Here's a question I ask sometimes, usually while somebody's baby is asleep on their shoulder. When you were growing in the womb, what do you think your body built first?
Almost everyone guesses the heart. Good guess. It's the thing we listen for at the first appointment, the thing on the ultrasound picture on the fridge, and culturally it's where we tend to locate a person.
It was the nervous system.
At around three weeks, a flat strip of cells along the back of the embryo folds up on itself and closes into a tube. That tube becomes the brain at one end and the spinal cord down the rest of it. It happens before the heart has taken a beat, and everything built afterward, the heart included, gets laid down around it.
Sit with the order, because the order is the point. Your body didn't build a set of organs and then run wiring out to them. It built the wiring, and then built the body outward from there.
You already know this rule from houses, even if you've never held a hammer. You don't frame the rooms and then wonder where the wiring goes. The electrical plan comes first, the rough-in goes in before the walls close, and every later decision gets made around it. People do it in that order because the other order means opening the walls back up.
An embryo has no option to open the walls back up. So it runs the wiring first.
There's a second thing that follows, and it's why we teach this early rather than filing it under trivia. The nervous system is the one system that got hard protection. A skull for the brain, and twenty-four moving segments of spine wrapped around the cord. Your liver doesn't get that. Your lungs get a partial cage.
The system your body built first is the system it then armored, which I read as a fairly clear statement of priority from a body that has never been sentimental about anything.
So when we spend our appointments looking at how a spine moves, this is why. The spine is the only part of that entire system you can reach from the outside, and how well it moves is a real, measurable thing. Which matters enormously in a patient who can't yet describe herself in words.
You built the wiring before you built the rooms. That's how important it was.
Keep reading: Babies and Development
Individual results vary. Chiropractic care does not diagnose, treat, or cure any disease or condition. This information is educational and not a substitute for medical care. Sláinte provides wellness chiropractic care and works alongside your medical team.
Ready to put this into practice for your family?
Your first visit includes our INSiGHT nervous system scans. X-rays, if clinically necessary, are always discussed with you first.
