Tune Chiropractic From the Doc

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 (groundbr...

                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 psychotrop...

                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 c...

                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...

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. ...

                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...

                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 sev...

                Have you experienced the exuberance of victory when dieting, only to be brought crashing down a week or two later when your “celebratory dinner” turned into a reversal of all your hard work?   The entire diet industry is built on this.   Weight Watchers doesn’t become enormously successful unless it’s designed for you to need the structure to maintain your weight.                   What if I told you there were only a few, easy-to-follow rules to follow and for no money at all, you could start down the path of a healthy LIFESTYLE?   That’s the key… stop referring to these changes as diets.   While, generally speaking, the word diet refers to food choices throughout societies and lifespans, it has taken on the connotation of finite changes to reach a specific weight loss goal.   Also, ra...

                You don’t have to worry about this micro-trauma crap, right?   You pick up heavy objects 4 days a week and participate in tough mudder and run a 10k every weekend, so you’re obviously in too good of shape to need to worry about this.   Micro-trauma is to be worried about by the obese guy who sits in his cubicle all day.   … Right?                 Maybe… Maybe you move enough throughout the day.   Maybe you are perfectly mindful of your posture.   Maybe you have escaped what many people have experienced, so far.   Realistically, (if you’ve read any pieces from my blog in the past you know this) there is a cross-section of the population whom I believe don’t required chiropractic care weekly, or even monthly, (or even at all?) to live a good, long, healthy life.   I think everyone ca...

                We’ve been discussing trauma lately and most people think of the major traumas when they think of the word.   How about micro-trauma?   There are syndromes associated with the desktop life style.   Many people sit for HOURS a day.   In fact, it isn’t a stretch to imagine someone who is in a standing position for less than an hour total a day.   Moving from bed to shower to car to work to car to couch to bed.   I would venture that many reading this spend the majority of their waking day sitting – I won’t even mention the poor sleep hygiene we are facing.   YOUR BODY WAS MEANT FOR MOTION!                 Upper Cross Syndrome and Lower Cross Syndrome are associated with sitting in a poor posture for hours on end a day.   Rounded shoulders and weak muscles on the front and back add u...

                So, great… I just remind you of your mortality and tell you to stop smoking.   What the H kind of posts are these?                 Here’s the rub, as a chiropractor I am concerned with 3 main facets of health that all contribute to our well-being:   physical stressors, chemical stressors and emotional stressors.   DD Palmer, the inventor of chiropractic described them as Traumas, Toxins and Thoughts.   The stuff you put in your body, the tax your system experiences when your emotions overwhelm you, and the major and minor traumas we experience in our everyday life all add up. Daniel David Palmer, the founder of Chiropractic                 So how do each impact our lives?   Well, our diet and habits fall under the...

My Chiropractic Story                 It’s interesting, looking back, to note how much chiropractic was in my life before I realized it.   When I was younger, my sister and I would stand on each other’s backs.   Sometimes our upper backs would “crack”.   Since a young age, I would feel like pressure in my upper back would be relieved by having my back pushed on.   My first official taste of chiropractic was during football with low back spasms, which I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts.   When I was being seen by the chiropractor, he told me my left leg was an inch shorter than the other.   He gave me exercises to perform and told gave me a certain frequency that he recommended I see him to get this fixed.   I went one other time and did the exercises and stretches as prescribed and refrained from participating in football the whole duration he recommended.   I only...