Heart Palpitations

Dr. Gordon Elder , Director of the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, TX discusses his experience with helping people with rapid heartbeat.

I know from experience the neck can affect the heart.

I had a patient come in several years ago in January. Over the Christmas vacation, she had been to the emergency room a couple times for rapid heart beat. In fact, it was so rapid, the doctors thought it was impossible and tested it a few times because they couldn’t believe how fast her heart was beating.

She told me that her heart had actually been beating faster before she went to the emergency room and they measured it. She said her whole shirt was vibrating.

The typical intervention for this in a severe case was to go in and burn out some of the nerves in the heart. Now in my opinion, we probably need most of the parts that we have in our body. Occasionally something needs to be removed and medicine is great at doing that. But sometimes parts are removed when something else maybe was the problem.

I asked her to not get the surgery right away (a little risky on my part, right, we are dealing with the heart) and I found a problem and said that I thought it could be relevant. I ran my hand down her back and right in the top part of her back there was one bone that when I touched it, she almost screamed. It’s one of the bones where nerves actually come out and go to the heart and then back up. Now the heart gets its innervation from a couple different places, not just the spine. When that bone was that tender, I thought, okay this is probably a mechanical problem, not an organic one that needs to be dealt with with surgery.

I said, “Don’t do the surgery yet, give me a little while, I am going to adjust your neck and see what happens.” I adjusted her neck, the hot spot in her upper back went away, and her heart calmed down. Every once in a while it would come back and we’d check and sure enough, she was out of alignment again. So I know from experience- and I’ve had other patients after that (not as dramatic)- that the neck can affect the heart.

How Does Upper Cervical Chiropractic Work [Video]

Dr Gordon D. Elder of The Blair Chiropractic Clinic, Lubbock Texas explains how Upper Cervical Chiropractic works and how it’s different from other forms of chiropractic.

The brain controls everything in your body.

If you think about it it controls your heart rate, your blood pressure, your immune system, your hormones, and obviously when you want to make a movement of some kind. The most important part of the central nervous system is the brain. It’s protected pretty well by the skull, but then all the nerves have to go down through the neck. So if you injure the neck then it will cause pressure on some certain nerves. Depending on what nerves are affected will depend on how it affects your health. One of the ways that the body accommodates to that though is to change your posture. So if you’ve got a problem in your neck you may start getting bad posture. You might not even realize that it’s affecting your health until you get some back pain because of the bad posture. 

The neck is the weakest part of the spine 

If we can find and fix that correctly, then a lot of times a body will straighten up. Not only will it take off pressure that is going to of nerves that are going to your stomach or to your heart, but then it allows the body to go back to normal and take care of symptoms that way.

Visit us at

Blair Chiropractic Clinic

1802 East 50th Street , Ste 112
Lubbock, Texas 79404
United States (US)

Phone: (806) 747-2735

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Wednesday 9:00 AM - 6:000 PM
Friday 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM