Question: Mr. Caliendo, can you first just please give us a general idea of what it is you do and the principals that are surrounded by network spinal analysis?

The thing that you want to do is you want to delineate the difference between the medical model of health care and an alternative model of health care. The medical model of health care comes from a mechanistic world view, and what that is is, that's treating the parts. So, if you have a headache, they are going to give you any type of medication, whatever it takes to get rid of the headache. When the headache is gone, you have been cured. If there is no headache, there is no problem. This is, this has been classically the medical model of health care. An alternative model of health care is not that at all. It's recognizing that the body is holistic. This is where you get the term holistic holism, it's from the word 'holy.' You're treating the whole body. So what an alternative or holistic practitioner will do is, they'll look at that headache, and they'll see it a little bit differently. Of course it hurts the person, and the person wants to get rid of the headache, but they're looking at that headache as a sign that the body is giving that person that something is wrong in their body, anywhere in their body, it can be anywhere. So, you're not breaking the body into parts, you're looking at the body as a whole.

And also what we're insinuating here is that the body has an intelligence because I just said that; the body is telling you that something is wrong. This is actually insinuating that there is actually intelligence. Every thing that's alive has, inside of it, an intelligence or a healing force; in China they call it the qi (pronounced "chi"), India, they call it prana, homeopathy calls it the vital force, and chiropractic calls it innate intelligence. And all it is, is it's that thing that knows what to do to sustain human life. If you put a plant in a dark room with a little bit of light in one corner the plant will grow towards the light because it's alive in it's intelligence and it knows what to do to survive, and the same thing with your body. So, this is the principle that alternative or holistic health care providers are coming from. There is a lot of trust in that the body can heal itself. There are times that the body cannot heal itself, and the person will die before they heal. This is when you go for medical intervention, so as to help the body heal itself before the person dies. This is the time that medicine is brilliant. There is dialysis, there are certain infections that cannot be fought by the body. So, what alternative practitioners look into is why is this person's body sick and why is this symptom being expressed at this time. The symptom isn't there to suppress, the symptom is there to look at and to learn from. The practitioner will look at these signals and try to determine where that person's healing capacities are at and he or she will ask is that person's body working one-hundred percent. If it is working one-hundred percent, and the person has symptoms, then you can assume that the symptoms are part of the healing process.

Sometimes symptoms aren't bad. If I twist an ankle, the ankle will swell up and it will hurt. Well, is that a bad thing? No, that's a good thing because the body is telling you if you walk on it, it won't heal. The same thing I see in my practice with people with bad backs all the time. They say, 'I have to get rid of this back pain,' and I ask them, 'Well what do you do for a living?' They often reply, 'I dig ditches for a living.' For twenty years the person has been bending and digging, now they can't bend. The body is telling them that if you continue to bend, you're going to rupture nerve cells in your brain stem because that is what research has shown. Constant flexing of the spine can literally rupture brain stem cells. The body is putting you in pain, literally to protect you. The body has an intelligence, has an energy, has a knowing of what it needs. And that is something that the medical model of health care is missing. They are assuming that once the symptom is gone, the problem is gone, and that's not the case.

The cornerstone is to recognize that the body can do what it has to do if uninterfered with. This is what most of your alternative practices deal with. They deal with blockages in the body. This is where you start getting into the energetics of it, how the body really is an energy system. Acupuncture frees up energy stuck in what they call meridians. Once that life energy is freed up, the body is now free to go and heal itself. Chiropractic deals with blocks in the nervous system that inhibit the body from freely expressing life force. So what we do is, we free up the nervous system to help the body free itself. Homeopathy is the same way. Tai chi is another one, it's movement, it's working with the subtle energies of the body to heal. That's the cornerstone.

Question: Do you believe western medicine has lost sight of the body as a whole in its attempt to treat the specialized tissues and organ systems of the body?

No! (jokingly) Absolutely, that is what I was saying before. They're not looking deeply enough; they're looking on the surface. Sometimes you absolutely need western medicine, emergency medicine, because it will save your life. That's fine, you do that to give yourself time to heal, and that's what I tell my patients all the time. But I do think that western medicine is compartmentalizing the body.

Question: Do you, in your practice, utilize other alternative medicine therapies in treating or diagnosing?

No, I don't, but I do recommend people to do that.

Question: What scientific advancements, if any, have been made in the field of chiropractic recently?

I practice something called network spinal analysis, and it's a specialty within chiropractic. Chiropractic has been around 103 years now. One of the raps against chiropractic has been that there hasn't been scientific research, but more recently they are starting to come up with it. One of the problems that I have with a lot of the research in chiropractic is that it's based on low back pain, headaches. When I was speaking of chiropractic as knocking the medical model, I was really speaking of my type of chiropractic, I can't speak for all chiropractic. Unfortunately, the profession is a little bit divided in its model of health care. Many chiropractic practitioners practice from a medical model of health care. What their objective is in care is to get rid of that headache or to get rid of that back pain. A lot of the research in chiropractic has been along those lines; it's been oh look chiropractic gets rid of back pain look at this, and that's great, it really is good for the profession because the truth is, chiropractic does help get rid of these symptoms. More recently in network spinal analysis, they have been doing some quality of life research. A couple of years ago a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by Wilson and Cleary. They wanted to know that if somebody came into their medical office with a headache and they gave them a pill to get rid of their headache and their headache went away, they wanted to know if that person was actually any healthier for it.

And this was a good question now for the medical profession to start asking, and it got us a little bit excited too. And what their conclusion was... no, the person isn't necessarily any healthier when the headache pain went away. But then they had a problem. The problem was how do you measure health now. See now they know that you don't measure health from symptomotology because that's not what health is, or isn't. How you measure health, what they determined, was you need what they called health-related quality of life parameters. And what they are are things like joy in life. Are people happier? Are people making lifestyle changes for the better in their lives? Are they happier at work? Are they happier in their relationships? Think about it, these are things that they've found that would probably be better measuring peoples' health, and with the treatment that is given these people, are these parameters improving? So what network spinal analysis did a couple of years ago, they had 2,800 patients, many offices around the world participated, mine included, and we gave out questionnaires. And people were under care anywhere from 3 months to several years. What they asked are certain areas in their life and how they've changed since they were under care. What they found across the board were significant changes in peoples' lives as their nervous system freed up and cleared from these spinal adjustments. This was huge! Now they are doing follow-up studies really to follow through with that because this is very, very exciting, because the medical profession now is looking for parameters to see how quality of life may improve. Now we are positioning chiropractic to be one of the modalities to help quality of life.

Also, another study that's on the horizon, it's out in the University of California Medical School. They have what is called a functional MRI. This MRI is measuring, I believe, oxygen uptake and utilization in the brain. They did a scan of someone's brain before they had a network spinal analysis adjustment. They had the person wiggle their ankles in flexion and dorsiflexion and then they measured how much blood flow and how much activity had to take place in the brain to do this activity of the ankles. Then they adjusted the person and they had them do the same movement of the ankles and measured the activity in the brain. They found, consistently, that after an adjustment, the brain had to work less. In other words it worked more efficiently; the nervous system was more integrated and more coordinated. And that's on the horizon, and it's things like that that they're starting to look into.

Question: With the recent openings of alternative medicine clinics in many universities like Duke and Harvard and hospitals such as Beth Israel in New York City, how do you account for the recent upsurge in popularity of alternative medicine techniques and the credibility that some therapies are now finally receiving?

Obviously, this stuff has worked; it's been anecdotal for years. It works so that's why it's getting popular. Unfortunately, we're talking about an economic situation also. Even Stony Brook University Hospital has taken up an alternative section. My personal opinion is that they are losing patients to alternative practitioners and it's hitting them in the pocket. Just, why not open up your own wing and get these people to come in. There was another study done in 1994. This was published in another medical journal, I'm not sure which one. They actually found that in 1994 there were more patient visits to alternative practitioners than all medical offices combined. People actually went to more alternative practitioners than they did to medical practitioners, which makes the medical practitioners now the alternative if you think about it. And people paid out of their pocket to go. There is not a lot of insurance for massage, and for chiropractic; it's limited. And to get back to your original question, I believe that the reason why people are coming over is because it works.

Question: Is chiropractic now backed by insurance companies and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)?

Yes. Yes it is on a limited basis. Question: What do you think the future holds for network chiropractic and for alternative medicine in general, in the United States? I think it is the future. Absolutely, I see the medical model of health care crumbling. You can see it happening all over. I've been in practice for twelve years, and when I first got into practice I spent a lot of time with people trying to educate them into this way of thinking. They wanted their pain to go away, understandably, and they couldn't understand what I was saying. Today, people are coming in looking for it. I believe that this is the future, and the medical model of health care really and truly is crumbling and they are going to have to make changes because it is not working, we are a very sick country.

Question: Does chiropractic believe that all disease stems from disorder or dysfunction of the spine and vertebrae? Do you make any exceptions?

Well, what chiropractic believes is when your spine is misaligned or what we call subluxated (a vertebral subluxation is a vertebra that is subluxated or misaligned causing interference somewhere in the nervous system), we believe that when the nervous system is interfered with or disrupted, or has undue tension on it, it is not as able to communicate with the rest of the body or to deliver messages. Research has actually shown that the weight of a nickel over a minute or twos time on a nerve decreases that nerve's function by 60 percent. Chiropractic believes and understands that structure equalls function. If a wheel wasn't round it wouldn't function too well if it was square. So when a nerve is structurally altered in any way, its functioning is disrupted. Because the nervous system coordinates and controls all functions of the body-that's right out of Gray's Anatomy, which is the bible-when the nervous system is disrupted it causes a disruption to all parts of he body. So, where does disease start and where does it end? We believe that disease does not start when it shows up on a blood test or shows up on an x-ray; it has actually taken years. Now where does that start? That started on the cellular level, the molecular level. Now what was it about those molecules, about the atoms that was off kilter? It was, what we believe, a nervous system that was under undue tension causing a change in the energy into the cell, causing a change in the structure of the cell. That one cell can lead to other cells. This is how disease starts. It goes from cells to tissues to organs to systems to the whole body. What chiropractic believes is that most of your diseases do come from the nervous system.

Question: Now genetics plays a role in there too causing a lot of hereditary traits like scoliosis and things like that, subluxations right?

Well, my belief is that genetically you may have a predisposition for a particular disease. What that means is that if your whole family are asthmatics you may have a genetic predisposition for it. It does not mean that you have to get it. Things like Down's Syndrome, Sickle Cell Anemia obviously yes. There are obvious genetic diseases that no matter what you do you are not going to be able to change that. What chiropractic does say for the Sickle Cell Anermia patient or the Down's Syndrome patient, for instance, we still want to get them worked on and adjusted because that person's body will express a fuller potential of its genetic potential with a clear nervous system. That's the goal, to just express your genetic potential, whatever that may be.

The thing is you can talk with people who live their lives in the mechanistic model (world view) until you're blue in the face about alternative stuff and if they don't understand the very simple principle of energy they will never get what you're talking about. You have to understand that the body is just a bundle of energy. When you look at who we really are we're made up of cells, everyone knows trillions of cells (70 trillion cells). Cells are made up of molecules which are made up of atoms. Atoms are made up of a nucleus with protons and neutrons and electrons. Science now tells us with the electron microscopes and bigger and better ways of studying the atom, it tells us that even an electron-when I was in school we learned that the electron was a ball that circulated around the nucleus. They now know that this isn't the case-an electron is just a very, very quickly vibrating energy, it's mass and energy at times. If we're made up atoms, which are made up of electrons and protons and neutrons, if I was a nucleus the first cell of an electron would be across route 25A, the next orbit would be in the Long Island Sound. So really if we're made up of atoms, and atoms are made up of mostly empty space, what are we? Basically we're mostly empty space. We are vibrating at a very high frequency. When you understand energy that stops to explain...and this is quantum physics by the way. Quantum physics is now showing this, this isn't like the alternative guru.

Comment: The Bohr model of the atom.

Absolutely, and they also know that an electron is sometimes mass, sometimes its a particle, sometimes it's energy. And what makes an electron a particle is the observation of it. When you observe an electron it becomes a particle. So what does that say? That means that how you observe someone changes them, literally. There is your explanation for prayer. Prayer works. How do you explain prayer working on a mechanistic model? It is impossible to happen. If you understand that the body is all energy, then these things start to make sense, how the body works. Energetically, those atoms which make up molecules which make up cells are getting fed information from this life energy, whatever you want to call it. So now we're talking about something you can't really see. If I cut your arm we'll watch it bleed and it'll heal. If I cut the arm of a corpse it won't heal because it's dead. So there's something in a live person right, so this energy force (life force) brings life to even tthe atom. That atom, the information that is delivered from this life force to the atom is deterined by the tension in the physical body. If a nerve is real tense, it changes the frequency of the energy that goes to the atom. It's tensegrity! There have been studies on this too. Structures have what they call tensegrity. If you can bring more ease or flexibility into the nervous system, you're bringing more ease and flexibility, you're changing the tension of the nerve, you're changing the frequency of the energy that's going into the individual cells, the individual molecules, and the individual atoms. So now you're changing it energetically.

Now network chiropractic, you wanted to talk about that a little bit and how it's different. Traditionally, chiropractic believes the vertebral column is made up of 24 vertebrae, vertebrae like donuts; 24 of them stacked on top of another. The canal that's formed, the hold, is where the spinal cord goes. So your skull protects the brain. An extension of the brain is the spinal cord. Spinal cord goes down the vertebral column, which is the vertebrae. When those vertebrae are misaligned, or twisted, or subluxated in any way it can cause tension, stretching, torqueing on the nerve. That nerve now isn't sending its appropriate messages to the rest of the body. This is chiropractic. Chiropractic is saying that when we take the pressure off of the nerve by adjusting the spine and putting the vertebrae back, now you're freeing up the nerve and making the body healthier. Network chiropractic was born out of traditional chiropractic. In fact, the name network is from networking the different techniques in chiropractic. There are a hundred, there are over a hundred techniqes in chiropractic. And what network did was it took the main concepts from a lot of these major techniqes and put them under one umbrella. And it really was the timing and sequencing of the adjustments; it's all timing. It's when to do one type of force in the body as opposed to another type of force.

The foundation of network chiropractic really comes from the division of subluxation into two types. Donald Epstein is a chiropractor from Brooklyn originally who was the developer and the founder of network spinal analysis (chiropractic). He has written many aritcles, and he has done the research. The brilliance of his work all started when he made that division of subluxation into two types. He dividied it into what he called a structural subluxation and a facilitated subluxation. A structural subluxation occurs when a vertebra gets pulled out of place, causing interference on the nerve root. And the way you correct a structural subluxation is by manually adjusting the spine. That's when you hear the audible crunches or pops when you crack your knuckle. That again is a structural subluxation and that is caused by a physical type of a stress: car accident, falls, sporting injuries, sitting at a desk in the same position all day, causes your spine structurally to change posturally. 90 percent of the profession I would say practice chiropractic strictly from a structural point of view, meaning correcting only structural subluxations, which in it of itself is a phenomenal service.

The second type of subluation, the facilitated subluxation, is a different animal all together. It's not caused by physical stress. It's caused by a mental, emotional, or a chemical stress. It affects the nervous system a lot differently. It doesn't affect the nervous system segmentally. One vertebra causing one pair of nerve roots to go out of place. It affects the nervous system multisegmentally, meaning over several segments of the spine. It doesn't affect the nerve root as much as it affects the spinal cord itself, and the brain stem actually.

And the way that this is caused...I like to bring examples into this...the first thing people need to know is that the nervous system is what connects us to our environment. If you go outside and you feel cold, the reason you feel cold is because the nervous system perceives it as being cold out, and your body has to adapt to this. The way your body adapts to this is through the nervous system. So you may shiver, you may go through a bunch of physiological responses to the coldness that your body is doing appropriately. If somebody puts a gun to your head, if somebody threatens your life, and it could have been 20 years ago it could have been any time, but if somebody threatens you, your body will perceive your life as being threatened, and it will go into what is called a fight or flight response, you may have heard of it. And it's called a sympathetic nervous system stress response; the sympathetic nervous system kicks in. One of the things that the sympathetic nervous system controls is adrenaline being pumped throughout the system. So now what adrenaline does is...part of the sympathetic response is that all of the blood and nerve energy goes from your internal organs out to your musculoskeletal system. So now you have more strength and power than you have ever had, and that's the fight or flight. It gives you the strength to either stand there and fight or to run because life knows that your life is in danger; your body knows this. Part of the stress response is also your eyes dilate. Your glucose uptake is a little different. Your breathing changes. And what that does is that positions your body to protect itself. If you ever see a cat being chased-I like to use a cat because everyone can relate to this-it takes off. But when a cat is cornered, what does it do? It arches its back up right, and everyone knows don't go near the cat when it arches its back up because that's literally the nervous system now. The nervous system, spinal cord, has stretched up in a defensive posture.

You see, the position, tension, and tone of your spinal system determines to a great degree what is going on in your life (your life experience). Psychiatrists and artists have known this forever. If you go to a psychiatrist and you say to the person "I love you," the psychiatrist knows when the hands are clenched and the head is forward that's different from, "I love you," it's the position of where the person is at. An artist, someone like this isn't ready to kill someone. Someone like this (he makes mean, scary face and contortion) is (laughter from the crowd!). So we look at the position, tension, and tone of the spinal system. Appropriately when that gun is pointed at your head your body goes through all of these responses physiologically, appropriately. And you're up like this, and your muscle tension is real tight, and all the blood and nerve energy goes from your stomach out to your muscles and you've got all of this energy built up. Then when the threat is gone (when the dog walks away), the cat's nervous system should be flexible enough to recover. So what does it do? It brings its spine back into extension, not flexion. When the person takes the gun away and you realize that your life isn't in danger any longer, your system should be flexible enough to recover...and calm down. When your system doesn't recover completely, that's where facilitated subluxations are born. The whole spinal system gets under tension when it doesn't completely recover...that tension remains in the spinal system. And you look at people as they get much older, I've seen people literally in their 80s where they cannot lift their head up like this because their is a lifetime of stress. See it's not the stress that does it to us, it's the body's ability to deal with it and to accomodate it and to recover from it. That's the key, you have to recover from the stress. When you don't that's a meningeal or facilitated subluxation. And this is something that Donald Epstein (network spinal analysis) addresses. And the way we address and correct facilitated subluxations is not with the manual type of an adjustment where you hear the popping necessarily. It's more of a lighter touch.