heart disease and the spine

According to the distinguished Harley Street Doctor Paul Sherwood, regular back and neck treatment could dramatically lower your risk of a heart attack:

"What is the relationship between neck pain and heart attacks?

Unlike most other muscles the heart is unable to lie down and have a sleep. It has to go on pumping throughout your entire life. Its output varies considerably from a trickle when you are asleep to a flow that would fill an average sized bath in 4 minutes when you run after a bus. To keep up with these demands the heart muscle requires an equally versatile blood supply to cover such a huge range of activity.
This supply is controlled by contracting or relaxing the circular muscles in the artery wall, varying its size. This necessitates a very sophisticated controlling mechanism, with various centres in the body from those in the heart itself, to the sympathetic nervous centres in the brain stem. This responds to the ever-changing requirements from one moment to the next and therefore there is considerable scope for things to go wrong.
The dominant control of the coronaries is muscle causing pain known as angina pectoris (pain in the chest). With advancing age it is normal for the coronary to have patches of disease. These increase the likelihood of blood passing through the artery forming a clot. Fortunately, clots take a while to form so as long as the blood flows reasonably freely they are unlikely.
In a moment of major malfunction the stellate ganglion in the back of the neck closes the artery off completely. This can give time for a clot to form and in our opinion is almost always the final trigger in a coronary thrombosis. If the sympathetic system remains healthy, the stellate ganglion will not cause a cramp in an artery and then, however diseased the artery is, it is unlikely that a clot would form. For people having treatment for neck problems, the risk of an extreme malfunction in the stellate ganglion, will be forewarned by the other signs and symptoms associated with this problem.
The signs and symptoms that together constitute a warning are stiffness or pain in the neck, muscular pains across the shoulders and the sudden increase of excessive tiredness"

see www.drsherwood.co.uk