Chiropractic

Leonard A. Mazza, DC

OFFICE HOURS
Monday - Wednesday - Friday
New Patients: 8 AM – 1 PM and 7 PM – 9 PM
Established Patients: 1 PM – 7 PM

To arrange an appointment: (717) 334-4481

Email: lamazzadc@gmail.com

        . About The Doctor
        . What Is Chiropractic?
        . About Our Care
        . Well Care vs. Sick Care
        . Why Should You And Your Family Use Chiropractic?


About the Doctor

Dr. Leonard Mazza is a chiropractor with over nineteen years of professional experience, as well as a passion for helping adults & children achieve healthier lives. He owned and operated the Chiropractic LifeCenter, a private practice in Franklin Park, New Jersey, for sixteen years before relocating to the Gettysburg area and joining the Gettysburg Holistic Health Center.

Dr. Mazza is a graduate of Cook College/ Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (B.S. Forestry, 1982) and Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic in Spartanburg, South Carolina (Doctor of Chiropractic, 1986).

Dr. Mazza served on the Board of Trustees of Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic from 1993 until 2005, and served as vice chairman from 2002 to 2005. He has also served as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Federation of Straight Chiropractic, a national chiropractic society, and the Garden State Chiropractic Society, a state-level organization in New Jersey.

In the summer of 2001, he and his wife Lorraine rode their bicycles across the United States to raise funds for the Berkowitz Scholarship, which they founded to offset the high cost of chiropractic education. Applicants must demonstrate a history of community service in order to be eligible. To learn more about Sherman College of Straight Chiropractic and the Berkowitz Scholarship Fund, click here .

What is Chiropractic?

Chiropractic’s main area of interest is subluxation, a condition in which a vertebrae becomes slightly misaligned with an adjacent segment in such a way as to disturb nerve function. The objective of chiropractic is to locate, analyze, and correct subluxation.

Chiropractic maintains that the body possesses a unique innate wisdom that strives to maintain it in a state of good health. This intelligence strives to maintain normal heart rate, blood pressure, insulin production, etc.; this same intelligence also directs our bodily functions in continuously adapting to an ever changing environment.

Maintenance of good health depends upon the body’s natural ability to continually adapt to changes in its internal and external environment. Ensuring this capability is one of nature’s most remarkable communication networks: the nerve system. The brain sends mental impulses to each of the body’s more than 100 trillion cells, giving them direction on how to function properly. At the same time, each part of the body is reporting information back to the brain; these mental impulses are transmitted to and from the brain by way of the nerves passing through the spine.

Vertebrae in the spine can and, on occasion, do become subluxated, which is an interference to the body’s communication process. A subluxation causes messages being transmitted over nerves to become garbled or modified; the body’s response to the environment is then inadequate. Chiropractic makes its contribution to health by identifying, analyzing and correcting subluxated vertebrae. The doctor of chiropractic removes this particular kind of interference to the body’s innate striving to maintain its own health.

Chiropractic’s concern, then, is with subluxation and its influence on health and health maintenance. Its aim is to ensure that the body’s natural health-assurance process is allowed to function without interference from subluxation.

In the end, chiropractic is concerned with life, because good health, after all, is the expression of life itself.

About Our Care

Upper Cervical Oriented Although the full spine is checked and adjusted as needed, the emphasis in our office is in the upper cervical region of the spine – the top two bones of the neck called the Atlas and the Axis. The reason for emphasizing the upper cervical spine is that these bones are the most freely moving vertebra in the spine and, thus, most subject to misalignment. In addition, the spinal cord is largest at this level and the spinal canal (where the spinal cord passes through) is smallest in this area. The likelihood of vertebral subluxation being present in the spine is greatest in the upper cervical region because of the free movement of these vertebrae, and because there is so little room for error. Also, when subluxations are corrected in this area, many times other areas of the spine will improve because if the big problems are taken care of, the body can often take care of the rest.

Conservative Since the body is always striving to maintain itself in a state of good health, a person should not need an adjustment every time they visit our office. Our thorough evaluation (which includes state of the art paraspinal infrared thermography) allows us to accurately detect the presence or absence of vertebral subluxation. After a vertebral subluxation is identified and an adjustment is performed, most of our time is spent monitoring the spine to see if there is evidence of vertebral subluxation and if an adjustment is needed or not.

Straight There exists within the chiropractic profession today two schools of thought, which are called “Straight” and “Mixed.” Mixed chiropractic mixes chiropractic and other methods to accomplish the medical objective of treating disease. Straight chiropractic uses chiropractic methods to accomplish the chiropractic objective of locating, analyzing and correcting vertebral subluxation. Read “Well Care vs. Sick Care” to learn more about this.

Gentle The adjustment feels like a light tap on the spine and takes a fraction of a second. It is very safe and gentle.

Well Care vs. Sick Care

The American Heritage Dictionary states that health is, “Optimal functioning with freedom from disease and abnormality.” The two components of that definition – optimal functioning and freedom from disease and abnormality identify the two different approaches in heath care.

Sick care is based upon a philosophy of health called mechanism. Mechanism is a philosophy that views the body as a sophisticated machine, but a machine nonetheless, and that life is equal to the sum of the body parts. The objective of sick care is to diagnose and treat disease – essentially destroy your enemy (disease) before it destroys you. It is also typically about treating effects rather than causes. These effects are often treated with drugs and surgery. Symptoms are also considered to be intrinsically harmful and must be removed or combated.

An example would be to treat a cold with a cough suppressant. Does that deal with causes or effects? Why is the body coughing in the first place? Are we helping by suppressing this bodily function? What are the consequences of suppressing that bodily function?

Well care is based upon a philosophy called vitalism. Vitalism is a philosophy that recognizes that although we have mechanical aspects, we are more than sophisticated machines and that we are more that the sum of our parts. There is an immaterial part of life that can be recognized but cannot be measured. For example, what is the difference between a live person and a corpse? They have all the same parts yet they behave quite differently. That is what vitalists refer to as the immaterial aspect of life. That is also why hey assert that we are more than the sum of our parts.

The objective of well care is to build up your body so that you can heal yourself by addressing causes rather than effects. Symptoms are considered the body’s attempt to get rid of harmful agents as opposed to problems in and of themselves.

How do you build yourself up? By providing better circumstances such as better nutrition, exercise, rest, hygienic food handling, cleaner indoor air, positive mental attitude, and removing vertebral subluxations.

Because addressing a cause makes much more sense to us than treating effects, our health care approach is focused on well care.

Why Should You and Your Family Use Chiropractic?

Simply put – because you deserve to have the best life possible! Chiropractic can help you perform at our best because your nerve system touches everything you do. You can be a better parent, your child can be a better student, you can perform better at sports, you can perform better on the job, you will be less accident-prone, you will think clearer, and ultimately, you can be the best person that you can be. Chiropractic is for the entire family because it makes sense to have the whole family – including children – enjoy all of these benefits.

Parents often don’t realize that children need chiropractic care too. The most common reason a child may have a vertebral subluxation is the trauma of the birth process. Rather than the mother pushing the child out, which is nature’s way, the child is often pulled out of the birth canal. The pulling and twisting that the newborn’s neck is subject to oftentimes causes a vertebral subluxation. This is why all newborns should be checked.

Getting checked in childhood, especially right after birth, is the best time to get checked because if there is a vertebral subluxation, it is easiest to correct. The child has the most to gain because if a vertebral subluxation is corrected early, it positively affects every aspect of growth and development during the most critical time of their life.

Likewise, it is also important for teenagers and adults to get their spines check for vertebral subluxation because the causes are so widespread. Causes can include falls, sleeping improperly, automobile accidents, exposure to various chemicals, sitting or standing for prolonged periods of time, and stress, to name a few.

When families utilize chiropractic, everyone wins!

Gettysburg Holistic Health Center
2311 Fairfield Rd. - Suite E
Gettysburg, PA 17325