Skip to main content

Posts

Why Do I Care About Your Sleep?

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you likely remember my droning on and on about “chiropractors look for the cause”.  I say it all the time because it’s true.  Only focusing on the obvious is like replacing your tires that are wearing too quickly rather than getting a rotation and balance to get maximum mileage from them.  Often subluxation is causing your issues and being adjusted can do amazing things for your health and wellness.  Other times, something else is causing the subluxation and until the cause is found and corrected, no amount of adjustments is going to fully fix the problem.  Sleep is often one of the examples of this circumstance.  Not getting enough sleep can cause a lot of issues and chiropractic can help with many of them, but until your sleep hygiene is addressed, issues will continue to arise.  From my concern, there are two main concerns regarding your sleep.   Quantity of sleep and quality of sleep (groundbreaking, I know).   In terms of quantity
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Pain and mental health

                One of the symptoms of depression is vague aches and pains.   One of the complications to chronic pain is depression.   For many it can be similar to the question regarding the chicken or the egg.   Did significant trauma at a young age (even unremembered) cause the brain to grow weary of constant pain, resulting in depressive and anxious symptoms?   Or did depression which came on in adolescence develop into physical symptoms that have grown into more severe and frequent complaints?                 Does the question even matter?   Do we really care if the person has been suffering from pain and is depressed from it, versus if the person has been depressed and is suffering from pain because of it?   There are many who would argue that it doesn’t matter.   We can be given psychotropic drugs for the depressive symptoms, and ibuprofen (or stronger) for the pain.                   How about this:   how many people have you met who’s lives have been significantly i
Post a Comment
Read more

More About Healing Yourself

                Great, so the body heals itself.   What’s that actually mean in terms of health and wellness?   Why does the fact that our bodies can heal by themselves if the injury isn’t too severe and the injury isn’t continued and why do we care that a headache isn’t from a lack of an over-the-counter medication, so long as the OTC’s give us relief? They're just so cute... I like to add their pictures.                 Well, first and foremost, if we understand that we are able to heal without intervention the vast majority of the time, it can help with our approach to many of our complaints.   Also, how the body heals is important to understand so we can make choices that speed healing.   Along those lines, if we are able to make choices that allow us to heal faster, it stands to reason making those same choices consistently will afford our bodies the ability to over come many injuries fast as it isn’t trying to catch up all the time and working with over-worked parts
Post a Comment
Read more

Healing Yourself

                Whether you are a regular utilizer of chiropractic or not, you likely have figured out over the course of your life that your body heals itself.   If you’ve read previous blog posts, I’ve alluded to that fact a few times.   Our bodies are, in the vast majority of situations, capable of healing without outside aid.   I wanted to expand on that a little bit this week.                 First, this ability is dependent upon severity.   While a cut will heal, and a broken bone will even join back together over time, once tissue is dead, there’s not bringing it back.   The question of severity applies to all three types of stress that I’ve discussed before too.   You can be scared to death, ingest too much poison or suffer too severe a trauma and die.   No amount of self-healing will help you.   Time is also a major factor, as it may take 6 weeks for a bone to be strong enough to function again, once broken, a nerve regrows approximately 1mm a day once the trauma is co
Post a Comment
Read more

Pay Attention.

Focus.   I can’t tell you how many times I say that word to my children.   Whether it’s eating, walking, homework, or just listening to what their mother or I are telling them.   The instruction to focus has been a recurrent theme in my children’s lives since my oldest was about 2 or so.   If you think about it, there is more to my favorite parenting mantra than meets the eye. There’s a saying that if you’re multi-tasking, you’re actually half-assing and studies are beginning to agree.   Trying to do multiple things at the same time results in poorer results for all of those tasks.   Here’s a link to an article suggesting as much:   https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010028589900169 From personal experience, I could not study or do work from home and parent at the same time.   I was short-tempered asking for near-silence and then talking and playing and not giving the attention needed to comprehend what I was reading.   I found quite early that I needed to sep
Post a Comment
Read more

You aren't being chased by a tiger all day... stop acting like it

                Mental stress is something we all deal with.   While there are positive and negative scenarios surrounding the source of the stress, our bodies react the same way regardless.   Being chased by a tiger has the same physiological reaction as the first day of your dream job.   Our physiological reaction is a good thing, in fact.   Both from an adaptation perspective and from a biological perspective.   The problem is that we aren’t designed to be chased by a tiger from the moment we wake up to the moment we finally fall asleep.                 “What can be done though?” the reader thought aloud with rapt attention.                 I get it.   There are some stresses that are unavoidable, but there are ways to minimize the effects they have on us.   If you are required to commute, you can see if public transportation would be a good fit.   The train or bus will likely take longer than driving yourself, but you can read,or catch a nap, or text or go on social media or
Post a Comment
Read more

Not-so-micro-trauma

                All this talk of micro-trauma… how about slightly more significant trauma?   If you saw the Facebook post regarding car accidents I shared, you saw that a 5 mph collision can result in injury to the spine and neck musculature.   Does that mean any incident at 5 miles per hour will result in a whiplash-type injury?   Does it mean all accidents that don’t break the magic 5 mile per hour threshold are harmless?   What is a horse shoe anyway? Apple picking would be less fun if you fell out of the tree.  Just saying.                 Here’s the rub:   in a modern car, designed to keep the occupants as safe as possible, a rapid deceleration from 5mph may still result in mild, yet significant trauma and a crash at 20 mph may be harmless... there are many contributing factors that determine severity of injuries.   If you’re riding a bicycle and crash and are able to escape traumatic brain injury, your body will sustain much more serious injuries that it would at the sam
Post a Comment
Read more