Network Chiropractic 1.0

Network Chiropractic is the system Donald M. Epstein assembled between 1979 and 1984. He took apart nine chiropractic methods and rebuilt their analyses into one. He published it as Network Analysis in the Digest of Chiropractic Economics, Part I in the March and April 1983 issue and Part 2 in July and August. Its governing clinical rule is an intersection rule. Epstein held that the spine carries two separable faults, a bony misalignment and a tension in the membranes sleeving the cord. The adjustment belongs where those two readings coincide. The first of three Network eras runs 1983 to 1992.

Network Chiropractic began when Epstein refused to choose one technique

Epstein graduated from New York Chiropractic College in 1977 and practiced in Brooklyn and on Long Island. He began as an upper cervical specific practitioner. He took open mouth, lateral cervical, and base posterior spinographs. Wedge lines compared the plane of the atlas to a corrected occipital line. Torque was read as deviation from the four to eight degrees at which the atlas rested. A neurocalograph on a strip recorder established a pattern, and no adjustment was given unless that pattern returned at the same intensity as the previous visit.

The method broke on its own anomalies. A pattern would appear with no cervical involvement on the leg check. The legs would show cervical involvement with no pattern. When atlas temperature was off by more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit and the leg check was quiet, a sacral contact often cleared the atlas reading, the pattern, and the legs at once. The contact point was nowhere near the atlas.

The nine methods Epstein investigated before he named the network

He visited chiropractors who used the Toftness lens alone, others who used motion palpation, others who used only leg checks. His conclusion, in Clinical Origin of Network: they were all correct for the model of the vertebral subluxation they had constructed, or accepted. They were prisoners of their model. The sources he names are upper cervical specific, Logan Basic, Pierce-Stillwagon, Thompson, and Sacro-Occipital Technic. To those he added Toftness, Goodheart’s vertebral challenge from Applied Kinesiology, Van Rumpt’s reactive leg from Directional Non-Force Technique, and Lowell Ward’s Stressology. He read further into Gonstead spinal analysis. Glenn Russo, one of Epstein’s early editors, put it plainly. Network Chiropractic is a network of techniques already used across the profession, and what makes it distinct is the sequence and the intent.

The spinal meningeal functional unit is the anatomy Network Chiropractic rests on

Epstein defined the unit formally in a paper presented to ARCS in November 1989. It is the anatomically and physiologically functional relationship of the brain and spinal cord with the nerves and the meninges. Epstein included the associated osseous structures: the vertebral column, pelvis, and cranium. His 1986 paper on the meningeal critical stated the negative version first. The spine is not a static stack of segments randomly related by soft tissue. It is one unit, and it adds up to more than the sum of its parts.

The mechanics he described are membrane mechanics. The meninges act as guy wires attaching the cord within the canal at several levels. The denticulate ligaments, strips of pia attaching to dura, keep the cord from slipping inside the neural canal. Epstein listed the dural attachments as the foramen magnum, the second through sixth cervical segments, the sacrum, and the coccyx. He held that the cord rides up to four inches within the canal in hyperflexion while those anchors stay put. The Sacro-Occipital Technique page carries this dural anatomy in full, and Epstein credited De Jarnette by name for the dural tension argument.

How Epstein said the unit adapts to stress

The November and December 1986 Digest of Chiropractic Economics carried his hypothesis in one sentence. The relative degree of tone of the spinal meningeal functional unit, and its recovery from that tonal quality, determines how the organism responds to stress. He set out a six-step loop. A stimulus alters the unit’s tension and position at the spinal level. The input travels to thalamus and cortex, where past learning shapes the reaction. Descending traffic modifies the unit’s tension again, and that modification is written into memory at higher and lower centers, changing the response to the next similar stress. Without subluxation the tension falls as the stress falls. With subluxation it persists and intensifies. He put the persistence of the resulting afterimage at four to six months.

Network Chiropractic divides the subluxation into Class A structural and Class B meningeal

The 1983 papers set out the two classes on which everything else in Network Chiropractic depends. A Class A subluxation is structural. A physical concussion of forces misaligns a segment and fixes it within a range of its motion, and the interference sits at the intervertebral foramen. A Class B subluxation is meningeal. An emotional or chemical overload of the brain and cord circuitry places abnormal tension on the cord by torsion of the meninges, and the vertebra displaces secondarily as an adaptive feature. Epstein set the etiology out in capitals. With Class B the origin of the nerve interference is inside the central nervous system, not in the misalignment of the osseous structures.

What each class shows under the hands and the instruments

Class A gives a palpable fixation, hard and taut muscle fibers, and a sharp break in the temperature differential. Its Toftness readings do not move with posture. Class B gives a pattern reading on a double thermocouple, plus radiation over the cord and cranium that does move with posture. It also gives marked heel tension, foot flare, and a musculature Epstein called rubbery and resistant to pressure. Foot flare and heel tension are graded from one to five. In the ARCS paper he added a paraspinal palpation scale from zero to seven. One is structural and two is structural with slight meningeal involvement. Three and five are meningeal from emotional stress, four and six are meningeal from chemical stress, and seven is both. Epstein reported that a skilled palpator could date a dominant pattern within three to five years across forty.

The overlap rule sends the Network Chiropractic adjustment where the two readings coincide

Epstein’s line in 1983 is the founding observation. Most people carry serious meningeal subluxations, either alone or overlapping with structural ones, and usually the latter. Two readings run in parallel across a visit. The osseous listing comes from film, positional palpation, and observed distortion. The meningeal reading comes from the leg check, heel tension, and foot flare. It comes equally from the thermal pattern, microwave palpation, and paraspinal tone. Neither reading is trusted alone, and the sequence follows. When a Class B presents alongside a Class A, Epstein took the Class B vectors first, on the ground that reducing the meningeal factor allows a more efficient structural correction. He restated the rule in 1986. The structural subluxation is adjusted after the Class B subluxations have been addressed.

The point of critical tension is defined by least force

The rule has a precise operational form. The point of critical tension is the point or region within a major meningeal subluxation that produces the most reduction of meningeal tension with the least force. The worked example starts from a conventional listing of atlas ASRP. The practitioner challenges each direction of that listing in turn, beginning with the superior and inferior torque. Posteriority is challenged two ways, posterior to anterior on the right and anterior to posterior on the left. Whichever direction reduces the meningeal interference most, with the least force, is the point of critical tension. Epstein added the discriminator that keeps the two systems separable. Anterior involvement is generally meningeal, and posteriority is usually structural.

The point of facilitated focus and the moment the two points meet

Above a grade of three, Epstein held that a second region surfaces, which he called the point of facilitated focus. It is where adverse meningeal tension is released rather than created, most commonly the lumbar and lumbosacral spine. It carries high meningeal tone, it reduces when the point of critical tension is contacted, and it worsens if thrust upon directly. His instruction was a question asked before any thrust. Might this be a region of facilitated focus? Across a course of care he predicted that it migrates toward the point of critical tension until the two coincide. At that moment, he wrote, the subluxation has become mostly structural.

Epstein published Eighteen Principles for Network Chiropractic in 1989

Epstein published them in 1989 under Innate Intelligence Incorporated. They are his own framework.

• Dis-Equilibrium. Health rests on a living organism striving toward difference from its surroundings.
• Coherent Evolving Systems Models of Modern Physics. A self-evolving structure reaches a bifurcation point and either breaks down to a lower order or restructures to meet new demand.
• Quantum Physics. Matter and energy are interchangeable, and an object cannot be observed without itself being changed.
• Growth and Development. Chaos and stress are necessary for growth, and the nervous system exists to perceive present energy demands and adapt.
• Dominant Patterns. The nervous system works by producing dominant patterns, and what is called sickness is one of those patterns being expressed.
• Unified Field. A primary field underlies all matter and energy, and all of existence participates in it.
• Body-Mind. Neuropeptides are made by blood cells and secreted by nerves, so every cell processes information and every cell is both body and mind.
• Recovery. Every tissue can recover from patterns of learned behavior, whatever its current level of pathology.
• Full Respiration. A flexible spine allows free flow of cerebrospinal fluid, and fixed tension shows up as an inability to fully inhale.
• Ease. The predominant natural state of a living organism is to be at ease within itself.
• Adverse Spinal Cord Tension. A stretched cord torsions and kinks both cord and spinal nerves, and prolonged torsion interferes with flow through the nervous system.
• Vertebral Subluxation. There are two types, meningeal and structural, and the meningeal type keeps a person reacting to a stress that is already over.
• Emotion. Emotion at the cellular level is an unobstructed flow of plasm from center to periphery, and blocking it reverses that flow.
• Self-Expression. The self is an internalized image built by selective remembering, and its accuracy depends on the state of the nervous system holding it.
• Vulnerability. A more highly organized system is more vulnerable to new stress, and a more evolved one can use that stress.
• Selflessness. Only a self that has been properly developed can be set aside.
• Holograms. Information and memory of the whole exist in each part of the organism.
• Life Force. An animating force generated by resident intelligence is present in all organisms.

Tone, posture, and facilitation as Epstein defined them

The ARCS paper of 1989 supplies the definitions the principles run on. Tone is a subjective composite of resilience, texture, and tension of body tissues. Posture is spatial adaptation to the environment. Facilitation is a state of the neuromuscular system in which nervous impulses may be elicited with minimal stimulation. Epstein built the facilitation argument on work he named. Lewis and Kellgren told the 52nd annual convention of the American Osteopathic Association in 1948 that primary pathology is organized by the spinal cord. Irvin Korr described the facilitated segment in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association between 1947 and 1955. A. D. Speransky argued in 1943 that the irritant becomes independent of the primary pathology. A. A. Ukhtomsky named the local focus of increased excitability in the Russian Physiological Journal in 1923.

How the Network Chiropractic adjustment was delivered in this era

Network Chiropractic varied its input across the range, from sustained contacts through toggles to thrusts, and the contacts are the best documented end of it. A Logan Basic apex contact at the sacrum used about four ounces with a strong upward angle, the hand held as if holding a baseball. The occipital contact, just superior to the atlas on the short leg side, used four to eight ounces and swept by torquing the contact finger. Epstein wrote that the sustained contact is always very light. The practitioner held and watched. Release came at a change in breathing, an evening of the legs, or a change of sensation in the contact finger. He described the musculature clearing its tone over the next thirty seconds to a minute.

Thrusts were not abandoned. A toggle recoil could clear both the meningeal and the structural component of an atlas or a fifth cervical, and drop-piece work handled the positive ilium. His warning about force was specific. A rapid concussion of force on a meningeal subluxation kicks the legs and arms and extends the neck. A manipulative thrust into that state produces a deep spinal pulling or shearing pain, which he read as fresh distortion in the membranes.

The phasing system put structural work last

Epstein described ten phases, each correlated with a part of the nervous system, and taught that the order of adjusting is itself the method. Phases one through five are meningeal. Phase one works the occiput and sacral notches, phase two the atlas and C4 to C6, phase three the anterior sacrum and positive ilium, and phase four the axis. Phase five takes double contacts of axis with sacrum or C5 with coccyx. Phase six is the structural subluxation, considered only once the first five are cleared. Two rules governed it. The first area addressed is usually the former point of critical tension, and force stays out of any region that was a point of facilitated focus. He also held the neck in extension rather than flexion during a thrust, to avoid recreating the anterior cord pull just released.

The October 1991 Phase One revision made sacrum and occiput the port of entry

Epstein issued a dated revision, Phase One Revision as of October 1991, narrowing phase one to three lines. The sacrum and the occiput are vital regions of dural attachment of the spinal meningeal functional unit. A subluxation at either produces adaptive distortions through any portion of the spine. Any other phase subluxation may be a consequence of that primary distortion. Phase one may therefore correct thoracic and lumbar distortions and any phase two through five subluxation, so the clinician works from the lowest possible phase upward. The revision added a sacral-to-thoracic correspondence map. T1 and T2 pair with the coccyx, T3 and T4 with the fifth and fourth sacral segments, and T5 and T6 with S3. T7 and T8 pair with S2, and T9 and T10 with S1. It also fixed the vector convention. Always vector first into the sacrum on a sacral contact. Epstein’s mnemonic for the phase was ROME, for remember, occiput or sacrum masks everything.

The 1992 self and non-self paper named two waves and closed the first era

Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of the Association for Network Chiropractic carried Epstein’s paper Dynamic Fluctuations Between Self and Non Self As Influenced By the SomatoPsychic and Respiratory Waves, dated October 1992. It is the first place he describes the two waves in print, and it defines them physically. The somatopsychic wave is an automatic integration of body and mind, associated with vertically aligned undulations of the trunk and movement of the extremities. The respiratory wave is a nonlinear breathing pattern with large expansions in the trunk musculature, progressing into the shoulder girdle and cervical spine. He described it as two combined movements, one vertical and one horizontal, tied to craniosacral pumping flexibility. Once both waves are integrated, he wrote, a touch of about two to four ounces will usually start one. The paper fixes the phase count at ten. Epstein anchored the emotional argument in Candace Pert’s 1985 paper in the Journal of Immunology, on neuropeptides and their receptors as a psychosomatic network. He also cited Ronald Melzack’s neuromatrix, published in Scientific American in April 1992.

Where Network Chiropractic meets the Unified Model of Tone

Network Chiropractic was Epstein’s unified model of the vertebral subluxation, in his own words a model to which specific techniques may be integrated. The Unified Model of Tone is a unified model of the variable those techniques all reach. They meet at three points, and Epstein’s writing from 1983 to 1992 states each earlier than any other technique here.

Epstein enacted plural leverage as a working method in 1983

The model holds that there is rarely a single lynchpin. A body ordinarily carries several points of critical tension at once, each with a different potential to reorganize the whole, and that potential shifts from week to week. The clinical art is reading which of several real leverage points the system is most ready to use now. Epstein reached that position from the clinic rather than from theory. He found the atlas reading clearing from a sacral contact, the pattern from an axis contact, and the temperature variance from a drop-table ilium adjustment. He named the region a point of critical tension, held that it moves during care, and built a phasing system to find today’s location instead of yesterday’s. His founding act was refusing to choose one doorway, and that is the clearest historical anticipation of the model’s no-lynchpin position in the library.

The overlap rule is specificity as correspondence, and it is triangulation

The model holds that specificity is not a property of the hands, the instrument, or the dose. It is a property of the reading that precedes them, because an input can only correspond to a pattern that has first been found. Every window onto the body’s state is partial, so accuracy comes from triangulating across several rather than trusting one. Epstein’s overlap rule is that principle in its sharpest form. It is not a convergence of many findings, which is how Gonstead works from five criteria and how Diversified works from pattern analysis. It is an intersection rule between two systems that can be read independently and can genuinely disagree. Bone says one thing, membrane says another, and only where they cross does the adjustment go. His least-force test is the same claim from the delivery side. The correct direction produces the most change for the smallest input, which defines correspondence rather than magnitude.

Epstein already used the word tone, and used it the way the model does

He defined tone in 1989 as a subjective composite of resilience, texture, and tension of body tissues. He wrote of establishing the tone of the cord itself through the tension of its dural attachment points. He noted that D. D. Palmer founded the chiropractic principle on tone and left the concept unexplored, and he pointed at Pert’s proposal that each neuropeptide evokes a tone equivalent to a mood state. The model completes the arc. Tone is the integrated organization through which the body’s many interacting processes relate to one another at a given moment. What Epstein called the tension of the unit and what he called the tone of the paraspinal musculature are two readings of one variable. That is why his Class B pattern reduced at the neck when he contacted the sacrum. Alf Breig’s 1978 demonstration that the cord is a tensioned structure, whose decisive variable is tension rather than compression, is the mechanical anchor his membrane argument needed.

What the Unified Model of Tone predicts from here

Two predictions follow, and they belong to the model rather than to Epstein. First, the model predicts that his two readings will prove to be one. Measures of membrane and cord mechanics and measures of paraspinal tone should covary as functions of a single regulatory state. A change induced at one site should appear at the other within the same session. Second, the model predicts that the point of critical tension behaves as a state variable and not as an address. Its location should track autonomic state and shift between sessions in the same person. A contact matched to the current location should outperform the same contact placed where that person’s point sat on a prior visit.

How this page relates to the rest of the library

Six of the nine methods Epstein networked have pages here. Logan Basic supplied the four-ounce sacral apex contact at the center of phase one. Toftness supplied the sustained light contact and the microwave reading that separated posture-dependent findings from fixed. Sacro-Occipital Technique supplied the sacrum-to-occiput relationship and the dural tension argument. Thompson supplied the positive ilium, Pierce-Stillwagon the atlas temperature differential, and Applied Kinesiology the vertebral challenge that became the least-force test. Bio-Geometric Integration belongs here for a different reason. Sue Brown practiced Network Chiropractic alongside Epstein in this era, then left and built her own technique on its own terms. Network Spinal Analysis 2.0 and NetworkSpinal 3.0 are the two later eras of Epstein’s own work. The tone reading underneath all of them is set out in the Unified Model of Tone. The stress physiology he described in 1986 is taught in current terms on the research page on stress and physical symptoms.