Educational Tools | Princeton Integrative Health

Dr. Conny Garefino, Family Chiropractor, explains her technique

Written by Jenna Richardson | Mar 19, 2019 6:07:49 PM

What is B.G.I Chiropractic?

The approach known as Bio-Geometric Integration (B.G.I.) is an acceptance that everything in our bodies are connected. This means our bones, ligaments, blood chemistry, thoughts, emotions, and our interactions we have with our environment, are all connected. When you receive a chiropractic adjustment, all of these pieces shift and transform to allow for healing to occur. The adjustment affects your whole body, starting in your cells to restore the brain and body connection. It is so much more than just moving a bone.

B.G.I. chiropractic care is unique because it acknowledges that even the smallest force affects the whole system, making it a gentle approach to the adjusting process. When a doctor is able to identify where your subluxations or blocks in your internal communication network (the nervous system) are, it doesn’t take a lot of force to unblock them, but rather, a keen awareness of helping your brain realize the block is there, and in turn encourages your body to work on clearing it.

As a doctor of Chiropractor and practitioner of BGI, when I put my hands on a patient I am feeling for changes in tone (tension) in a person’s system. Each type of tissue, whether it is bone, muscle, organ, lymph, etcetera, carries a different tone. For example, bones are denser than your organs, and your heart has a much different tone than your liver. Within each type of tissue, it is ideal for the tone to be the same in order to adapt to life’s experiences optimally. When there are differences in tone, this leads to communication issues between the brain and body, not allowing information from the brain to be conveyed efficiently to that specific area of the body. In chiropractic, we call this a subluxation and the long-term result of this, are symptoms. For example, if I feel tonal differences in a patient’s midback which contains the nerves that feed the stomach, that patient may exhibit symptoms such as indigestion due to low acid production in the stomach. Indigestion is the symptom and the result of the body’s inability to adapt to life’s experiences (which come in the form of thoughts, traumas, or toxins) which leads to subluxation. Removing the subluxation DOES NOT address the indigestion, but rather frees energy in the body to allow space for healing.

What controls the tone of my biology?

The nervous system, the master control system of your body is responsible for regulating, regenerating and healing all systems of your body, and it produces an overall tone. The bioenergetics of the nervous system is housed within the brain and spinal cord and peripheral nerves that send signals throughout the rest of the body. Ultimately, your body cannot function

at its optimum if there is an imbalance in its overall tone; this is because your body is not getting the proper information to do its job via the nervous system.

When our nervous system experiences what we perceive as stress, this changes the tone of our biology depending on whether we integrate that experience or not.

For example, say you twisted your ankle running. If your body integrated that stress the next time you go running you will respond differently with movements, muscles and ligaments that will prevent injury. Someone that did not integrate this experience may hold reservations just thinking about running and could potentially reinjure themselves.

The body that has not integrated the experience holds tonal/tensional patterns keeping that person in the frequency of the experience. Our nervous system does not know the difference between the past, present or future and will run patterns of stress until they are integrated. This stress could be physical like the example, or it could be mental, emotional or chemical and as long as it remains unintegrated, it’s changing the tone of your body, the response of your nervous system and your overall expression of health.

What is a tonal adjustment?

Gentle specific contacts into the areas where tone is not optimal, and patterns of tension are stored, stimulate the nervous system to reprocess and reintegrate that stress so that our system grows and moves beyond it. As the body begins to rebalance tone and create homeostasis via the nervous system our body is able to better communicate. With proper communication our bodies are able to do what they are designed to do, which is heal, repair, regenerate and continuously evolve and express optimal health and lives. Simply stated, an optimal life starts with optimal health!