Things took a more serious and scientific turn at a recent Friday Seminar, Life Chiropractic College West’s weekly all-student meeting.
While most presentations are around student body business, such as student council elections or awards, or strike a more inspirational tone, such as a recent talk from Life West President Dr. Ron Oberstein, this one was notable for featuring Dr. Amy Haas, a New Hampshire chiropractor who is also an expert on chiropractic and heart rate variability, or HRV.
Dr. Amy Haas speaks to Life West students recently.
Dr. Haas, who runs her own practice in New Hampshire and gave several examples taken from her own patients, gave a presentation called “Why HRV? Creating Value with Certainty in Chiropractic Practice.” Her lecture, which she had given to faculty members earlier, frames HRV as a unique opportunity for the chiropractic profession. She says that being able to measure HRV allows chiropractors to differentiate themselves from other healthcare disciplines, and to promote the core chiropractic value of improving adaptability as modulated by innate intelligence.
During the presentation, Dr. Haas drew connections for the audience between chaos theory, how the human body works and the patterns that are created by the nervous system, and heart rate variability. Medical findings show that increased heart rate variability leads to better health, and she has documented among her own patients a link between chiropractic adjustments for subluxation and increased HRV.
Dr. Haas said that making adjustments for subluxation allows for better sensory input into the nervous system, which fits into the chiropractic idea of innate intelligence. Innate intelligence says that the body knows how to heal itself and can, if given the right circumstances. One example of that is the way in which a broken bone knits properly, once it is set.
Dr. Haas has published an open-access article about her work, “Sustained improvement of heart rate variability in patients undergoing a program of chiropractic care: A retrospective case series” in Chiropractic Journal Australia 2018. It provides ideas for further research but is not proof of the relationships in itself.
Watch her talk about HRV as well in this Mile High Chiro podcast with Dr. Daniel Knowles.
