A chiropractor managing high blood pressure may sound like a stretch, but there is surprisingly good evidence that your chiropractor SHOULD be involved in lowering your blood pressure.
Chances are you or a loved one has a diagnosis of high blood pressure or hypertension. It, in fact, is the single most common diagnosis in family medicine with approximately 25 percent of American adults being affected. A diagnosis is usually settled on when your blood pressure is consistently measured above 140/90, and there is no pathological cause found for the increase in pressure.
Hypertension is almost always a symptom of bad things to come. It’s a major risk factor for stroke and heart attack and contributes to the development of congestive heart failure, retinopathy (eye issues and blindness), and hypertensive kidney disease.
Where does your chiropractor fit in?
Management of hypertension should be a three-pronged approach with nutritional, lifestyle, and adjustment/alignment interventions forming the triad. As the only nationally licensed health care discipline with training in nutritional, lifestyle and adjusting interventions, chiropractic stands out as the premier discipline for managing chronic high blood pressure. The research substantiates this approach.
Lifestyle
A study published in a nationally respected journal showed that the combination of improved diet and fasting normalized blood pressure in nearly 90 percent of the hypertensive group in this study. The drop in blood pressure also was greater than a group taking blood pressure lowering medications.
Nutrition
Several nutritional supplements also have been shown to lower blood pressure in the research. These include CoQ10, vitamin D, magnesium, L-carnitine and others.
Adjustments/Manipulation
Finally, chiropractic spinal adjustments have been shown to be effective in lowering blood pressure. The most recent publication in the medical journal, Journal of Human Hypertension, found that neck adjustments lowered blood pressure on average 17/10 mm Hg versus 3/2 in the placebo group. An added bonus to this research is that it changes the way we think about the cause of chronic hypertension, namely that it may be caused in part by compression of the brainstem in the upper neck.
This post summarizes an article by Dr. Alex Vasquez, DC, ND, DO. If you would like to read the full article, go to the link below:
Healing Tip of the Week
Get your vitamin D naturally! Sunbathing a half-hour a day in midday sunlight will give you approximately 10,000 IU’s of Vitamin D, a very healthy dose of this crucial hormone that has been shown to help lower blood pressure.
Do you have low back pain? Who doesn’t, right? Does the pain not respond to treatments to your low back? Big surprise … the pain might not be coming from your back. Research shows that health care practitioners should be looking to your hips.
For your low back to function properly, the hip joints need to have adequate mobility. Internal rotation (moving the thigh inward) and external rotation (moving the thigh outward) should be equal on each leg and from side to side. The musculature around the hips also needs to be balanced and strong.
Unfortunately, most of us sit at a desk for 8 hours a day and then go home to sit on the couch. Whatever happened to running around and enjoying the great outdoors? In case you need some help, I’ve put together some dynamic (movement) stretches to help increase mobility in your hips. So go outside, enjoy the sun (get your 15 minutes worth) and stretch out your hips twice a day. The best time to stretch is after cardiovascular exercise, when your muscles are pumped full of blood. However, if you stretch dynamically, there is less chance of injury if done before exercise. Plus, dynamic stretching is more fun! Please remember, if you feel pain at any time (or were instructed not to perform any of these moves), stop what you are doing and see your health care practitioner.
Leg swings – swing your leg from front to back, toes pointed forward. Keep your back straight, shoulder blades down and back, and pelvis still. If you lack mobility, keep your swings small.
Side-side Leg swings – swing your leg from side to side, toes pointed forward. Keep your back straight, shoulder blades back and down, and pelvis still. Do not rotate your torso.
Split squats – assume a wide split stance with toes pointed forward. Keep your back straight, shoulder blades back and down, and don’t let the knees buckle in. Keep your hands behind your head and squat one knee toward the floor.
Lateral squats – assume a wide stance with toes pointed forward. Keep your back straight, shoulder blades back and down, knees out, and squat to the side with hands behind your head.
Rotational squats – assume a wide stance, with one leg toes pointed forward and the other leg toes pointed out 90 degrees. Keep your back straight, shoulder blades back and down, knees out, and squat to the side with toes pointed forward.
Reverse lunge with twist – step back with one leg as far as you can and rotate to the opposite side. Keep your back straight, shoulder blades back and down, and knees out. Squeeze your glute (butt) muscle on the back leg while you rotate and stand up.
Healing Tip of the Week
Go outside, enjoy the sun (get your 15 minutes worth), and stretch out your hips twice a day. Your hips and low back will thank you for it!
With a busy California lifestyle, it can be tough to eat healthy every day. Luckily, in Long Beach, we have several easy options for getting fresh, organic foods. One such place is Olives Gourmet Grocer with one store on 2nd St. and another on Broadway. In Dr. Michael Day’s article, “All Five Servings at Olives Gourmet Grocer,” which appeared in the Long Beach Post on July 6, he describes the ingredients and benefits of a healthy raw meal.
In our modern world, where American children spend an average of almost 8 hours per day in front of some form media, such as TV, video games, computers and cell phones, we often wonder what these “weapons of mass distraction” are doing to our health and wellness.
In his excellent book, The Blue Zones, Dan Buettner examines the four areas of the world that have the highest density of people living to be 100 years or older. In these very different cultures, he finds common traits that hold true for all four of them. One of these traits is the emphasis on maintaining a social circle all throughout life. Buettner concludes that if you want to live a long, fruitful life, you need a strong social support system.
The Journal of the American Medical Association recently validated this conclusion. In a recent study, several hundred volunteers were exposed to a cold virus. The volunteers with the most socially diverse networks were the most disease resistant.
One would think that with the advent of cell phones and social networking sites, like Facebook, those relationships would be even easier to strengthen and maintain. We can now reach virtually anyone we know instantly 24 hours per day. In many cases, however, this media has actually robbed us of our communities, leaving us more isolated than ever. My grandfather’s generation spent their evenings playing cards, roughhousing in the yard with their kids, telling jokes, or going dancing. We now spend our evenings surfing the internet, relentlessly updating Facebook, or zoning out on TV. We have “signed off” on reality in favor of reality TV.
Fortunately, technology does have an upside. We have infinite opportunities for forming and strengthening personal relationships. The internet is a great tool for finding activities to do with your family and friends. And if you lack a social circle, the internet has sites to find like-minded people.
The only thing missing in your life is what you’re not willing to give. If you feel lonely, reach out to someone who is lonely. If you feel disconnected to your family, turn off the TV and reconnect. The health of our society depends on each one of us working diligently to improve our interconnections and strengthen our social networks.
Healing Tip of the Week
There are several great websites for families to find activities to do and for individuals to make new friends. Meetup.com is a site that holds gatherings, such as hikes or get-togethers based on similar interest. Me and my sister have used this site very successfully when relocating to new areas. Yelp.com is good for finding hikes, restaurants, parks, playgrounds etc. Taking a class at a community college also works like a charm!
We talk a great deal on the blog about the importance of keeping proper posture while driving, sitting on the computer, or watching television. Most recently, one of my patients brought to my attention one activity that I had totally overlooked: texting.
This patient was having neck and mid-back pain typical of poor upper body posture and was trying to work out what activities were causing the symptoms to worsen. After some searching, he realized that the main contributor to his pain was not his computer work or car time; it was text messaging on his cell phone.
A recent chiropractic publication confirms what he intuitively deduced. “These days, people are constantly ‘connected’ to their hand-held devices, whether it is their cellular phones, portable video games like Nintendo DS, e-readers such as Amazon Kindle, or they are just using apps on an iPhone.” In fact, a recent survey found that 8-18 year olds spend in excess of seven-and-a-half-hours a day using some form of mobile media.
Be aware of your forward head posture or “text neck,” and use the strategies written in many articles throughout this blog to correct them. Small corrections over a long period of time add up to big changes in your body.
Healing Tip of the Week
Get that head back on top of your shoulders! Your head is like a bowling ball, for every inch that your head migrates forward, the force it takes for your neck muscles to keep it upright effectively doubles.
A friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Dan Kehres, once wrote, “Sitting is one of the unhealthiest activities one can do.” How so? The body isn’t designed to sit. It’s designed to move. As many office workers can relate, when we sit too much, unhealthy events begin to occur. The muscles underneath the back of your head start to get irritated causing tension headaches. Your chin starts to jut forward flattening your spinal curve, irritating joints, nerves, and discs in your neck. The shoulders start to round forward causing shoulder and mid-back pain. The low back rounds forward irritating the muscles and increasing the stress on the lumbar discs and nerves.
Unfortunately, modern living is requiring us to sit more and more. How many hours do you sit per day; 8, 10, 12 or even 16? Fortunately, there are stretches and exercises you can do while sitting at the office or waiting at red lights. At AWC, we incorporate these into a program called “Chair Care.” Chair Care is a set of exercises designed to counter the effects of constant sitting. With Chair Care, you will learn exercises, such as “The Fonz” and “Head of the Cow.”
Healing Tip of the Week
Try this Chair Care exercise when you feel your low-back tightening. Make sure that the majority of your weight is supported by your arms. You can use the arm rests as well.
Neck pain is an interesting cascade of symptoms that leave many confused and searching for answers. The most interesting part about neck pain is where you feel your pain is rarely the true cause of your discomfort. Here is a short list of things that can cause neck pain.
Posture: As our society flexes forward at work, while texting, and in the car. As a result, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in neck pain. Muscles become imbalanced, and the neck usually gets the brunt of the abuse. The problem with posture is, once a faulty memory is set, it rarely goes back to normal by just “sitting up straighter.”
Subluxation: As defined by the American Chiropractic Association: “A subluxation is a complex of functional and/or structural and/or pathological articular changes that compromise neural integrity and may influence organ system function and general health. A subluxation is evaluated, diagnosed, and managed through the use of chiropractic procedures based on the best available rational and empirical evidence.” Full spine subluxations are a hidden key to neck pain reduction and/or elimination. I have seen countless patients leave my treatment room free of chronic neck pain and headaches after removing the subluxations in their spine. Research recently showed chiropractic is effective in the treatment of neck pain when combined with exercise 60% of the time … compared to medical visits and pain meds 10%, and exercise alone 20%. Now those are some stats!
Breathing: Many people breathe from their upper chest instead of their diaphragm. This is a neurological dysfunction that needs to be fixed in order for neck pain to go away.
Inflammation: Most U.S. diets are pro-inflammatory, which means they create inflammation. The foods we eat increase acidity and heat within our bodies, which lead to an increased pain sensation and increased healing time.
Jaw clenching: Going to bed with unresolved emotion and stress can cause you to clench your jaw in the night. My personal theory is: once parts of the body become paralyzed in certain stages of sleep, the jaw and breathing muscles must stay active. Individuals literally “grind” their way through their problematic dreams. Also, if there is a jaw or upper neck subluxation, the brain will grind the teeth to attempt to make them congruent.
Emotion: Suppressed emotion can express itself in many ways (see breathing and jaw clenching). When the limbus brain, the emotional center, is overactive, it sends excess messages to the muscles of the body causing them to be chronically tense.
Posterior Line Fascial Restriction: Coined by Thomas Myer, the Posterior Fascial Line is a link of connective tissue starting in the feet and going all the way to the cranium. Checking fascial restrictions from head to foot is an integral aspect of eliminating many types of posterior body pain.
Healing Tip of the Week
If you have neck pain, check your breathing. Are you taking deep, even breaths all the way into your diaphragm and exhaling slowly? If not, try it!
When walking, each foot lifts and hits the ground without us consciously thinking about how it’s happening. We just walk. Then, one day, we set our foot down and, “Ouch!” We have pain in the low back. How did that happen? There is something off in the biomechanics of your gait cycle. In other words, your foot is not lifting or landing correctly, and it sets off a chain of events from your foot to your hip that causes pain. As your chiropractor, I can perform a Gaitscan, a computerized test, to see where along that chain the disruption occurs, so that we can correct it.
So, what does the Gaitscan (a dynamic evaluation of your feet while standing and walking) tell you as it relates to your current pain, and how will orthotic support (if indicated) help you now and in the future?
The gait cycle (walk cycle) describes what happens to the foot and ankle from the point of initial contact of one foot with the ground to the point at which the same foot contacts the ground again. The gait cycle is divided into the swing phase and the stance phase. During the swing phase, the foot is not in contact with the ground. As the name implies, it is the phase of the gait cycle in which the foot swings forward to take another step. During the stance phase, the foot is in contact with the ground. The stance phase of the gait cycle can also be divided into three stages. The first stage is called heel strike; the second stage is called mid-stance; and the third stage is called heel lift.
During heel strike of the stance phase, the foot begins to pronate. Pronation of the foot is the term that describes the rolling motion of the foot inwards and flattening of the inner (medial) arch of the foot. Pronation allows the foot to adapt to uneven terrain and absorb the impact of the foot striking the ground. It is during this phase that the foot begins to act like a shock absorber.
During mid-stance, the entire foot is in contact with the ground, and the weight of the body is directly over the foot. It is during this phase that the foot is maximally pronated. The foot also acts as a shock absorber during the early part of this phase.
Heel lift occurs at the end of the stance phase. Supination of the foot is the term used to describe the rolling motion of the foot outwards and the rising of the inner (medial) arch of the foot. During heel lift, the foot supinates to act as a rigid lever. The plantar fascia is a strong connective tissue that runs along the bottom of the foot connecting the heel to the base of the toes. The bones, muscles, and the plantar fascia act together to form this rigid lever.
Abnormal amounts of pronation or supination can cause a variety of foot and leg problems. Abnormal pronation (overpronation) occurs as a result of the foot pronating when it should be neutral or supinating. Abnormal supination occurs when the foot is too rigid. These abnormal biomechanics can create lower back, hip, knee, ankle and/or foot problems.
Healing Tip of the Week
If you are having pain in the feet, ankles, knees or back, take the time to consider the following:
Are your shoes in good working condition? Worn out shoes can contribute to more than just pain. They can assist in the acceleration of joint degradation.
Do you ignore foot pain and hope it goes away? It usually doesn’t.
Do you feel that you can’t afford to get the appropriate help regarding foot pain and its primary cause?
A consultation at the Advanced Wellness Center is free.
In Part One of this topic, “Does Spinal Alignment Influence Life Expectancy and Disease Rate?,” I discussed how the spine acts as a circuit breaker of sorts for the nervous system’s electrical impulses coming in and out of it. When misaligned, one side of the spine may transmit too many signals, while on the other side, the circuit breaker is off completely. This can have adverse effects throughout the body. Now, let’s look at the muscles of the body and how they affect overall health.
Muscles fire and have a memory that is transmitted from the brain and spinal cord. A muscle can be functioning normally, be overly excited (hypertonic), or under excited (hypotonic). Muscles are connected to one another through fascia. Fascia is a thick covering that surrounds the muscle and links with adjacent muscles. Since the fascia is linked like a train throughout the body, a restricted fascia in the foot can affect cranial fascia or neck pain and so on. (See “Anatomy Trains,” Thomas Myer.)
Much research has hypothesized that fascia, or the fascial train, carries an electrical charge throughout the body. (See Harold Burr of Yale’s biofield studies as well as Dr. Robert Fulford’s work, ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine.) Since we are electromagnetic bodies, with polarities just like the north and south poles, it can be theorized that if a muscle is not functioning in one part of the body, it affects the whole fascial train, and ultimately the electrical charge or “healing energy” of the body. This tradition of “healing energy” has been carried down for centuries as Chi, Prana, Ki, or Innate.
We can then say that it is integral to have a balanced body, with both a balanced spine as the circuit breaker sending out proper internal messages, as well as a healthy muscle and fascial system to transmit our vital energy. If there is an imbalance, we are not at our full potential. We may be able to get by, but we can’t excel.
A full exam is necessary to diagnose your muscle and fascial system, with postural checks, movement screens, strength testing, and most importantly, palpation. A skilled clinician can often feel or sense the hidden blockages that may be the root cause of your problem. Many problems stem from old or new traumas, both physical and emotional, that must be released from the muscle in order for you to heal.
Through hands-on work, using muscle and joint manipulation, your chiropractor can balance your electromagnetic, spinal, muscle, and fascial systems. You will feel more alert, have less pain, and old conditions that you never thought would go away may clear up.
Healing Tip of the Week
If you feel like you are not functioning at your body’s full potential, have your chiropractor perform a full exam, which includes the muscles and fascial system. Some simple muscle and joint manipulation can dramatically enhance your performance.
Most people will say they’re healthy, because they don’t have any “dis-ease” limiting their daily lives. Does this mean we should sit back and wait for disease to happen? No way! Take a moment and ask yourself the following questions:
What level of health do you really desire?
You may be feeling OK, but are you waking up full of energy and maintaining any amount of that energy as you work through your day? If your answer is no, but it sounds like a pretty good way to feel, then raise your standard of health to include a sense of quality of life. This means you not only pass all of the tests on your physical exams, but you also have enough vitality and energy throughout the day. It means your emotions, or spirit, are lifted and stable, which you can use to live in a meaningful and rich way.
How do we get to that point if we’re not already there?
Only YOU can achieve health for yourself. No one can do it for you. There is so much we can do to increase our quality of health and life. Eating well, exercising regularly and getting enough rest are the basics to having good health. To increase your health to a higher level, do whatever helps to keep the vast majority of the trillions of cells in your body working properly. Oriental medicine is one great way of working with the energy systems and treating on that cellular level. Everything from reproduction to infections to repairing broken bones happens on a cellular level. Chiropractic treatments, meditation/prayer and all forms of massage can also help keep us in tip-top shape. That’s one reason the Advanced Wellness Center has a variety of treatment options. When you’re ready to include overall quality of life and vitality in your definition of good health, we’re here to support you in your growth!
Healing Tip of the Week
Spend some time answering the following questions for yourself: What is my definition of good health? Am I feeling as good as I want to? If not, what do I need to add or subtract from my health regimen to achieve my desired level of health?
