years of back pain from the chemotherapy and radiation before he was satisfied with his spinal health.

The two postures Aajonus recommended consistently were the Plow and the Spinal Twist. He described the Plow as lying on the back, raising the legs, buttocks, and back into the air, and either bringing the knees to the ears or extending the toes out onto the floor behind the head. The Spinal Twist he described as lying on the right side with the right leg completely stretched and straight, bending the left leg at the knee and moving the left foot to press flat against the right shin just below the right knee, then moving the left shoulder and arm backward behind the body, twisting the shoulder back while trying to keep the left knee pressing onto the bed or floor. He recommended these postures be attempted two to five times daily, and critically, only after applying hot water bottles to painful areas of the back for thirty minutes or after thirty minutes in a hot bath.

He described these postures as capable of handling most spinal alignment problems on their own once the diet had improved and the body had recovered enough flexibility. When he was at his worst, these postures gave him relief that lasted an hour and a half to two hours before the pain would build again and require another round of stretching. He described doing this cycle continuously while bicycling across North America in the mid-1970s, stopping every forty-five minutes to an hour and spending fifteen to forty-five minutes in yoga postures before he could continue riding.

During his most severe period of back damage, before the diet was developed, the yoga postures and the bath were his primary tools. He described sleeping in a bathtub filled with salt water and milk to make his body buoyant enough to take the pressure off his spine, then performing the Plow and Spinal Twist when he got out. He said the bath alleviated approximately eighty percent of the back pain while he was in it, and the yoga postures extended that relief after he emerged.

Aajonus was explicit that chiropractic adjustments, however skillfully performed and however well prepared with heat, are limited in their long-term effectiveness if the underlying nutritional conditions are not addressed. The tendons, muscles, and cartilage surrounding the vertebrae need adequate fat to function properly. He stated directly that eating lots of butter and cream with meat is very important for cleansing and healing the spine. The fat combination serves both as a vehicle for removing toxins that have accumulated in the vertebral joints and as the raw material for rebuilding the soft tissue structures that must hold the bones in place.

Many toxins, he explained, cause poor development of tendons, particularly heavy metals such as mercury from vaccines and chemicals including household cleaning compounds. These toxins can poison the RNA and DNA, interfering with proper tissue development. When the tendons are poorly developed or chronically inflexible because of this toxic load, no amount of chiropractic work can produce a durable result. The adjustment addresses the position of the bone, but the diet addresses the quality of the tissue that surrounds it and determines whether the adjustment holds.

He described his own spinal renewal as taking decades and still ongoing. Even after many years on the raw diet, he noted that he still had scar tissue from the radiation in areas of his spine, that one vertebra near the base of his neck was still partially hardened, and that his hamstrings remained affected by the radiation damage in ways that limited his range of motion. He was clear that the body does replace bone cells, but that it takes a long time, and that with the level of damage he sustained, it required the full combination of diet, heat therapy, yoga, and periodic chiropractic work to get to where he was.

In responding to a question from someone whose chiropractor diagnosed a pronounced cervical curvature possibly originating from birth trauma, pulling during delivery, or injury within the first two years of life, Aajonus confirmed that this kind of early displacement is plausible as a root cause of cascading structural problems including lower back curves, hip dysfunction, foot pronation, gland and muscle problems, and fatigue. He did not dispute the chiropractor's assessment that regular adjustments two to three times a week could rectify the neck problem over time. He affirmed that previous regular chiropractic treatment had helped that person's long-term hip pain greatly and stopped them from leaning twenty pounds more on one side, and he acknowledged there was more improvement still possible.

His framework for why such problems are so persistent is consistent: the displacement is maintained by inflexible tendons and muscles, and until the tissues themselves become more pliable through dietary improvement and heat application, adjustment frequency must remain high to compensate for what the tissue cannot yet hold on its own.

Several times in the source material, Aajonus described situations where he wanted chiropractic care urgently but could not access it. After a severe motorcycle accident in Thailand in which he sustained a fractured tibia, split longitudinally, with the pyramid fragment broken off the top and cartilage fragments throughout the knee, he believed the injury was a dislocation because of how distorted the knee appeared and the severity of the pain. He searched for a chiropractor but could not find one, did not know the word for chiropractor in Thai, and could not make the language barrier work. He went to the hospital instead, where the intern refused to treat him without X-rays and then refused to treat him even with X-rays, calling in an osteosurgeon. Aajonus eventually negotiated for only two X-rays (one from each direction) and refused surgical intervention, healing the injury through his own methods including swimming in the ocean.

This episode illustrates how strongly he associated chiropractic with the specific and limited mechanical function of returning bones to correct position, distinguished sharply from what he considered the harmful interventions of mainstream medicine. He went to the hospital in that case only because no chiropractor was available, and he resisted everything the hospital wanted to do beyond the structural correction he originally sought.

He also described a period of severe back crisis in which he was assessed by doctors as needing surgical intervention on his spine. His consistent position was that he would not permit spinal surgery, particularly near the spinal cord, because he had witnessed too many surgeries ending in permanent disability or coma, and because any radioactive material near the spinal cord that was disturbed surgically could potentially paralyze a person.

When a person reported that their current chiropractor was requesting an MRI before proceeding with treatment, Aajonus gave a clear caution about the MRI itself, not about chiropractic. He stated that an MRI is likely to cause more pain within two weeks of the procedure. He offered to provide suggestions to reduce back pain without requiring an MRI. His objection was to the diagnostic imaging technology, not to the chiropractic framework.

He held consistently that X-rays are damaging and that MRI causes its own problems, but his concern about these tools did not translate into skepticism about chiropractic adjustment as such. He separated the diagnostic tools chiropractors sometimes use from the mechanical therapy itself, which he continued to endorse as a valid structural approach.

In one exchange, a person reported that a chiropractic adjustment had triggered severe back pain that was worse than what they experienced before the treatment. Aajonus's explanation was precise: the pain was not directly caused by the adjustment in the sense that the chiropractor had done something wrong structurally. The toxins were already there and the body was trying to remove them more gradually. The adjustment probably bruised the area and caused a more intense detoxification response. The chiropractic work, by disturbing the area, accelerated the release of stored toxins from the vertebral tissue, and the resulting detoxification was more painful than the slow release the body had been managing on its own.

This reading is consistent with his broader framework: any intervention that mobilizes stored toxins faster than the body can clear them through skin, lymph, and other elimination pathways will produce a symptomatic crisis. He did not conclude from this that chiropractic was harmful in that case, but that the adjustment had been more abrasive than ideal, and that the hot water bottle and warm water soaks were the correct support for moving through the detoxification that had been triggered.

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