How Does Subluxation Affect the Nervous System?
Research performed in the first half of this century demonstrated that extremity pain could be induced by injecting hypertonic saline into paraspinal muscles and interspinous ligaments.1,2 For readers who are unfamiliar with this work, it is known that the injection of hypertonic saline into musculoskeletal structures causes a significant amount of pain and discomfort. Presumably, the reason for the pain response is that hypertonic saline acts to depolarize local tissue nociceptors. In 1976, Drs. Vert Mooney and James Robertson set out to confirm the earlier research on referred pain and discussed their findings in a well-known paper, “The Facet Syndrome.”3 Their attention was directed toward the facet joints rather than spinal muscles and ligaments. The subjects in this study included five normal individuals and 15 patients with low back pain. To make a semi-long story short, Mooney and Robertson discovered that, indeed, injecting hypertonic saline into facet joints resulted in local
