Network Care Explained

Network Care is a powerful healing approach that uses gentle, precise touches to activate your body's natural healing abilities. It helps release spinal tension while improving your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.

Developed by American Chiropractor Dr. Donald Epstein, Network Care combines the best practices from Chiropractic and other bodywork techniques. It integrates knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and how your body responds to stress on multiple levels. Through strategic touches to key spinal areas, it helps your body release tension and stored energy, allowing your brain and nervous system to function more efficiently.

The Basics

Understanding Network Care starts with knowing how your body works. Your nervous system contains over 100,000 billion nerve cells controlling everything from organ function to body temperature. Comprising your brain, spinal cord, sense organs, and nerves throughout your body, it's essential for keeping you alive and functioning.

Your nervous system manages vital bodily functions, from organ operation to muscle movement. It controls your thoughts, behaviours, sensations, and emotions. Your body responds to various forms of stress - physical (like injuries), mental, emotional (such as loss), or chemical (from medications or toxins). The most common response is muscle tension.

These stress responses originate in your brain's primitive section, which controls basic functions and emotions. Sensory information passes through these areas before reaching your conscious mind, explaining why you react to stress before fully processing it.

Your Body's Stress Response

Your body has multiple stress response patterns, with "fright, flight, fight" being the most common. Imagine walking down a dark alley when someone suddenly appears. Your body instantly responds - muscles tense, shoulders rise, neck tucks down, and limbs tighten. This is your body's natural alarm system, preparing you to either fight or flee from potential danger.

When faced with stress, your primitive brain triggers changes across your bodily functions, thoughts, emotions, and behaviours. The fright-flight pattern works in three key ways:

Firstly, it creates tension patterns centred around your spine and limbs. You can experience this when witnessing an accident - your body instinctively "cringes" around your spine.

Secondly, your body redirects energy and blood flow from digestive and reproductive systems to vital organs like heart, lungs, and muscles. This ensures you have sufficient resources for survival, temporarily pausing functions like growth and digestion.

Thirdly, your mental and emotional state shifts. Your attention moves to your external environment, blocking feelings temporarily. This "bottling up" of emotions while storing physical tension is a crucial survival mechanism. Once the stress passes and you feel safe, your body naturally releases this stored tension and emotion.

Your body often enters a defensive state in response to unpleasant experiences, ranging from severe trauma to minor discomfort. While natural release occurs after the stress passes, persistent or overwhelming stress can leave you stuck in these response patterns.

These tension patterns accumulate over time, affecting nerve supplies to various body regions, organ systems, and the brain. Your body can store significant tension long-term through compensation. Even a simple neck turn involves movement throughout your upper spine. Symptoms often emerge only when your body reaches its tension capacity, typically manifesting in well-functioning areas that have been compensating for rigid regions.

When trapped in these patterns, energy and information flow diminishes, particularly through your central nervous system. This affects organ function, with secondary systems like digestion becoming less efficient. You become increasingly rigid physically, mentally, and emotionally, limiting your ability to fully experience life.

Your capacity to express essential states - passion, strength, power, value and love - reduces. Mental functions like concentration and stress management decline.

How Network Care works

Network Care practitioners use precise touches and strategic body movements to help your system identify and release stored tension. Rather than forcing change, these gentle interventions act as signals to activate your body's natural healing abilities.

The method focuses on identifying exactly where your body needs input and the ideal pressure required. It's about providing the right touch, in the right place, at the right time, working with your body's natural responses.

The defensive stress responses in your body often carry unresolved feelings or stresses from your past. Network Care's precise touches help your body and brain become aware of these stored tensions, activating your natural healing abilities to transform them and integrate their emotional charge. Through Network Care, your body learns to effectively release and integrate tensions, a skill that stays with you permanently.

Experiencing Network Care

Network Care progresses through structured levels, each enhancing your body's ability to release deeper tension layers. Your first visit involves a detailed consultation, including health history and body assessments to identify defensive stress patterns. Regular visits last 5-20 minutes, with you lying face-down on an adjusting table, fully clothed. As you progress, different positions may be used.

During visits, practitioners make specific touches along your neck or tailbone, assessing your body's responses to determine necessary input. Brief pauses between touches allow your body to process the changes. Treatment continues until your body signals completion. The effects continue working hours after each session. Initially, visits are recommended every second day to maintain momentum.

Many people first notice freer breathing when starting Network Care. As treatment progresses, your body begins making spontaneous movements to release tensions, often starting with subtle movements in feet, ankles, wrists or hips.

These wave-like movements gradually become larger and more coordinated, with different body parts moving harmoniously with your breath. As you progress, you may experience sensations like tingling, warmth, or shifting aches. Emotional releases can occur occasionally, and most people report clearer, more peaceful thoughts after sessions.

Network levels of care

‘Discover Care’, the first level, helps transition your body from a defensive, rigid state to one of relative safety. This enables the practitioner to later on, address deeper tension layers more effectively in the second level - ‘Transform Care’.

Through these initial levels, most people experience significant improvements in posture and flexibility. Various discomforts along the spine and body often improve as your natural bodily functions restore themselves.

Your cognitive function enhances, allowing clearer perceptions. Rather than reacting through past stress filters, you respond to situations more effectively with increased flexibility and creativity. People naturally adopt healthier lifestyles and find other healing practices more beneficial.

In ‘Awaken Care’ and beyond, the focus shifts from recovery to growth and expansion. Your chest and heart regions open significantly, leading to increased presence and openness. Stressful events become opportunities for growth rather than threats, allowing quicker integration with less struggle.

Your stress response improves, and you develop greater capacity to express your essential qualities - passion, strength, power, value and love. Many describe becoming more "heart-centred".

Research

Recent studies demonstrate that Network Care consistently improves quality of life across physical, mental and emotional aspects, with benefits including:

• Increased energy

• Better flexibility

• Reduced pain and symptoms

• Fewer illnesses

• Lower stress levels

Research shows Network Care also enhances:

• Stress management abilities

• Emotional and psychological wellbeing

• Mental focus and concentration

• Anxiety and depression reduction

• Relaxation capacity

• Life satisfaction

• Self-expression and communication

• Goal achievement and productivity

• Adaptability to change and challenges

• Overall life contentment

Studies indicate that Network Care participants demonstrate significantly improved ability to maintain positive lifestyle changes, including better nutrition, regular exercise and meditation practices.

The benefits become apparent within weeks of starting care and continue growing substantially over time. Longer participation correlates with greater experienced benefits.

References

Blanks, RHI, Schuster, TL, Dobson M, 'A Retrospective Assessment of Network Care Using a Survey of Self-Related Health, Wellness and Quality of Life', Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, Vol 1, No 4, 1997.

Epstein DM, 'Network Spinal Analysis: A System of Health Care Delivery Within the Subluxation-based Chiropractic Model', Journal of Vertebral Subluxation Research, Vol 1, No 1, 1996.

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