Here is 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. It is a good guess. It is the thing we listen for at the first appointment, it is the thing on the ultrasound picture on the fridge, and culturally it is 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 for a second, because the order is the whole point. Your body did not 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 have never held a hammer. You do not 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, where the outlets land, which wall the kitchen takes, 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 is a second thing that follows from this, and it is the reason we teach it early rather than filing it under trivia. The nervous system is the one system that got hard protection. Bone all the way around it. A skull for the brain, and twenty-four moving segments of spine wrapped around the cord. Your liver does not 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. It is housing and a set of moving joints at the same time, and how well it moves is a real, measurable thing, which matters enormously in a patient who cannot yet describe herself in words.
For a mom who is still pregnant, it is the same sentence aimed a few months earlier. The system your baby is building right now, first, ahead of everything else, is the one that will end up running everything else. That is a good reason to pay attention to the environment it is being built in, and a good reason for everybody involved to be unhurried and gentle about all of it.
You built the wiring before you built the rooms. That is 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.
