How to Reach your Health Goals in the New Year
January 1st, the time of year gym memberships soar, diet pills fly off the shelves, and your social media feed is filled with “how to lose weight” advice, and supplements that “guarantee instant results.” Considering the decline of gym memberships drops drastically by February and cuts in half by May, how do you keep your goals? How do you make it all twelve months without dropping the ball on your health goals for the new year? Thankfully, there are some great things you can do to help you reach your goals! We all want to feel our best and reach our goals, start and end this next year right! Call us today and we will be happy to help you not only feel your best, but help you set and reach your goals.
How to hit Your Goals This Year (Without Pain!)
Did you know that, worldwide, back pain is the single leading cause of disability? When it’s severe, it can prevent people from engaging in work and leisure activities, creating a pronounced negative impact on quality of life, and making it hard to enjoy the things you used to love. Back pain is also one of the most common reasons people miss work, and accounts for more than 264 million missed work days annually! As if this weren’t enough, about 80% of all Americans will experience back pain in their lives, and most of these cases will not be caused by a serious condition like a fracture. This means that millions of people each year suffer preventable chiropractic pain that can have a major impact on their quality of life and happiness. Are you one of them? If so, there’s good news on the horizon: you don’t have to live this way. We’re here to tell you that, this year, you can hit your goals – whatever they may be – without struggling with chiropractic pain and discomfort. Here’s what you need to know. The Origins of Chiropractic Pain Back pain is one of the most common things that sends people to the chiropractor, but how does it happen? Here’s what the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has to say about the origins of back pain: “The vast majority of low back pain is mechanical in nature. In many cases, low back pain is associated with spondylosis, a term that refers to the general degeneration of the spine associated with normal wear and tear that occurs in the joints, discs, and bones of the spine as people get older. Some examples of mechanical causes of low back pain include: Sprains and strains account for most acute back pain. Sprains are caused by overstretching or tearing ligaments, and strains are tears in tendon or muscle. Both can occur from twisting or lifting something improperly, lifting something too heavy, or overstretching. Such movements may also trigger spasms in back muscles, which can also be painful. Intervertebral disc degeneration is one of the most common mechanical causes of low back pain, and it occurs when the usually rubbery discs lose integrity as a normal process of aging. In a healthy back, intervertebral discs provide height and allow bending, flexion, and torsion of the lower back. As the discs deteriorate, they lose their cushioning ability. Herniated or ruptured discs can occur when the intervertebral discs become compressed and bulge outward (herniation) or rupture, causing low back pain. Radiculopathy is a condition caused by compression, inflammation and/or injury to a spinal nerve root. Pressure on the nerve root results in pain, numbness, or a tingling sensation that travels or radiates to other areas of the body that are served by that nerve. Radiculopathy may occur when spinal stenosis or a herniated or ruptured disc compresses the nerve root. Sciatica is a form of radiculopathy caused by compression of the sciatic nerve, the large nerve that travels through the buttocks and extends down the back of the leg. This compression causes shock-like or burning low back pain combined with pain through the buttocks and down one leg, occasionally reaching the foot. In the most extreme cases, when the nerve is pinched between the disc and the adjacent bone, the symptoms may involve not only pain, but numbness and muscle weakness in the leg because of interrupted nerve signaling. The condition may also be caused by a tumor or cyst that presses on the sciatic nerve or its roots. Spondylolisthesis is a condition in which a vertebra of the lower spine slips out of place, pinching the nerves exiting the spinal column. A traumatic injury, such as from playing sports, car accidents, or a fall can injure tendons, ligaments or muscle resulting in low back pain. Traumatic injury may also cause the spine to become overly compressed, which in turn can cause an intervertebral disc to rupture or herniate, exerting pressure on any of the nerves rooted to the spinal cord. When spinal nerves become compressed and irritated, back pain and sciatica may result. Spinal stenosis is a narrowing of the spinal column that puts pressure on the spinal cord and nerves that can cause pain or numbness with walking and over time leads to leg weakness and sensory loss. Skeletal irregularities include scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that does not usually cause pain until middle age; lordosis, an abnormally accentuated arch in the lower back; and other congenital anomalies of the spine. Low back pain is rarely related to serious underlying conditions, but when these conditions do occur, they require immediate medical attention.” 3 Ways a Chiropractor can Help you Resolve Back Pain If you’ve never been to a chiropractor before, you likely have some questions about how the process will work to provide pain relief for your muscles and joints. Here are the top three ways chiropractors work with your body to provide a pain-free experience, both now and in the future: 1. Soft Tissue Therapy Some chiropractic work focuses expressly on the soft tissues of your body. In this kind of treatment, the chiropractor will work to help you relax, and to treat tight and sore muscles that are holding your misalignments in place. Soft tissue therapy may include tactics like manual release therapy, which involves stretching the muscle while also applying pressure, instrument-assisted soft tissue therapy, which uses a tool to apply pressure and sweep over the affected area, and trigger point therapy, which applies direct pressure to tense areas of a muscle. This is a helpful therapy for anyone interested in living a pain-free life this upcoming year. 2. Manual Therapy Manual therapy focuses on restoring movement to parts of the body that are locked up or present immobilized. Chiropractors utilize these treatment techniques when a joint needs to regain mobility. Most chiropractors will either use joint mobilization tactics (which include slow, gentle stretches of the affected
Pregnancy Pain? What your Chiropractor can do to Help!
Pregnancy can be a wonderful and beautiful time in a woman’s life, however; it can be painful, uncomfortable, and come with lots of unexpected side effects. Fortunately, there are a lot of things you can do to help alleviate unwanted side effects. If you are experiencing uncomfortable pregnancy call your chiropractor today, we can help you feel your best and enjoy your pregnancy. Call our office today, we can help you feel your best and have a great pregnancy!
Pregnant? 4 Natural Therapies You Should Be Using To Help Ease Your Pregnancy Pains!
Finding out you are pregnant is a joyous and overwhelmingly excited event. However, the realization that your body is no longer just your body soon sets in and can provoke a fear like no other. Knowing that everything you consume, put on and do to your body may affect that little person growing inside of you, can become beyond stressful. Mothers-to-be will often choose to suffer with pain because of not knowing what is harmful and what is not. The worry of taking any medication for pain becomes too much so they choose the “better safe than sorry” approach as opposed to taking action to combat their aching back, head or legs. Good news Mommas! There are very safe alternative methods to help you overcome those pregnancy pains without the conventional methods of overused medication for pain! In order to understand why different approaches to pain relief for pregnancy work, it is best to understand why the pain begins in the first place! The following is a little information on how the changes in your body from pregnancy affect the pain that you feel. Why is my head pounding? With pregnancy comes headaches. At some point along that 40 week pregnancy journey, you will have a headache. Women who have never had headaches will get them, and women who suffer from them will feel as though their headaches are more severe and more frequent. So, what’s the deal with headaches? During the first trimester of pregnancy your hormones surge and go crazy! This along with a huge increase in the volume of your blood will cause headaches to come on out of nowhere. However, it’s not just the hormones and blood. As your belly grows, your posture becomes harder to maintain and becomes far from perfect. The bigger the belly, the more your low back is pushed forward. This results in compromises all the way up your spine into your neck and head. Your shoulders roll forward and your neck straightens to compensate for you low back. These postural changes can cause the bones in the neck to not articulate as they should. This is known as a misalignment of the spine. These postural changes and spinal misalignments will bring on headaches quickly due to the compromising of the nerves that run out of your cervical spinal column into your neck and head. Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? Oh those hormones! Believe it or not, hormones can make you feel as though you are short of breath. Progesterone is a key hormone that increases when you are pregnant. Progesterone causes you to breathe in more deeply and makes you feel like you are not taking in enough air. Hormones are not the only culprit taking your breath away. As your baby grows, so does your uterus. Your uterus is located below the muscles of the lungs known as the diaphragm. The larger the uterus, the more pressure being put on the diaphragm, the harder it is to breathe. During the third trimester, your baby maybe the actual cause of feeling like you cannot breath. Depending on how the baby is positioned, he or she may actually be kicking you in your ribs! Kicking is not the only issue with these little mobile guys, even stretching out underneath your ribs or moving by your ribs can cause pain or a misalignment of the ribs. Your ribs serve to protect the vital organs of your body such as the heart and lungs. When the ribs are misaligned or not in their proper place, breathing in will cause severe pain due to the misarticulation of the bones, stretching of the muscles and compromising of the nerve function. Why does my back constantly ache? Ahhh, the backache like no other. It seems to only get worse as you progress through pregnancy. Why does this happen? Early onset of back pain in pregnancy can be because of those fun hormones we’ve been talking about. From the second you become pregnant, your body goes into stellar “getting ready for birth” mode. Your body releases hormones that allow for the ligaments holding your bones together to loosen. This, along with some bloating and cramping that can occur in early pregnancy, can make for a killer backache. As your pregnancy continues and your baby gets bigger, your weight increases. A typical pregnancy weight can can be from 25-35 lbs. The majority of this weight goes right to your belly, forcing your pelvis to widen and your lumbar spine to sway inward toward the baby. This forces the rest of your spine to change accordingly and alter your posture. Misalignments of the pelvis and lumbar spine occur due to the pulling of muscles and ligaments and because of the altered posture, putting pressure on the discs, muscles, and nerves in the low back, producing a constant low back pain! Why are my legs on fire? That sharp, aching, burning feeling in your legs. Almost every pregnant woman will have this pain at some point during her pregnancy. What is it? The answer maybe not one you would expect because it is mostly associated with an injury to a bulging or herniated disc. But the answer is a simple one. It’s sciatica. Sciatic pain is that deep, dull, aching, burning pain you can feel in your hips, thighs, buttocks, legs and feet. It can be in one area or travel down from your buttocks to your feet leaving no region unaffected. Sciatica is caused when the sciatic nerve becomes compressed or irritated. This nerve is the longest nerve of the body and travels from your lumbar spine down through the buttocks, to the back of the thigh and down through the back of the leg into the foot, on both sides. During pregnancy, sciatic pain comes on because of the changes in your lumbar spine, pelvis and posture. Your anatomy shifts and it is common that the sciatic nerve