Dr. Genin
by Bob Waite
Doctor Gina Genin remembers when a six-year-old boy who had chronic ear infections since he was two weeks old was brought to her office. His condition was so bad that he had to have his mastoid bone, which sits behind the ear, reconstructed because it too had become infected. His mother had heard that chiropractors could help, so she brought the boy to Dr. Genin’s office. “It’s funny, but sometimes,” Dr. Genin says, “I call myself the choice of last resort. Anyway he was recommended by one of my regular patients and I got to see him while he was having a raging ear infection.” When Dr. Genin checked the boy, she noticed something right away. “His atlas vertebra (the vertebra at top of neck) was so rotated and tilted up out of alignment that it felt like a knuckle sticking out of the side of his neck. So I adjusted him and he never had another ear infection again in his life. Now it didn’t hold right away, but adjustments on kids hold pretty quickly and they don’t need to get readjusted over and over again. But from that first adjustment that ear infection cleared up almost overnight because that ear drained for the first time.”
Dr. Genin sees her job as taking away what hinders the body from healing itself. “An adjustment,” she explains, “is using a force in the spine to realign spinal bones.” The theory behind chiropractic treatment has to do with the wisdom already built into the human body. “The body has innate intelligence, inborn wisdom that allows it to oversee all its processes. For example, you don’t have to tell yourself to breath. You don't have to voluntarily blink your eyes or make your heart beat. The wisdom of your body knows how often your eyes should blink, how often you should breath, how often you heart should beat, and it does this by constantly monitoring itself and these functions are mediated by the nervous system. If the nervous system is free from interference and able to do its job, it can maintain a state of homeostasis where things are balanced and regulated. When the system goes out of balance and you are no longer in this nice balanced state, things don’t work properly. So the whole concept of chiropractic came about based upon the idea that nature needs no help, just no interference."