Make it a Habbit

It's officially January of 2020, and with the new year comes New Year’s resolutions. While most are  great goals, rarely do they make it past the first month or two of the new year. There are a number of reasons why we have trouble following through on our resolutions, but I would like to take some time and tackle one of the major ones.

That major issue is the goal we set in itself. Our goals are often very optimistic. If your goal is to lose 30 pounds, quit smoking, and read a new book every month, it’s very likely you will fall short. Once you miss a day of working out, get stressed, or smoke a cigarette you can get discouraged. Everything all at once implodes, and you’re back to the same old lifestyle you had in December. Generally speaking, we only have a set amount of willpower, and if we take on too much at once it becomes overwhelming and we give up. For this reason it is best to start with something that is less life changing, and something that you know you can handle every day. Instead of making a commitment to lose 30 pounds, instead perhaps try and start with something simple and very achievable. I often recommend starting a simple 10 minute workout or stretching routine in the morning. It’s important that the 10 minutes is not overly challenging, something that gets your heart rate up, and gets your body moving. Nothing that makes you feel totally exhausted. As time goes on this 10 minute workout will become easier at which point you can either increase the difficulty or increase the time to 15 or 20 minutes. After a month or so this workout is now simply part of your routine. Working out in the morning requires less willpower, and you can then add other things such as smoking less or reading a little more often. The same goes for changing your diet. Don’t try and cut all the sugar out right away. Simply cut one thing out like perhaps you go from a double double coffee to a 2 cream 1 sugar. Once you are comfortable with that try and take the other sugar out. Research has shown that the vast majority of people who do radical life changes such as strict diets and exercise routines will end up right back where they started within the year. However, those who make slow incremental changes are much more likely to see lasting changes. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and unfortunately neither are good habits. To exercise and have good eating habits as part of your everyday routine should be the goal. 

So What About Chiropractic?

So what about chiropractic? My past articles have all largely focused on lifestyle changes and diet changes. Which are fantastic and will only ever make your life better. But what does a chiropractor do and how can they help me in my health journey? The answer is actually very simple. 

I think one of the largest things about chiropractic that sets it apart from most other professions is the paradigm or philosophy that a chiropractor has. The general mindset of a chiropractor is to restore the bodies ability to heal itself. Well, what does that mean? When you go in to see your doctor about an ear infection and they prescribe an antibiotic to deal with those nasty bacteria, they are providing an outside aid to help your immune system that is currently having trouble fending off the nasty intruder. This is wonderful and has saved millions of lives, in a similar fashion when an organ malfunctions or gets a clot, our medical teams are able to get in and fix the problem with surgery. These types of care all involve getting in and helping the body where it can’t help itself.

Chiropractic comes in on the opposite end of the spectrum, chiropractic focused on making sure the body is functioning optimally so as to best deal with problems on its own, or help it heal quicker should medical intervention be required. When all your joints are healthy, the muscles are unstressed, and the nervous system is functioning in a well and balanced state, our bodies are better able to take care of themselves. My simple focus with my patients is to make sure that there are no stressors on their body that shouldn’t be there. Pain all on its own can be a problem.Throw in poor joint function, inflammation and a lack of essential nutrients and you have a recipe for disaster. This is one of the reasons your chiropractor may check your whole spine even areas that may seem unrelated to your current complaint. If there is dysfunction in your low back, but you have neck pain, it’s entirely possible that the lower back is contributing to the problem by both changing your body mechanics, and also by keeping your body in a more stressed state. When their is pain, tension or dysfunction, your body stays in what is known as sympathetic dominance, or as its more commonly known, that good old fight or flight mode that keeps you out of healing. Remove the dysfunction and the body can better focus on healing, and in turn putting energy into the things you love.

Its All in The Hips

Modern life presents itself with a multitude of new stressors. In past columns I talked about dealing with our fight or flight response, poor diet and missing essential nutrients. For this column I wanted to focus on something a little more mechanical, and there are few muscles in the human body that cause as many problems as the hip flexors.

Before we can jump into the problems that the hip flexors cause we should know more about them. First off, the hip flexors are actually a complex of 3 muscles known as the psoas major, psoas minor, and the iliacus, or the iliopsoas when referring to all three. These three muscles are anchored to several parts of the low back and pelvis before attaching to the thigh bone. The main thing these muscles do is lift your thighs as you walk and stabilize the spine when you sit. The iliopsoas muscles are some of the largest in the body and have plenty of important things running around and even through them. 

Now there are many different things that can start to cause issues with the iliopsoas muscles, but I will stick to the most common ones. The first, and probably the most common cause of iliopsoas dysfunction is lack of activity and sitting. When we sit, the muscles are in a shortened state and after a long period of time the muscles tighten. When we finally stand up, the muscles remain tight and cause dysfunction. A second cause is frequent exercise without proper stretching, runners run into iliopsoas problems because of the nature of running. When a person runs, the legs go through the same motion over and over again often thousands of times a day. If the runner doesn’t properly stretch out after the run, the iliopsoas will tighten into the rather limited range used to run. The third and perhaps less looked at cause is stress, yes going back to that fight or flight response. If we are stressed, our bodies go into fight or flight and this tightens our iliopsoas muscles up in preparation for running from that bear, or in a more modern circumstance, meeting with our new boss.

When there is dysfunction in the iliopsoas muscles, various symptoms will arise. The tightening of the muscle will actually cause  a rotation of the pelvis forward, this leads to low back pain and changes in the natural spinal curvature right through the neck. Tight iliopsoas muscles also affect the surrounding nerves, this can lead to pain going into various parts of the legs, buttocks and groin area. The last and most controversial is the effect on the digestive system. Our intestines are extremely dense in nerve endings and a vast number of those nerves pass directly by the iliopsoas muscles, it is theorized that when these muscles are tight and irritated it will lead to digestive dysfunction.

So what do you do about tight iliopsoas muscles? Several things actually. The first is to stretch, stretch, stretch! Whether you spend your day sitting at a desk, or running marathons, stretching will help to calm the muscles and prevent rotation of the pelvis. The second thing is to strengthen the opposing muscles, these muscles consist of the gluteus muscles and the abdominal muscles. When the muscle strength is properly balanced the iliopsoas muscles will be forced to stay in a more lengthened state. The last thing is to bring your body out of that stressful state. Whether it be through meditation, mindful breathing or yoga, when you relax your mind, your body will follow suit.

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.

I've Always Had Back Pain, I Just Deal With It.

Back pain is one of the leading causes of disability in Canada and the United States, and the number of people dealing with it is only growing. Back pain is also one of the most lucrative fields of healthcare costing Americans over 86 billion per year. While the cases of low back pain increase so do the number of pain killers, muscle relaxants and invasive surgeries. The results so far have not been good.

Pain killers are in no way designed to fix the problem and are at best pain suppressors. Basically, taking pain killers are like taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm while the kitchen is burning down. You may forget it for a while, but the house (your back) is still burning down. Eventually the damage and nervous system dysfunction will overwhelm the pills and your doctor will max out how many painkillers you can take. The damage will however, still continue and unfortunately the next step is often going under the knife where a surgeon will try and cut out the problem. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but regardless your looking at risky surgery a lengthy rehab program and permanent loss of motion and/or function in the spine. I have to return to the smoke alarm analogy at this point. Does it not seem like the better idea would have been to simply put the fire out when it had just started? This seems like a simple concept, but one that is often ignored. I think a large part of the problem is that most don’t realize the damage a little back pain can cause if left for years. The damage grows and becomes harder to correct as time goes on. Over time discs degenerate, muscles become fibrous, and vertebrate loose their structural integrity. Much of this damage is irreversible and why the end result is often surgery to either remove some completely degenerated bone or disc, or just screw a couple vertebrate together to correct for severe instability. This all seems to me to be a rather poor outcome.

I want you to make a shift in your thinking when it comes to back pain, I want you to think of it in the same way you think of pain when you get burnt or cut yourself. We know the extreme importance of pain when we touch a hot stove, it makes us snap our hand back, we do this because we are causing damage and the body is protecting itself. The same goes for cuts, extreme cold and even excess pressure. So why on earth do we suddenly think that back pain is different? Perhaps its because we can’t see the damage? Or maybe its because its not too bad right now. Either way its largely ignored until its not possible to ignore and its at this point we decide to simply turn off the fire alarm with some medication.

The reality of back pain is that when we get it, our body is telling us that something is wrong, we are in some way causing damage to our bodies and we need to stop doing whatever it is we are doing. Of course just what you are doing that is causing the back pain may vary greatly. For many the pain is caused, at least in part by leading a largely sedentary lifestyle, sitting in front of a computer all day, and then going home to watch Netflix on the couch until we fall asleep. For others it might be poor lifting patterns in a physically demanding job, and for others it may be poor functional movements that have developed due to a prior injury. Regardless of how the pain started, the best thing one can do is actively work at fixing the problem(putting out the fire). I continue to implore my patients and anyone else I run into with back pain to please not leave it until later, its always easiest to put out while its still just a small fire.