Monday, January 26, 2015

With Every New Beginning

After quite a bit of deliberation, I want to inform you that I’m going to discontinue the “Let Health Happen” column (at least for now).  For one thing, after nearly 300 columns, quite frankly, I’m running out of things to write about.  More importantly, I’ve decided it’s time to come out of my safe zone and get out doing more talks in the community in person rather than writing it in from a distance.  So for this last column, I’d like to reflect on a few of the concepts I believe are most important.

This column has been called “Let Health Happen” because you were genetically designed for health.  If God made us in his image and that image is perfect, then you were created in perfection.  The trick is to let that perfection express itself and get out of the way.  Getting out of the way is all about lifestyle.  Controlling your relationship in regard to what you eat, how you move or exercise and how you manage stress or think, has absolutely everything to do with your physiology expressing health naturally or expressing a state of dis-ease or illness.  In the end, there are only two real causes of disease – deficiency and toxicity.  Deficiency is when we are not providing our body with the essential components it requires.  This includes vital nutrients from real food, adequate movement and physical exercise, and positive thoughts or emotions.  Toxicity is when we are putting components into our body that simply don’t belong.  Obviously this includes all the junk, fake, processed food, but a sedentary lifestyle is toxic as well.  Most importantly, negative thoughts, feelings, and self-talk are all toxins that lower our vibrational energy and change the expression of our hormones to what I’ve commonly referred to as stress-physiology.  The New England Journal of Medicine states that 75% of all disease and the associated expenses are preventable.  This means the nearly all disease is related to lifestyle and not something that is acquired as the result of bad germs, bad genes or bad luck.  And because your body is innately intelligent, it also means that you can begin to change your outcomes.  In fact, we see amazing outcomes in our office even with bloodwork in just 8 weeks’ time when you begin to address these critical lifestyle factors.  When it comes to your health, you are not a victim, you are in control!

We will be reposting all the old articles on our website blog every week and I will commit to including some new posts at least a couple times per month.  Please go to www.rivertownchiro.com to check our blog and while you’re there, sign up for our free newsletter as well as information on upcoming events.  To receive these articles via email, click on the title (With Every New Beginning), enter your email address and hit submit.  I would like to thank the Madison Courier for working with me on this column for the last 5 ½ years.  But most of all I would like to thank all of the local people who supported this column and let me know that they looked forward to reading it – that the information made a difference!

Monday, January 19, 2015

Posture Problems

In the first chapter of every physiology book you’ll find the phrase, “Anatomy dictates physiology.”  In other words, our structure dictates our function or how well things work.  This is certainly true in your neck.  A normal neck has a 35-45 degree curve as measured on x-ray.  Think of this like the bow in a dam or a bridge.  The curve provides flexibility and strength amongst numerous other functions.  When the curve is lost or especially reversed, problems can arise with our physiology.  These include chronic aches and pains, but also bigger problems with overall health. 

The normal curve (lordosis) of our neck develops as an infant when we begin to hold our head up and crawl.  As mentioned, this curve reduces stress on the soft tissues of the neck and provides flexibility – think of it like a spring or shock absorber for the weight of the head.  This normal curve keeps the vertical pressure and weight of the head on the backs of the vertebrae rather than the fronts where the discs are.  Likewise, the curve allows the numerous little muscles on the back side of the neck to stay relaxed.  Poor posture from driving or sitting at a desk or especially looking down at a phone, tablet, or laptop for hours will change the muscle balance of the neck; stretching the muscles of the back side while shortening those in the front.  Some studies have shown that this phenomenon will happen 80% of the time after a whiplash accident from a car wreck or other injury.  In previous articles, we called this “upper-crossed syndrome.”  This syndrome results in a straightening of the neck or sometimes even a reversal of the curve.  Either way, when the curve is lost, you lose the functional advantages mentioned above and forces are shifted to the front of the vertebrae and onto the discs.  The result will be chronic tightness of the muscles in the back of the neck, chronic neck pain and stiffness, tension headaches, shoulder tension, and loss of normal range of motion in the neck.  Over time this imbalanced pressure creates excessive wear-and-tear that causes degenerative changes such as arthritis of the spine and breakdown of the discs.  Worse than this, as the head starts to drift forward from these changes of the neck, our shoulders won’t move the same.  Also, breathing will become more difficult.  You can try this on your own – just push your head forward and attempt to rotate your shoulders like you were swimming or take deep breaths.  A landmark 2004 study looking at thousands of subjects found that the loss of curve in the neck will increase tension in the spinal cord and stretch the cord up to 5-7 centimeters.  The study found that people that had this loss of curve on average lived two years less than those who retained the normal curve in their neck.


The good news is that all of this can be prevented and many times reversed.  Obviously, focusing on normal posture is critical.  But even when the curve is lost, there are neck and shoulder exercises that work to undo the damage.  Contoured cervical pillows help prevent the problem, but only if you sleep on your back.  When the curve is already lost, in most cases, you will need to practice some form of neck traction/extension regularly over a period of 6-12 months and there are various products that are designed for this retraining of the neck.  

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Two Opportunities

I want to make you aware of a couple events we have planned to help promote health and wellness.  My experience is that people are either scared into making changes and moving toward wellness, or they are inspired to do so.  Unfortunately when fear is the factor, it generally means that you’re making decisions from a doctor’s office due to unfavorable tests or worse, from an emergency room.  While it’s never too late to make better choices and change, this is not the best way to do things.  We decided to bring two separate events to the community in hopes of enlightening and inspiring you to make the changes that result in better health and we’ve partnered with North Madison Christian Church to provide us with a big enough room and first-rate facility to accommodate as many people as possible.

The first event is something we’ve done before – we’re re-screening the Fed Up movie.  This film is still in some theaters and it’s the film that USA Today said, “Will change the way you think about eating.”  I’ve watched it twice and it will definitely enlighten you as to why our dietary choices are directly linked to our health (or disease) outcomes.  You truly are what you eat!  This movie was produced by Katie Couric’s team who set out to make it a regular segment for her show and decided what they uncovered was much too big for a segment piece.  The film focuses on the true causes of obesity and metabolic syndrome which is the syndrome that is a pre-cursor to heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.  It’s worth the watch and I would encourage you to bring your kids as childhood obesity is on trial in this movie!  This will be shown in the main room at North Madison Christian (across from the hospital) on Wednesday, January 14th at 6:30 p.m.


The following week, on Wednesday, January 21st (at 6:30), we will be bringing in Dr. Denise Chranowski who runs a practice called Wellness Solution Centers in Newtown, Pennsylvania.  She has franchised her own wellness center to over 60 other centers across the U.S. and abroad.  Dr. Denise speaks all over the country on health and wellness and was gracious enough to come to our town!  I’ve asked her to speak on the subject of how to raise healthy families with emphasis on what specific steps we can take to ensure results.  I learned the last time that we screened Fed Up that people were excited and motivated to make change, but they really didn’t know how to get things going.  Dr. Denise is an expert at this!  This is by far the biggest thing we’ve ever done and I want to thank North Madison Christian for having the vision to include health and wellness as part of their mission for this community.  All are welcome to both events and there is no cost or obligation – this is about getting you and your family the health outcomes you really want!  You don’t need to R.S.V.P., but if you’d like more information, I encourage you to go to our webpage at rivertownchiro.com and sign in your name and email on the “newsletter sign-up” box of the home page and you will get updates of these events as well as future speakers we intend to bring to town.  I hope to see you there!