It’s October and fall is just barely beginning to arrive in South Carolina. We’ve had such a long, hot summer that I’m glad to see the hot weather finally leave. With clearer air and cooler days, everything’s getting more comfortable, and soon we’ll have the colors of fall, too. All in all, it’s my favorite time of year.
Driving around Rock Hill I see some of the other trappings of fall starting to show up like pumpkins on the doorstep, and colorful trees. With Halloween around the corner some of the usual scary decorations are showing up around the neighborhood. Just today I saw a pumpkin with sharp, angry looking eyes and teeth, a skeleton hanging from one tree and a flying ghost, tethered with fish line to the branches of another tree. Yes, it seems like people are getting into full swing about trying to scare one another. Seeing that, 
reminded me of something that someone said just before getting an adjustment yesterday.
The eleven-year-old girl needed a neck adjustment, so I asked her to step over to the special table for adjusting the top of the neck. That’s when she hesitated “Getting my neck adjusted scares me.”
“Why does that scare you” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t really know, but it looks like it should hurt” she answered.
I said “Let’s think about it then. You just saw a six-month-old baby get her neck adjusted, and before that you watched your father get a similar adjustment. It didn’t hurt either of them, did it?”
“Well no, but it still scares me” she answered.
I thought that we needed to clear up some misunderstandings, so I said “You’re right to be scared.” Then after a few seconds I added “You’re just scared of the wrong things!”
“What do you mean?” she inquired.
My answer was simple “There are lots of things in this world about which a healthy fear is a good thing. We should fear things that are harmful, like polluted water and air, artificial chemicals in our food, crime and other hazards that have crept into our culture.”
“So what does that have to do with you adjusting me?” she asked.
“I was just coming to that” I said. “The thing is that when it comes to our body, there’s one really good reason to be afraid, it’s called a subluxation. When a spinal bone gets misaligned like the one in the top of your neck is, it can’t do what it’s supposed to do.”
She stopped me and asked “What’s it supposed to do?”
“That’s easy. It protects your nerve system.” I answered. “Now remember we talked about how the nerves connect your brain to everything else in the body?”
She replied “Yes, I remember.”
“Well, here’s the thing, if your spinal bone isn’t protecting properly, then it does just the opposite, it insults your nerve system. When subluxations happen, the messages from the brain can’t get to the body parts properly and all kinds of things can go wrong. That’s why I said that you were right to be scared.”
“Since you already know it doesn’t hurt, it just makes sense that the thing to be scared of is not getting adjusted, right?”
“I guess so” she said.
Then we got her on the table, did the adjustment and I heard her giggle. When I looked closer I noticed a big smile on her face.
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