What's in an Adjustment?

Why are you getting adjusted? To feel better? To reduce pain levels? To hear a pop? There are a multitude of reasons I will have someone walk in the door and want to be adjusted (though I will admit that pain is probably the number one reason); but what if the benefits are so much more than just pain relief? What if chiropractic care can provide something that is more than just a quick release or a quick limbering up? The reality is that chiropractic care has been shown to be extremely helpful in relieving pain and providing long-lasting relief, but it also has benefits that are over and above just some basic pain relief!

Let's start with joint mobility. Joints, like every other part of the body, require nutrition and a good blood supply to remain healthy. But they also require something else. Joints require motion! In fact, motion is as vital to a joint as air is to the lungs. Motion allows the joint to circulate fluid, receive proper nutrition and maintain its structural integrity. In fact, joints that no longer move will degenerate and often rather quickly. A joint that has undergone degeneration loses its ability to move fully and smoothly. Think of a degenerate joint like a hinge that's been left in the rain for a while. If the hinge doesn’t seize altogether, it's hard to move; it creaks and groans when you forcefully get it moving again (sound familiar?). Chiropractic adjustments work to restore a joint's full ranges of motion and, just as importantly, they work to maintain those ranges. A well-adjusted spine can be thought of as a hinge that’s regularly greased and not left out in the rain to rust.

So having great moving joints is important because it means you can use those joints for years to come. But there is still more yet, there are deeper benefits of the chiropractic adjustment as well! To understand the further benefits we must first understand something called allostatic load. Allostatic load can be defined as the sum of all the stressors your body has to deal with. The more stressors, the higher the load. As this load of stressors increases, it moves your body into a state of sympathetic dominance. This state is most commonly known as your fight or flight response. In short bursts this state is beneficial, it results in higher wakefulness and higher energy output. But this increased energy output comes at a cost, our bodies give up on their basic maintenance. Things like sleep and digestion are put on the back burner, and cellular healing is also slower to work. If we remain in this state for a few hours our bodies are able to recover fine, even a few days and our bodies can get back to healing themselves with little consequence. However, if left for weeks to months we can start to run into some real issues. Chronic stress can lead to higher sensitivity to pain, increases in headaches, insomnia, and low energy levels. So how do we combat this state of sympathetic dominance? This is where chiropractic comes in. Chiropractic care and adjustments work specifically to reduce your allostatic load. By decreasing the physical and neurological stressors on your body, chiropractic is able to help you out of this state of fight or flight. When your body is no longer feeling tension and joints are free to as they are designed, your body can better divert energy to where it is more needed.

The best thing about chiropractic is not that it gets you out of pain, the best thing about chiropractic is that it allows your body to better modulate itself and do its job properly. After all, our bodies are designed to be healthy, we just have to make sure there's nothing getting in the way. When our bodies are moving well and the joints are able to go through their full ranges, when our allostatic load is low, our bodies are able to maintain themselves and make sure we have the energy to focus on other things.

-Dr. Benjamin Davey D.C.

A Product of Our Environment

Have you ever wondered how some high-achieving people manage to stay committed to their work? To getting up early every morning? Or exercising every day? Meanwhile, you have a hard time slugging out of bed in the morning, exercise is a struggle and you end up on your phone for at least an hour every day at work? Mostly this can be whittled down to habits. I’ve talked in part about habits, and how it’s important to make small habits that can increase your productivity. Now I want to look at things from the opposite end. To do that, we need to look back in time to none other than the Vietnam War.

What does the Vietnam War have to do with bad habits? A lot actually, and it’s been a pivotal point of research into the human mind and how habits work. In 1971 it was discovered that over 35% of American soldiers in Vietnam had tried heroin and at least 20% had full-blown addiction. This set off alarm bells back at home and there was huge concern about the impending drug crisis that might ensue when the soldiers returned to the USA. There was tracking set up and the government was preparing for the worst. Then something strange happened.

When following up with the soldiers who returned from Vietnam, it was discovered that of those with known addiction, only 5% became re-addicted within the first year of being home and 12% became re-addicted within 3 years. Now that might sound like an awful lot of people who relapsed into drug use, but for comparison, the current relapse rate after going to rehab is somewhere around 90%. So now there was a new question, Why?

There was an assumption and to a large extent there still is, that to get clean and stay clean of drugs you just have to have the will and the grit. The reality as was plainly shown with the returning vets is that we are more a product of our environment than we might like to admit. It turns out that when the soldiers returned from the war a few things happened. The first is that their stress levels went down (we tend to be less stressed when not getting shot at), the soldiers also were returned to their friends and family who provided a feeling of belonging and comfort. However, the third thing that happened was that they changed their environment and thus their habits.

Now the soldiers didn’t do this intentionally, it just happened due to the fact they were no longer fighting in Vietnam. It turns out that triggers are far more important than we used to think. When the soldiers came back nearly everything in their lives changed. If the soldier used heroin after every frontline deployment, the ending of a frontline deployment would become a trigger and they would grave the drug after every deployment. If they used heroin after getting yelled at by a superior, getting yelled at by a superior would become yet another trigger. Upon returning home, nearly every trigger had been removed from the soldier’s lives, no more frontline duty, no more yelling commanding officer and thus no more trigger. Interestingly if you were to take a soldier and put them back on the frontlines in a similar environment, even decades later, you would find that the rate of re-addiction would skyrocket.

So what does this have to do with you? Well, this mechanism is not exclusive to drug use. In fact, it’s pretty much universal across all behaviours. If you have a habit of stopping for a breakfast sandwich from McDonald’s it’s likely to be linked to a trigger. Have you ever noticed that your mouth starts watering while you’re in the drive-thru? Pulling into that drive-thru could be the trigger, or it could be something as simple as turning onto the road you know the McDonalds is on. Triggers are not just related to ingesting things either. Ever notice how as soon as you are in an awkward silence you whip out your phone without even thinking about it? The silence is a trigger to grab your phone.

Shoulders Back!

Why is posture important? Should you really care if you have good posture? And if so, how do you go about fixing your posture? I would argue that posture is incredibly important and not just because I’m a chiropractor and that’s part of my job. It turns out that good posture has many physical health benefits as well as mental and social benefits. 

Let’s start with the physical benefits. When it comes to spinal health, a well-stacked spine with good healthy curves can help decrease degeneration and reduce your chances of bulging a spinal disc. Think of each spinal disc like a jelly doughnut. When we have good posture, the jelly stays inside the doughnut. When we have poor posture and are very forward bent, it’s like you are sandwiching one side of the jelly doughnut and pop! The jelly comes out the back! Secondly, when you have good posture you also have better lung capacity. If your shoulders are rolled forward and slouched, you put downward pressure on your lungs and reduce the amount of space they have to work with. A decreased lung capacity can mean faster breathing and a higher resting heartbeat, neither of which is healthy. When you have poor posture your organs will also not function as well. Your abdominal space is decreased when you slouch. This decreased space puts increased pressure on all of your abdominal organs and restricts blood flow. Again, this compression is bad for your health and can cause issues, especially with digestion. The last point I will make on the negative effects physically is on our overall energy levels. When we are standing or sitting in bad posture, we overuse a lot of muscles. While it may seem like more work to keep good posture, when your head and shoulders are sitting too far forward, your trapezius muscles and neck muscles get over-worked and can cause headaches and a decrease in energy levels.

While those physical reasons should probably be good enough reason to maintain good posture, what about the mental and social side? Well, it turns out that good posture has been linked to good overall mental health and maturity. When we are first born we have very poor posture and no spinal curves to speak of. As a baby’s brain develops so does its posture. Good posture is essential for walking, that C-shaped spine we are born with is not ideal for when we want to start doing life in an upright manner. Most toddlers learn good posture fairly quickly as it is natural and ingrained in our DNA. Good posture with the shoulders pulled back has been shown to represent good brain health because the cerebellum (the part of the brain that controls posture) is firing on all cylinders. This is actually very observable and why as a person’s mental health declines, especially with diseases such as dementia, their posture will also decline. On a social scale, good posture has been shown (in more studies than I can list) to improve other people’s opinion of you and they will have a natural inclination to assume you are a more competent person and someone worth taking note of. This is not a feature that is limited to humans either, most mammals will display this mannerism. Simply think of your dog’s behaviour when it’s been bad and knows it. A dog will take on a forward slouch and keep its head low to the ground as a sign of submission.

There are many more reasons why good posture is important, but I want to make sure you have a good starting point towards better posture. The first step towards better posture is being more active in pulling our shoulders back and making sure we aren’t slouching in front of the computer, good ergonomics will play a big role here. A second way is to make sure that our spines are highly mobile. Chiropractic care, stretching and yoga will help here. Lastly, we need to strengthen some under-utilized muscles. Obviously, everyone is different and theirs no one size fits all. But the vast majority of us would benefit from a daily regimen that includes these few exercises. For the upper spine and neck, I like to see a daily routine including the YWTL exercise and stretching of the pectoral (chest) muscles, this will help to pull the shoulders and head back naturally. For the lower back, stretching the iliopsoas muscles (hip flexors) and strengthening the core with abdominal planks will go a long way in improving your posture. If you are unsure of how to do these exercises or stretches, there are a huge number of videos on Youtube that will provide better instruction than I ever could in writing. At the end of the day, your posture actually has a huge effect on your overall health and is often overlooked. 4-5 minutes a day devoted to good postural exercises can make a work of difference.

Move for Your Own Sanity

Sometimes I have a hard time deciding what topic I want to write about. Sometimes I have a million things I want to stuff into one post and other times I seem to have writer’s block and can’t get anything down. Today is neither of those. Today I want to talk about our mental health. These past 13 months have been some of the most challenging ever experienced. We haven’t seen loved ones in over a year, some have lost their jobs, kids miss their friends and sports teams. The covid pandemic has taken an incredible toll and much of that damage will be felt for years to come. For this reason, I want to bring up something that I think can help us ride out what will hopefully be the tail-end of the pandemic. That thing is exercise.

Really? Exercise? That’s what you want to talk about? It is, and for good reason. I know we have heard that exercise helps with our mental health, but I want to lay a little groundwork on what it’s doing for you and how it can help you get through some of these tough days. Exercise may be one of the most misunderstood forms of care and it’s time we rethink it. If you ask the average person what they think of exercise, they will liken it to a 30-minute torture session and they might rather listen to nails scraped across a chalkboard for the half-hour. I think under a lot of circumstances, this may be a fair response to exercise. However, I believe this is not due to exercise in and of itself, so much as it is our misunderstanding of how and why we should exercise. Let me ask you if this sounds familiar. You see yourself in the mirror at a new angle or roll the scale over another couple of digits and you snap. “That’s it I’m going to get in shape!” You buy a treadmill or a subscription to the latest fitness craze and tell yourself this time you are gonna work until the weight is gone, and then keep it off! After nearly killing yourself for two weeks, you decide it’s not worth it. You give up and use that new treadmill as a very expensive clothesline. This is not an abnormal chain of events, in fact, I would say it’s pretty much the norm. But what if we decided to exercise for another reason? Instead of exercising for weight loss and because we wanted to fit into our pants from 10 years ago.

What if we exercised for our mental health? What would that kind of exercise look like? Well, a good place to start would be doing something that you enjoy, or at the very least don’t mind. For many people, that’s a walk, a hike, or a leisurely bike ride around the neighbourhood. You probably won’t get your heart rate to 200 beats per minute doing those things, and you probably won’t feel like coughing up a lung either. It turns out that something as simple as a leisurely walk or a 30-minute bike ride has huge benefits for our mental health. Studies have shown that even a small amount of non-intense exercise can elevate our mood and give us more energy and more drive. Studies have also shown that our brains are better at processing emotions when we are moving (there is actual biology and mechanism behind why it’s easier to talk about hard subjects while out for a walk). The reality is that our minds need to exercise just as much if not more than our physical bodies do. If you talk to someone who runs several times a week, some may say they do it because they want to lose weight, but many people who exercise several times a week do it because it helps keep them emotionally stable and they would be lost without it. Don’t get me wrong there are times when you just don’t feel like getting outside or even getting off the couch. However, I have yet to meet a person that says they regret all that time they spent walking the trails of Sudbury or going on a family bike ride. 

It is my firm belief that exercise is for every single person on the planet, but it also probably won’t look the same for every person. For me it might be running, for my wife it might be yoga, for you, it might be hiking and for that crazy guy you know down the street, it might be a 100-mile ultra-marathon. We are all different and have different needs and interests, but in one thing we are all the same, we are all biologically made to move.

Here Comes The Sun

It seems we are in for an early spring. We are already seeing double-digit temperatures and most of the snow is gone. Hopefully, it means that we are heading outside more and getting into the sun. I’ve written several articles on the importance of the sun, but that’s because of just how important it is for our overall health both physically and mentally. Today I want to focus on how the sun and light in general, affect our sleep/wake cycle.

I previously talked about how our sleep and wake cycle are tied to our body’s temperature and how it can affect when we start to feel tired or wakeful. It turns out, perhaps not so surprisingly, that the sun and light in general also have a huge effect on our sleep cycle. A large amount of light into our eyes will wake us up and make our bodies more alert. Darkness helps our bodies wind down and prepare for sleep. Many people tote the use of blue light filters while looking at screens. These blue light filters are supposed to make the screens have a less intense effect on the eyes and make it easier to sleep at night. The problem is that the benefits of blue light blocking glasses is somewhat controversial and perhaps just a little bit of overzealous marketing. While blocking blue light can be helpful, it turns out that any form of light-blocking is beneficial for sleep. What you should be focusing on is the amount of light, not the colour of light. The reality of the relationship we share with light is one that is simple, straightforward and unfortunately hard to cheat. This relationship is based entirely on the sun. Our bodies are not designed with modern light exposure in mind. Our bodies know 2 basic things when it comes to light. The first is that when light enters the eye it’s time to wake up because the day is beginning. The second is that as light decreases, the evening is approaching and the time to sleep has come. If you understand these 2 basic principles you can greatly improve your sleep quality and also when you will wake up in the morning. It might sound simple and rather boring, but often the reality is. 

So how can we utilize these two basic rules of our eyes? It turns out there are a few ways we can learn to use our relationship with light to our advantage and properly set our sleep-wake cycle. I said earlier that the amount of light matters. If you want to start getting up earlier, one of the best things you can do is get as much light into your eyes as possible, as soon as possible. Now don’t go looking at the sun, but getting outside and seeing the daylight is the best way to set your internal clock. That blast of natural light stimulates our wake cycle and “sets our clock” so to speak. You might say, “well I turn my kitchen lights on first thing in the morning, so that’s my light exposure”. Turns out, that while you may believe that you are getting a lot of light into your eyes, it’s actually only a fraction of what you would get by going out and sitting on the porch. It is very hard to substitute natural light with artificial light. Now you might be thinking, “if our kitchen lights aren’t enough to set our internal clock why would our phone screen mess it up at night?” Well, it turns out that we become very sensitive to light as evening approaches. If our bodies are still seeing a decent amount of light from something such as a phone(even with blue light filters and the dimmest setting), our sleep clocks will be delayed and we will stay up later and later each night. 

As is often the case, the best way to look after our sleep habits is to return to what is more natural for us before modern conveniences. If we can get lots of light in the morning and turn our phones off at least an hour before bed, sleep will come much easier. Perhaps more importantly, waking up at 6 on a Monday morning won’t require an extra-large coffee with an extra shot of espresso.

Are You Cleared for Takeoff?

Let’s talk about pain today. We have all experienced it from time to time and to varying extents. Whether you just stubbed your toe, touched a hot stove, or rolled your ankle. One of the first things you will feel is pain. Why? Well, it's our warning system. Pain tells us that we are damaging our bodies. It might be saying “hey, stop touching that stove it’s burning your hand!” or “hey, you can’t walk on that ankle until I have a chance to fix the torn tissues”. We understand that pain very well, it’s for our protection and we could get severely injured without it. However, there is another type of pain that is less straightforward. That pain is chronic pain.

To start looking at pain we need to understand a little bit about how pain works in the first place. The best way is with an analogy. Imagine your brain as a flight control tower. Like a flight control tower, your brain has control of and is constantly communicating with everything around it. The control tower will tell pilots when to take off and when they are cleared to land. Just as importantly the pilots will communicate with the control tower to let them know if there is a problem. Let’s suppose one of the plane engines is not working right and the plane is not safe to take off. The pilot does their final check before takeoff and sees there is a problem with the engine. The pilot will call up to the tower and let them know that the plane is not safe to takeoff. After receiving the call, the tower will cancel the takeoff and direct the plane back to a hanger. This is great! A damaged plane has not taken off and there was no harm caused. However, I want you to now imagine that there is a bit of a troublesome plane. This plane has an engine failure every time it tries to take off. Every day the plain is scheduled to fly, but right before the plane takes off, the tower receives its call from the pilot and the pilot once again tells the tower that the plain is not safe to fly. Now the tower controllers are very efficient at their job. After weeks of the pilot calling the tower and telling them that there is an engine problem before every takeoff, the tower controllers stop picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. As soon as they see the call come in from the pilot they simply cancel the takeoff and send the plane back to the hangar. However, a few weeks after the tower stopped listening to the pilot, the engine problem was finally fixed! However, there is now a new problem. Now every time the pilot calls the tower to let them know that all systems are go, the control tower simply cancels the takeoff without ever picking up the phone to hear what the pilot has to say. The plane remains grounded despite the fact that there is no longer anything wrong with the plain. The problem is no longer a mechanical issue with the plain, it’s now a communication problem. In order to straighten the issue out, proper communication must be restored.

Ok, so what does this rather long analogy have to do with chronic pain? Well, believe it or not, this is very similar to what happens when a person develops chronic pain. If an issue lingers for too long, the brain will stop consulting with the tissue and just assume the tissue is still damaged. Recent studies have shown that most chronic pain is actually not related to damaged tissue and is in fact a brain communication problem. So what can be done? The brain must learn to pick up the phone again and talk with the tissue. When a new signal is sent from the tissue, the brain will pick up on that new signal because it’s not the one it usually receives from the tissue. One of the most powerful signals is that of motion. When motion is put through a tissue there is a signal sent to the brain. It's like the mechanic calling the control tower instead of the pilot to say that the plane is good to fly. After multiple calls from the mechanic saying everything is fine, the tower will eventually start picking up the phone and listening to what the pilot has to say. When the body receives enough motion signals saying that there is nothing wrong with the tissue, the brain will start to communicate properly again. This is how a chiropractic adjustment helps those in chronic pain! The adjustment sends a huge motion signal to the brain, after receiving multiple of these motion signals from an adjustment, the brain starts to listen and to communicate properly again.

To Run or Not to Run?

I don’t want to run too often because I don’t want to ruin my knees. I don’t want to lift weights because I don’t want to wear out my joints. I have arthritis and I don't want to make it worse. These are things I hear in clinic very often. At first glance it makes sense,. want to keep healthy knees? Don’t pound the pavement by running. Save my shoulders? Don’t stress them by lifting heavy weights. However, if we dive a little deeper into how the body works and what the research says, we find something quite different.

One of the first things is to realize that the body is very reactive in everything that it does. What I mean by that, is that your body is constantly responding to your environment. When any part of the body is strained, it adapts!  It does this to make the strain easier to handle the next time you have to deal with it. The body uses this in every function. When you study for a test or try to memorize something, the strain and repetition in the brain makes new connections. The more you practice, the better you get at something. The same goes for our muscles. The more we work a muscle the bigger and stronger it gets. The more we do cardio exercise, the stronger our heart becomes. This is a wonderful ability that the body has and allows us to learn and get better at dealing with our environment. However, there is another side to the bodies ability to adapt and that is what's known as Efficiency! Your body is constantly monitoring where energy is being spent and where it thinks it can cut energy cost. For the vast majority of human history food was not always readily available. Because of this, our bodies were designed to be able to survive on a very small number of calories when needed. This means that the body is always looking for ways to get rid of wasteful energy use. It’s why muscles shrink when you stop working out, and why you get rusty at the piano when you stop practicing (The brain is an energy hog and uses around 20% of the calories we consume!). Every muscle fiber and every nerve connection requires energy to maintain. Once the body notices that a tissue is no longer being used, it will degrade that tissue to preserve energy and remain efficient. While it might be great to have a near perfect memory and walk around looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger because you never lost muscle mass, the energy requirements and stress on the body would be so large we wouldn’t have lasted long as a species. 

These two modes of building and tearing down work together to make us the versatile beings we are. But modern society has presented an extreme problem that our bodies were never designed to deal with. That thing is probably best described as a cubicle and Mcdonalds. We now have an excess of highly dense processed calories and a total lack of strain on our bodies. As we move through life, our body chugs along still thinking that the current meal might be the last in a while, so it better store those calories from this large meal. It also seems that we aren't using our muscles that often so no need to maintain those. Because remember to your body, less muscles means more energy can be stored! This goes for the brain, and bones as well. If we aren’t learning new things and engaging in social activity our brains will lose connections and we become less sharp as we age. Lastly our bones will not maintain their integrity because they are never put under enough stress that the body feels the need to maintain them.

The long short of it is that we are victims of our own efficiency. We must realize that we are not designed for modern life. We need movement, we need to exercise. We need to have times of rest and we need to remember our bodies are designed to bank calories for a time it still assumes is coming where it will be without food for a while. Give your body something to work towards and it will continue to work for you.