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.

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.

Let's Stop Sleep Shaming

“Get out of bed! Its 10 a.m.!” Something that I, like many teenagers heard on many Saturdays. The common stereotype of teenagers being lazy and sleeping for way too long is well known. But why is it the case? Is it just that teenagers have a natural phase of being lazy or is there more to it? On another rather odd note, I often hear people bragging about just how little sleep they get by on. Is that a good thing I mean more hours awake in a day means more hours to get things done. Well, the reality is perhaps not what many teenagers or their parents want to hear.

The reality is that sleep is essential to the body and not in the ways that many of us think. Yes, it is absolutely important to sleep so our bodies have time to rest, but it’s also the time when your body cleans out the garbage and when it builds! In fact, one of the most important things that your body does when it sleeps is to build. The vast majority of Human Growth Hormone is released at night between 10 P.M. and 2:00 A.M. and the hormone is what helps your body build! In the younger population, this is essential! Building muscles requires a lot of energy all on its own. Now throw in new brain connections and bone growth and the average child is a full-blown construction site. This is one of the reasons why sleep is so important for adolescence and why babies sleep so much. Now, before all the teenagers go running to their parents about how making them get up early is unjust and their parents are stunting their growth, there are several things that they might not be doing as well as they think. The first is that not all sleep is equal. Research has shown that getting to bed early, having consistent bedtimes and avoiding screen time right before bed will vastly improve a person’s sleep. Your body likes to know what’s coming and having an early, consistent bedtime means your body’s internal clock is getting prepped for the night’s work as the bedtime approaches. The second problem that many teenagers (and older adults) have is using their cellphones or watching tv right before bed. The main issue is that the bright light tricks the brain into thinking that its actually day time. Your body stops its sleep preparation and instead starts getting revved up for what it thinks is another day. This leads to a hard time falling asleep and poorer sleep once you actually do fall asleep. 

The bottom line is that sleep is essential for everyone and when a body is under a lot of strain its going to need even more. Trying to get by on as little sleep as possible is like trying to drive your car for as long as possible with no oil changes and bad gas. You can do it and it might be beneficial in the short term, but you will end up paying for it down the road. Everyone (especially our younger population) could use a little more QUALITY sleep will no cell phones, or T.V.s and preferably before midnight.

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.

So What's the Deal With Probiotics?

Many of us have heard about probiotics and we know that we should probably have some because they are apparently good for us. We hear it from the latest trendy health news article or perhaps on the label of a yogurt. More often than not though, we really don't know why we should actually be consuming a probiotic or even what it is. My goal is to give you a basic low down on what a probiotic is and why you should be on one.

To start, we should define what exactly a probiotic is. A probiotic is a live culture of organisms and are essential in maintaining proper gut health. From the time we are born, we are in contact with bacteria and a huge population of those bacteria live within our gut (around 100 trillion) that’s somewhere around 3 times as many cells as we have in our own bodies! These trillions of gut bacteria maintain what is known as a symbiotic relationship with their host (you) and make up our gut flora. What this means is that we help each other out. As we ingest food the bacteria in our gut are able to survive and in turn, provide us with life sustaining benefits. BUT! We have a problem, as modern diets have changed and we have become an excessively sterile society, our gut bacteria fails to be properly restored through ingesting new bacteria. This is further complicated by the overuse of antibiotics both from prescriptions and ones that are fed to the meat we eat. Antibiotics are largely indiscriminate in what bacteria they kill and will wreak havoc on your guts natural and required bacteria. Obviously this is not to advocate against the use of antibiotics, they are often necessary and life saving against bacteria that are much less friendly. It is however, important to remember that antibiotics can cause some collateral damage. When this damage occurs it is of the utmost importance that we replace the lost good bacteria as quickly as possible.

So what exactly is so important about this good gut bacteria? Well there are several extremely important things that only your gut bacteria can do. One of those is the break down and fermentation of starches and fatty acids in the food that you eat. This breakdown is something that our bodies are incapable of doing on their own. If the bacteria is not present is sufficient amounts irritation and inflammation of the gut will follow. Further, a dysfunctional gut flora (the gut bacteria) has also been associated with systemic inflammation and hormone dysregulation. Poor gut flora is further associated with increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases and nervous system disorders including depression, autism, and OCD. For these reasons among many others, the need for a healthy gut flora cannot be overstated. By consuming a good probiotic we are supporting and keeping our gut bacteria healthy, we are making sure that they keep our guts out of inflammation and working optimally.