It’s good to be back! I haven’t written anything for LOP since Wrestlemania 23, so allow me to re-introduce myself. I am Chad Matthews, formerly the Raw, WWE PPV, Smackdown, ECW, and Velocity reporter for this great website. Let me tell you what I’ve been up to since April 2007, because it is that which brings me back today. On December 20, 2008, I earned my doctoral degree. To be honest, I’ve been working on this column, of sorts, for a long time. However, I wanted to have the degree on the wall, so that what I am about to write would carry more weight...so that you’d know that what is written is coming from someone with the credentials to speak on the matter. Without further ado, it really is an honor to write one more piece for LOP…

The Subluxation: An Alternative Perspective on the Cause of Wrestler Deaths

In last twenty-two years, upwards of 70 professional wrestlers have died before the age of 55. The media has been quick to point out that many of these men and women were regular users and abusers of pain killers, steroids, and various performance enhancing drugs. I do not believe it’d be unfair of me to say that the media is slightly biased when it comes to pro-wrestling. There are not many of us (wrestling fans) out there. We are a minority when it comes to our fandom for sports entertainment. Ask any wrestling fan, though, and they’ll tell you that their experiences with the likes of Eddie Guerrero, Curt “Mr. Perfect” Hennig, “The British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith, Brian Pillman, or the Big Bossman (just to name a few) were always very positive. So, while drug use certainly cannot be discredited as a contributing factor, I’m going to paint a different picture for you that gives these men and women a little more credit.

I have been a wrestling fan for over twenty years. I love watching a great wrestling match as much as I love anything else. The performances that many of these men and women are capable of putting on is something that I will remain in awe of until my last days. To me, what they do is spectacular. During my time as a wrestling fan, it has only become more spectacular. Consider that, prior to the first wrestling boom of the mid-1980’s, pro-wrestling was hardly the spectacle that it is today. It was primarily a mat-based performance. Fans were treated to longer matches, with a lot of grappling, holding, and even shoot fighting. Guys like Ric Flair have been praised as phenomenal workers, in my opinion, because of their ability to make a match like that so entertaining.

Over the last twenty years, the product has changed. Innovative workers like Shawn Michaels, Owen Hart, Eddie Guerrero, and Rey Mysterio started challenging their peers to do more. Organizations like ECW brought a hardcore, bump-crazy style to the forefront. Matches started more heavily involving high risk maneuvers. Where once upon a time a suplex off the second rope was considered a legit finishing move due to its dangerous nature, it is nothing more than a transition move in today’s time. Don’t even get me started on some of the crazy gimmick matches that have sprung up over the years, suffice to say that the wrestling product is now far more physically taxing on the wrestlers.

Less than 1% of the entire world’s population knows what I am about to tell you. Research is increasing on the subject and more and more people are being educated about it every week. In recent months, stories about it have appeared on The Montel Williams Show, The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Doctors.

I’ll get into what “it” is in just a moment, but first, I want to do a quick review of how the body works, so you can better understand what kind of effect the constant bumps have on the body of a wrestler. The brain, like a cell phone sends a signal through a cell tower and on to another phone, sends vital information through the brainstem to each part of the body. The brainstem is located at the area where the head and the neck meet, to give you a point of reference. Here’s an analogy: Vince McMahon is the brainstem of the WWE, and the overall wrestling product is the body. Vince’s job is to receive creative ideas and TV scripts from his staff and sign off on what he likes and dislikes. The product is, ultimately, 100% dependant on his ability to do his job well. Similarly, the brainstem has control over the function of the body. The body is 100% dependant on the brainstem’s ability to do its job well. Many assume that the brain itself is the most important thing in the body, but that title actually belongs to the brainSTEM. The brainstem is the very first thing created in a developing human baby.

Moving ahead, both the brain and the cell phone, if I may continue with that analogy, must send their signals through a network. In the human body, that network is called the nervous system. The nerves in the body are how we are able to function. In order for any bodily function to occur, the brain must send a message thru the nerve to the appropriate part of the body. That is how we breath, how our hearts beat, how our digestive system works, how we grow, how we learn, how we love, and how we watch pro-wrestling. The nerves are like the highways by which every message gets to where it needs to go and it just so happens that the brainstem is the intersection where every one of those messages has to cross. There are upwards of a trillion nerves wrapped around the brainstem. That’s a lot of traffic, wouldn’t you say? Anyhow, that, in a nutshell, is how the body works.

A subluxation is one of life’s finishing moves. It occurs when your head is no longer balanced, or aligned, properly on the top vertebra in your spine, distorting the messages from your brain to your body due to a stress on the brainstem. When this happens, your body can’t function properly…it stops working how it is supposed to…and you become much more likely to experience pain and develop into sicknesses and diseases of all kinds. The subluxation, in the case of the above example, is Vince making poor decisions. So, instead of signing off on ideas like the Stone Cold Steve Austin character, he signs off on ideas like dressing a guy up as a clown or featuring a guy who eats worms or giving the world title to a big giant with absolutely zero talent that is about as over as a dress shoe. In turn, the overall product declines. The more lame ideas that Vince signs off on, the worse the product becomes. The subluxation, in the case of the human body, is the brainstem no longer being able to send a healthy message from the brain to the body. In turn, the body starts to break down. The longer the subluxation is present, the less the body is able to withstand what it would normally be able to.

The subluxation is the “it” that I’m referring to. Montell Williams found that he was subluxated and since seeking help for it, has found that his symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a condition that he developed into a few years ago, have significantly decreased. In the healthcare field, we like to say that removing the subluxation is the equivalent of freeing up the body’s natural healing powers, as was further evidenced by the lady who spoke on the Today Show about how seeking help for her subluxation has helped her more quickly recover from the effects of being struck by lightning. These are just a few very powerful examples.

One of the things that happens when you are subluxated is that the body shifts and compensates. When your head becomes misaligned, so to speak, on the top bone in the spine, the first thing that happens is that the fluid in our ears that is responsible for our balance becomes uneven. It is important that the fluid in the ears remains as equal as possible, for otherwise we’d all walk around dizzy and confused. The body will most often accommodate for this problem, shifting the muscles in the neck and shoulders and raising one shoulder higher than the other. And then there’s more compensation. Next, the muscles in the back will shift, hiking up one hip so that it is now higher than the other. Our legs, being attached to our hips, are also affected. If one hip is higher, then one leg is going to be shorter. The knees, ankles, and feet are all adversely affected.

I recall a specific instance in 2005 that demonstrates how the body reacts to the subluxation. It was Shelton Benjamin vs. Carlito. Carlito was making his Monday night debut after just being drafted to Raw. He won the Intercontinental title that night. In that match, Shelton attempted a diving plancha over the top rope to the outside. Unfortunately, his foot caught the top rope and he was forced to adjust in mid-air, landing flat backed on the lightly padded arena floor. If you’ll recall, his equilibrium was totally thrown off for the remainder of the match. He stumbled his way through it, but you could tell that he just wasn’t all there. What happened was this: the fall caused a severe misalignment of the head and neck (a subluxation). The body tried to compensate as quickly as it could, but it takes time to adjust to something so severe. It was such a severe misalignment that 6 nights later, at the Vengeance PPV, he still didn’t have it all together. It took a few weeks for the body to compensate and shift its way to a state of adequate balance for him.

These compensations lead to numerous issues, including but not limited to pain in various parts of the body, more frequent ankle sprains and knee ligament tears, problems with the shoulders, and degenerative changes in the spine such as disc problems and spurs. It is the compensations I speak of that have been largely responsible for the eventual serious neck conditions that were so numerous at the beginning of the decade. The guys were just taking it to the extreme and it caught up with them.

Probably the best example in wrestling that I can think of is Stone Cold Steve Austin. After taking a piledriver from Owen Hart at Summerslam ’97, in which his head was spiked into the mat, Austin was knocked silly. He was out for a few months trying to recover from the effects. It was an extreme case and because it was never addressed, Austin’s body broke down pretty rapidly over the course of the two years that followed. He had neck surgery from the blown discs he suffered as a result of the wear and tear following the subluxation. Again, the problem was not addressed and the neck surgery did little more than postpone the ongoing problems for Austin.

So, as a wrestling fan truly concerned for the guys that he spends so much time enjoying on TV every week, I think that we should be exploring every potential issue that could be leading to the startling number of wrestler deaths we’ve seen in recent years. I do not think it is fair to the wrestlers to simply write off their problems as drug-related. The WWE’s Wellness Policy will certainly aid in their efforts to control drug abuse, but how are they addressing what is leading them to potential drug abuse? The subluxation, put very simply, chokes you to death from the inside. These guys don’t stand a chance in the long run if the subluxation is not found and corrected. It’s easy to correct. All it takes is a simple correction in the upper cervical spine.

I had two goals in writing this article. The first was that my fellow wrestling fans could read the perspective, from one of your own, that gives the wrestlers who died more credit than they get from the media. The second was so that it is now out there in the ever powerful internet wrestling media. Maybe the WWE will see it and do some research on the matter. There are Upper Cervical doctors around the country that could help the current wrestlers. (CMV1 note - It is ten times more cost effective to keep these guys running free and clear of the neurologic interference caused by the subluxation than it is to wait and watch as their bodies break down before our eyes).

Thanks for having for me back!

Dr. Chad Matthews

PS – If you have any feedback or simply would like to get more information, either email me at uppercervicalhealthcare@gmail.com or visit my website www.atlas4wellness.com (which is currently under construction) or you can also visit www.upcspine.com