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Youthful Rejuvenation Through Chiropractic Care

    If you found a 1950 Ford in a barn and it was all rusted, mechanically run-down and not started / driven in 48 years… could you make it look like a new car and run like one again ?
If you had the skills and the tools to do so, of course you could.

Now, if you were born in 1950 and haven’t been to gym since you graduated high school in 1968, you've packed on some pounds, smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, live on a boat-load of medications and further abuse your body with... drugs and alcohol – feeling as de-conditioned as that 1950 Ford - do you think that you could be restored to feeling youthful and in "like new" condition like that 1950 Ford?

Same answer - Certainly, with time, patience, commitment and the right tools. You might not look like you did in 1968 but you can feel like you did.

That’s what we do here – We have the skills and tools you need.

Some will say it’s a “lost cause”, but that’s very rare – Actually, this is what happens here - With our weight loss program, smoking cessation program, an exercise program tailored to you, a series of chiropractic adjustments and cold laser treatments to improve and "up-regulate" your nervous system - (which makes everything else in your body work right) … in 2-4 months you will enjoy the health and condition of someone 15-20 years younger. Would that be a bad thing for you?

Summer is 4 months away – Do you have something better to be doing with yourself?

 

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The Common Denominator for Back Pain

    Numerous studies show that 80% of the adult population either has or will have back pain sometime in their life.

If 80% sounds high there is a reason why some people are more likely to have a back problem than others. You don't just develop back pain because of who you voted for or what church you go to.

Like most things in life there is a process or a recipe that if you follow it, it makes you a candidate to have a back problem.

In other words, there is a “common denominator” for back pain.

A retrospective, look-back over a few thousand cases in the past 34 years in private practice provides a pretty good idea of what kind of conditions need to be met for a back to fail.

Interestingly these are also the same conditions or reasons that prevent a back problem from improving when the person gets treated.

Excluding genetic or congenital disorders and out right accidents and injuries, the following is a typical picture of the person who will likely get a back problem.

First – most back pain is lifestyle driven – it is caused by what you do (or don’t do or don't do right).

Back pain doesn’t care about your gender but, for simplicity sake, we’ll stick to “he” here -

                       So – a description of the person who has a back problem:

He is overweight particularly with excessive belly fat

He is de-conditioned, he's out of shape. (probably has not been regularly to a gym since high school)

He sleeps on his side or with one leg straight and the other dragged up in a semi-crawl position.

He smokes cigarettes

His work is, to a large extent, sedentary,

…Or it is interspersed with sporadic sudden exertions with incorrect bending and lifting

     maneuvers.

“Down time” is usually spent sitting in a shoulders-forward, slumped posture in front of a

     computer or TV.

He has numerous incorrect prolonged sedentary posture and motion habits.

He has had previous episodes of back pain that he treated with a heating pad and over-the-counter pain medications or he has consulted with but not followed through with any number of doctors.

 

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It's All About Shape and Motion

    It seems easy to blame our “new” back pain on the fact that we raked leaves yesterday or the heavy wet snow we just shoveled or the heavy brick we just lifted the wrong way or that we slept in the wrong position last night.

You can look at this as good news or bad, but - No one single event, activity or “thing” can do all that damage - These activities are merely the last straw that breaks the camel’s back...

The fact is your back is giving you trouble not because of one single event but your lifestyle - your sedentary postural habits and motion habits.

…It's the way you sleep every night on your side or with one leg straight and the other knee bent and dragged up in a semi-crawl position. It's the way you sit in your car leaning on the center consul. It’s the way you crash on your couch and watch television every night. It is the way that you carry your briefcase in the same hand every day. It's the way you sleep on the train when commuting to your job every day. It’s the way you sit slumped over your computer.

And. it’s the way you always lean forward in your chair to stand up. It’s the way you basically do a straight-leg sit-up to get up when you’re lying in your bed. It’s the way you neglect to bend your knees when you bend down to pick something up.

Sedentary postural habits and motion habits throw your body out of structural symmetry and balance. They cause ligaments on one side of your body to become more elongated and relaxed than their balancing counterpart on the opposite side of the body.

And - They cause the muscles on one side of your body to become longer, more stretched out and weaker than their stronger, balancing, counterpart on the other side.

The overall effect of this is your body slowly, incrementally, goes out of balance.

Once we are out of balance and symmetry, the motion of the joints, which is completely muscle and ligament tone, length and shape-dependent, must also become out of balance. Joints become stuck and cannot move freely.

Joint motion that is missing or simply out of balance will always trigger a cascade of neurologic signaling events throughout your nervous system.

Once that happens – a number of things begin to occur:

Your brain / computer takes those signals and translates them to what we interpret on a conscious level as -

                                   pain.

It also takes those signals and alters the function of one organ / area of your body or another depending upon which nerve pathway is involved, it almost always results in your health deteriorating or failing to one degree or another.

 

        It's takes a while, but yes, there is also... always a last straw

And it is that last straw that we tend to say caused our back problem…

 

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How to get the most benefit from your chiropractic care

   Among the many effects and benefits of chiropractic care that most people experience is that it reduces the effect that stress has on you.

            People frequently ask me how to get the most benefit from their adjustments.

  What are some of the things about you, things that you do or... don't do that might add to your stress levels?

   Changing them might also reduce the amount of stress in your system and increase the benefit of chiropractic care.

                         Here's a few ideas that will help:

 Lose weight - This will take some of the load off, literally. Being even a little over-weight adds enormous stress to your joints and strains your muscles and ligaments. If you're carrying around extra weight you're fighting an uphill battle.

 Stop smoking - Smoking not only destroys your lungs and blood vessels, when you smoke it also destroys your collagen – the fabric of which our muscles, ligaments (and spinal discs) are made. Contrary to what many think, that it relaxes them to smoke, smoking actually stresses you out, chemically and physiologically. Among other toxins and carcinogens cigarette smoke is full of carbon monoxide which starves your brain for oxygen. Smoking is essentially a mild form of suffocation. Would you feel a little bit stressed if someone was suffocating you?    

 Go to the gym – Go regularly. Neck and back injuries respond to care much faster with people who are in condition as opposed to a couch potato who hasn’t been to the gym since high school. Regular exercise is a natural de-stressor. It causes production of Serotonin which will de-stress you and you make you feel good. exercise gets more oxygen into your system, including your brain. When done properly, it improves whole body balance and symmetry so you hold your adjustments longer.

 Rehydrate regularly. Drink plenty of water. Your brain, your muscles, ligaments and joints - your entire body requires much more water than most people drink every day. Not sure how much you need?  Your urine should be light yellow - drink enough water until it is.

 BTW: Everything that goes on from the neck on down is controlled by what goes on above the neck...your little pinky toe doesn't move without a signal from the brain. If our brain isn't working right nothing else is either... So, if your brain is dehydrated, how well can it work for you ?

 Ditch the Carbs. If you had any idea what damage carbohydrates causes to the lining of your gut and how that stresses and inflames your entire body AND brain you would never put another morsel of carbohydrates in your mouth again. Carbohydrates are right up there with cigarette smoking in terms of risk to your health. 

 Get adjusted regularly- Getting adjusted occasionally - helps you ocassionally...

Those who get adjusted once each week report they never get sick and always feel their best and on top of their game. Getting adjusted regularly has an over-all positive effect on your health. It is unlikely you will meet anyone who gets adjusted regularly who says otherwise.

 All of these things are easy to do. They're the low-hanging fruit of stress reduction

techniques. They all reduce the stress load on your body and brain and they all reinforce the positive effects of your adjustment.

  If you have read this far - something in this post must have resonated with you. Perhaps now is a good time to call for an appointment and get adjusted. Why not call us today? We can be reached at  845-297-6688.

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Chiropractic Lowers Stress, Raises Wellness

   Not just for pain, Chiropractic can also have a strong influence on your general health.

Using before and after PET scans to compare changes in brain activity and testing salvia samples to track hormone changes after they received a chiropractic neck adjustment, a group of patients showed brain activity in the parts of the brain responsible for processing pain and stress reactions to be much lower and the saliva samples also had significantly reduced cortisol levels following an adjustment, all indicating decreased stress levels.

As most diseases are stress-related and driven, it follows that lowering one’s reaction to stress and the resulting cortisol levels… would lead to an improved ability to fight disease.

Another way of looking at it is stress and cortisol production, being the result of your body attempting to adapt to the effects of physical, mental, emotional, and other stresses in your environment - getting adjusted will improve your ability to adapt to you environment and resist illness.

Now that we’re in the middle of Cold & Flu season, wouldn’t it make sense to get

adjusted and improve your immunity to illness as much as you could?    

                                    email to a friend - you may very well keep her from catching a cold or flu...  

Causes and Cures for Headaches

Headaches can be due to a variety of causes and reasons

  If you frequently get headaches you will be interested to know that the most common type of headache, known as a cervicogenic headache (neck - generated...), is due to problems in the alignment and motion between the individual vertebrae in the neck. Testing of patients with cervicogenic headaches has shown that they have vertebrae in their neck that are, in effect, stuck or "fixed" in place and cannot move as they are supposed to move. These patients were also unable to turn or bend their neck symmetrically from side to side - one of the many signs of a stuck vertebrae. When a vertebrae is stuck or fixed (also known as "subluxated")it irritates nerves which starts a cascade of events in the body that causes pain and loss of function throughout the body.

                             The headache may only be the tip of the iceberg here  

Good news:

Releasing these stuck or fixed vertebral joints with a chiropractic adjustment can often have a near immediate effect of stopping the headache, reduce their frequency, plus stop any one of a number of other things that were starting to go wrong... that you were thinking was only just another "normal" morning headache.   

Other studies have shown that tension headaches and migraine headaches, which originate in the blood vessels and other tissues surrounding the brain, can also be similarly controlled by a chiropractic adjustment as it has been found that nerve pathways, actually located in the upper part of the neck between the top three vertebrae, have the ability to mediate control and stop even these types of headaches ... if they are stimulated by movement of the vertebrae that is caused by a chiropractic adjustment.

Multiple studies, comparing headache sufferers who have taken over the counter medications, massage or chiropractic adjustments alone have revealed that the chiropractic-treated patients reported a greater reduction, over all, in the quantity and intensity of their headaches when compared to those who were on medications or just had massages.

If you have been getting headaches maybe it's time to get that checked and find out what is causing them and get the problem under control. Who knows what else may be going on there.

As for what treatment - the low hanging fruit here is pretty obvious.

let's see...pop a few Advil every morning to get thru the day, destroy my kidneys, liver and my hearing all in the process or...hmm...get my neck adjusted and get rid of the headache problem and any one of a bunch of other problems that are all brewing in the backround at the same time from the same cause.

You can get a checkup to find out what is causing your headache simply by calling us at 845-297-6688 and making an appointment.       

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Why is Chiropractic Care Repetitive?

      When we go to the doctor we expect relief of our pain fairly quickly because pain medication is very effective at stopping pain.

 This can be very confusing and misleading when we go to a chiropractor for back pain -

Because, again - we're expecting pain relief to be coming very soon.

Why doesn't one simple, "quick crack" fix the problem? 

 The first several chiropractic adjustments is not as much about back pain as changing the internal environment within the body that has caused your back pain in the first place.

 By "environment"  we mean the many structural imbalances and neuro-chemical changes and events that have occurred in the body as a result of the original problem that is causing your back pain.

                               You mean to tell me now I have Two problems?

                    What's the original problem?

 The original problem is most often a joint between two bones in the spine becoming stuck or jammed in such a way that they cannot move properly.

                                       It's like a draw off the track...

 In our body, however, this starts a sequence of nerve signals being sent between the joint and the brain which processes the information and then sends a signal on to the adrenal glands which then produces an excess of Cortisol which.... causes further jamming of that joint.

 It is a joint that is not moving properly that makes you hurt and taking a pill might relieve the pain but it will not make the joint NOT be stuck or jammed.

 When you try to start your lawn mower, the first few times you pull the rope is not actually to start the engine but to make the piston suck fuel into the cylinder. It is only then that you can pull the rope a little faster and the engine can start.

 Likewise the first few adjustments merely gets those stuck joints moving again, but more importantly - stimulating the brain to send a signal to the adrenal glands to stop producing that cortisol which is keeping those joints from moving.

  For the same reason you remember which is your driveway, your muscles and nervous system remember that a joint has been stuck and unable to move properly, and will continue to behave as though it still is, still causing excess cortisol to be made. This is because it is easier to continue doing what it has been doing as opposed to starting to just suddenly move all by itself. 

 Repetitive adjustments stimulate the brain and nervous system to "unlearn stuck" and reinforce proper alignment and movement.

It is only then that the joint can continue to move normally on it's own and your pain can go away.

                                                                        

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5 Easy Steps to Staying Young

    Is there a Fountain of Youth?

 It was sometime around the early 1500’s when a daring baby-boomer / world traveler named Ponce de Leon was exploring the Carribean on his sailboat looking for riches when he heard rumor that there was a special water in a “Fountain of Youth” to the north. Ponce was very much in fear of getting old, so he set sail chasing this rumor, and found Florida. Searching all over Florida, he never found the fountain, but ever since then other people, die-hard believers in that rumor, have been continuing to move to Florida from all over North America to retire….thinking they will find their disappearing youth and live longer and healthier lives there.

I like a good rumor as much as the next guy but I wouldn’t bet on there being any Fountain of Youth in Florida. If people live longer there I am sure it’s not the water.

Anyway – who wants to live there? It’s too hot, it never snows and with all the creepy, crawly, slithering, biting things they have there, it’s more like the Wild Kingdom.

...If you really want to stay young or at least slow down the aging process you don’t have to put up with all that. There is a much easier way to stay young.  

No, I’m sorry - you can’t change your birthdate…it’s written in waterproof ink on your driver’s license,   - so you’re stuck with it.

Want to stay young? Ditch the rumors and mid-night TV magic potions and follow these 5 easy steps:  

1  Drink at least 5-6 glasses of water every day with the first glass when you first wake up

    in the morning.

2  Stop eating carbohydrates – it’s adding fat, putting you into systemic metabolic stress, it’s wrecking your knees, hips and back making you feel and look old - and worse – worse than snake venom, it’s poisoning your brain. Your brain is the one part of your body that makes all of your other body parts function - so stop messing that up.

-  Drop a pot of over-cooked spaghetti all over your computer mother board - short-circuiting all of those millions of connections – How well does the computer work then…?  See ? “Carbs”…when wet - they’re even bad for your computer.  lol

3  See a chiropractor and get adjusted, preferably, at least, once per week.

(I don’t care what your insurance says - Ole Ponce wasn’t worried about insurance.   

                Work out a livable payment plan with your chiropractor.

Why? Getting adjusted makes the “electrical wiring system” of the body function properly so that the brain can do its job of running the body and making it function properly.

FYI - Of all health care providers, chiropractors live the longest (because they get adjusted every week), and 67% of the general population that is over 100 years old – sees a chiropractor once per week.

                     ie.: Do what seems to be working for others.

4  Exercise intensely for 20-25 minutes per day every other day. Nothing will make you feel younger.

5  Get at least 7 hours of sleep every night in a dark room with the TV off. You only make growth hormone when you’re sleeping and your body requires growth hormone to rebuild, regenerate itself and stay young. It’s a must have if you want to stay young.

The bad news is:  There is no “Fountain of Youth” There is no pill to stay young.

Staying young is really not all that hard but you do have to work for it – at least a little bit.

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You don't try Chiropractic

     You don't try chiropractic care and expect anything but dismal results.

There is a right way (and a wrong way), to do most things and if you do something the wrong way or half way - the results you get will be poor.

When you bake a cake you're supposed to put an egg in it or the cake won't come out right. They don't tell you to put an egg in it because they want you to buy more eggs to support the egg industry.

  It is interesting how a patient will come in seeking care for a problem he has had in his lower back for 6 months and state he is ready to do whatever it takes to fix the problem and not be bothered with it anymore. He wants to get back to playing golf and not be dealing with a bad back anymore...and after 3 adjustments he's cancelling his appointment saying his back feels better and he doesn't need any more care.

(the fine print is that his insurance isn't paying for his care…)

Anyway, a month later his back is killing him again and he's telling his friends -

                      " Yea, I tried  chriopactry but it didn't work..." 

FYI ...there is a reason why you were told to get adjusted 3 times per week for 4 weeks. It is because that's the way it works best and it’s the way you get the results you came here for in the first place.

 Your back is giving you trouble because you lost the structural balance, symmetry and stability in your spine.  Getting less care than is really necessary to get that back again and restore that structural balance, symmetry and stability in your spine is pretty much the same thing as baking a cake without an egg...

                                       You don't get the results you want.  

You can't blame the care and say it wasn't effective when you haven't really done it.

You try spinach, maybe you try golf - you don't try chiropractic and then expect any kind of results.

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The slippery slope of being over-weight

  Many people have gained so much weight that when they look in the mirror or get on the scale, they no longer see what others see and don't recognize the risk they live with.   

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 110,000 Americans die as a result of obesity each year, and that one-third of all cancers are directly related to excess weight.

What most people are not aware of is that weight gain and increase in BMI ( body mass index), begins a progression of failing health. Increased weight leads to diabetes, which lays the foundation for heart disease, cancer, and alzheimers, in addition to a failed back, hip or knee.

According to Christopher Murray,¹ one of the authors of a comprehensive new analysis published in The Lancet,  excess body weight causes an estimated 3.4 million deaths worldwide each year.

'We know that there are severe downstream health effects from obesity, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and many cancers.'"

Carbohydrate-rich, highly processed foods, usually loaded with gluten which stimulates the "addiction and craving centers" in your brain - pushing you into a continuous "feast mode", are primary drivers of these statistics. Wherever a highly processed food diet becomes the norm, obesity inevitably follows. Weight gain promotes further weight gain.

Americans are notorious for eating a primarily grain-based or processed diet, so it's not surprising that we have the highest obesity rate in the world. The rate of "extreme obesity" in the US (defined as a BMI above 40) has risen by 350 percent over the past few years alone!

                            ( FYI: a healthy BMI is 24 - Do you know what your BMI is? )

If you base your diet on these foods, you are virtually guaranteed to experience weight gain, as they are loaded with sugar, fructose, and grains, all of which will pack on unnecessary pounds and make it more difficult to get excess weight off.

If this article is about you and you aren't taking this seriously,

                              Why aren't you?  

What are you doing and how's it working out for you?

 It's time to yank your head out of the sand and treat your weight and BMI problem as the emergency it is. You are looking at very real, very serious and possibly irrevocable health problems,

                                     just from being overweight

This may sound like over-reacting, but it's that important and it cannot be over-stressed - You need to be treating it with the same urgency as a severed artery. Just because the results take longer to appear doesn't mean they are any less serious.

Your weight problem is clearly taking you down a very slippery slope which only gets more steep and slippery the heavier you get.

It is ALL about the choices you make.

If you're gaining weight and it seems out of control - you obviously need help. It's ok to accept that.             That's why we're here - to help you with it.

Would you like more information?

We are offering free BMI testing and weight-loss counseling and we can help you get the weight off.

The first step is yours. You are just a phone call away from help - So call 845-297-6688 today.

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