Holiday Grieving

It's been a while since my last post--two months! It's been a busy time for my family. I've written a short article with some simple tips on how to help someone who is grieving during the holidays. Take some time to show the people in your life that you care. 

Holidays can be full of sparkle and wonder, especially in the eyes of little ones. For those of us who have lost someone dear, though, the holidays are layered with sadness. Memories and a sense of loss can turn what should be a happy time into emotional torture. 

If you know someone who is grieving, there are some things you can do to help them. Someone immersed in sadness will often not have the ability to take care of themselves. I don’t mean basic things like showering or putting food in their mouths; this usually gets done on autopilot. It can be hard to enjoy the people who are in your life when you have lost a spouse, a child, or someone else close to you.

Little (and big) acts of kindness can make a difference. Help your grieving friend clean the house one afternoon. Bring some easy-to-eat food over. Convince them to take a walk with you; the fresh air and exercise can bring a brighter perspective. Kids help, too. Kids have an endless well of joy; they find delight in something as small as a ladybug crawling. Just being around that kind of energy can help someone get out of a depression, even if only for a short while.

Encourage your grieving friend or relative to get help. Grief carries layers of weight:  guilt, anger, sadness, loneliness…all these things can be helped with counseling. Sometimes talking to a stranger, like a professional counselor, can be far more effective because strangers are detached from family emotional ties. Also encourage your friend or relative to take care of themselves physically. Mental grief translates to physical pain. Much of the symptoms that I see in my office relate to mental stress of some kind, like job stress, family illness, and grieving. Taking care of the body also helps take care of the mind and soul. 

I wish you all the best this Christmas season, and I hope you can find the time to step away from the bustle of buying presents and pageants and dinners to spend a little quality time with your family and friends.

Toe-Touch for Health

Here is a pop quiz question for you: which muscle group contributes most to low back aches? I’ll give you three choices: rhomboids, gluteus maximus, or biceps femoris. Go ahead, discuss amongst yourselves. I’ll wait.

Here is the answer: your biceps femoris, also known as the hamstrings. But wait, you might say, aren’t those muscles on the backs of my legs? Why, yes, they are. The attachments of these muscles are to the legs, but also to the bottom of your pelvis. When they are tight, they tug down on the pelvis. Some of your big spinal muscles attach to the top of your pelvis, which starts the tug-of-war and sets in a backache.

There are many causes of low back pain. They run the spectrum from disc bulges and ruptures, bone spurs, arthritis, joint strains/sprains, muscle strains/sprains, and, of course, the common subluxation. As my regular readers will remember, subluxation happens when one or more of the joints of the spine becomes misaligned and stuck, causing pressure at that joint and in the nervous system, because the spine protects the spinal cord.

Tight hamstrings can put lots of strain on the muscles of the low back, but they can also contribute to low spine/pelvic subluxation by inhibiting a healthy motion of the pelvis and low back. The biggest culprit of tight hamstrings is being sedentary. Sitting at a desk, in the car, on the couch, can all cause the hamstrings to tighten. I probably sound like a broken record at this point (maybe a skipping CD? or a corrupted MP3?) but most of what ails your muscles and bones comes from sitting on your butt. I have a three-step solution to change your life.

Step 1:  Stand up, then touch your toes. Feel the stretch! Do this regularly to loosen up your legs and low back. Step 2: Start a regular walking routine. Keep your legs and core engaged in exercise and you will have more energy and less pain. Step 3: Get adjusted by your chiropractor, of course! Keep your spine and nervous system functioning for optimal health.

Biofeedback

Biofeedback is what is known as a “mind-body technique.” When using biofeedback, a person concentrates on changing a bodily function with their mind. It sounds like a wacky, new-age procedure, but I would argue that everyone reading this article has used biofeedback, in some form. (Think about potty training!) In fact, the only difference between the clinical version of biofeedback and the daily functions that go on in your body is that the first is conscious and deliberate, while the second is automatic. 

Chiropractic works on the premise that your brain controls everything in your body, through complex interactions and communication within the nervous system. When subluxation occurs, caused when one or more joints of the spine malfunction, interference in the nerve signals happen, and the communication breaks down between the brain and body in little, and then in big ways. If you have ever been subluxated (and I bet you have) I would wager that you have used a kind of negative biofeedback. 

Think about it: your body tells you, through pain, discomfort, and general irritability that there is a less-than-optimal condition happening. Maybe your back hurts. Maybe you have a “crick,” a sore leg, an acidic stomach. You tell your body, “I don’t have time for you. Quit telling me about your problems.” So, you stop hurting, at least for a while. More accurately, you stop conscious awareness of the pain/discomfort signal being sent from your body to your brain. The reason I call this a “negative” biofeedback is that you have not fixed the problem your body is telling you about. You have suppressed it.

In positive biofeedback, you are coached into being able to positively affect your body. This works very well for PTSD, high anxiety, and people dealing with chronic pain. Using biofeedback methods, you can train yourself into lowering your own blood pressure, relaxing muscle spasms, even producing less stomach acid. Before becoming a chiropractor, I had been practicing biofeedback for years, without knowing it. When I was a little girl, my stomach hurt when I was upset. My dad sat me down and said, “Whose stomach is it?” I said, “Mine.” He said, “So tell it to quit hurting.” My young mind had not developed cynicism, so I innocently said, “Ok.” And it worked. To this day, I can consciously direct a great deal of my stress away, because I was taught that there is no difference between my mind and body. The two are inseparable.

Chiropractic care can help biofeedback methods become more potent. With less interference in the nervous system comes more clear communication, and better connection between your conscious mind and your body. Don’t suppress your problems, become aware of them. And then fix them. Chiropractic can help you to do this. After all, as my dad says, whose body is it?

Subluxation Pairs

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs with spinal subluxation. I have noticed, over and over again, that in certain people, two or more regions of the spine are directly interrelated. For instance, in some people, the L5/S1 joint relationship is a constant source of discomfort. In those same people, when they come in for a chiropractic adjustment by yours truly, I discover that the T12 segment is almost always subluxated at the same time. T12 is your last official thoracic vertebra. The last “short rib” is attached to it, and the lumbar vertebrae (L1 through L5) start just below T12. In other people, C1, also known affectionately as “Atlas,” because it holds your head up, (remember the myth about Atlas holding the world on his shoulders?) will misalign in the same direction as C7. These two vertebrae are the start and end of the cervical spine. The thoracics start just after C7. 

This concept—subluxation pairing—is by no means brand new. I cannot claim discovery. Great chiropractors before me have created whole methods of analyzing and treating spinal subluxation out of the philosophy of subluxation pairing. I guess I should give specific credit to my father, the esteemed and learned chiropractor over the mountain, for first bringing my attention to the phenomenon. It serves as another reminder to me that we human beings are one whole unit, and we cannot be broken up into a myriad of tiny, unrelated parts.

The relationship between segments of the spine has two components, special circumstances caused by accidents notwithstanding. In a normal occurrence of subluxation pairing, there is a mechanical and a nervous component.  There are natural curves of the spine, and natural delineations of spinal sections. For example, the thoracic spine acts completely different from the rest of the spine, because the bones are shaped differently, and because there are ribs attached. Each of the bones I mentioned above specifically are crucial in their own way. C1 protects the brain stem, and allows for much of the movement of your skull. C7 is a major attachment to many spinal and neck muscles. If C1 is subluxated, C7 may well follow; they share muscle attachments and both support the head. T12 is a major curve transitional segment; it takes a great deal of pressure when L5 stops functioning properly.

The nerve component of a subluxation is the most fascinating to me. Segments of the spine, and spinal cord, interact in feedback loops to stabilize your body completely subconsciously. This system is just as much responsible for the phenomenon of subluxation pairing as the mechanics of the spine. Get your spine—the whole thing!—checked for subluxation.

Chiropractic and C-Sections

1.2 million women undergo cesarean sections each year, according to the website today.msnbc.com. I was one of those women. Chiropractic helped me to recover.

In the case of an emergency c-section, mothers often labor for hours, well past the point of mental and physical exhaustion. A laboring woman’s body is intent on one thing only: pushing out a baby at all costs. A natural birth is tiring by itself. Afterward, a new mother has to go through what amounts to withdrawals of pregnancy hormones that are no longer pumping through her. She is still experiencing uterine contractions, so that it can shrink down to non-pregnancy size. Her metabolism is ramped into overtime still, so that she can heal her body while producing milk for her baby.

A c-section adds two layers of extra difficulty of healing for a new mother. One layer is drugs; the human body has to expend lots of energy to break down, filter, and flush out foreign toxins. Many pain killers are essentially neurotoxins; they stop nerves from perceiving signals, and so pain messages no longer reach the brain. The second layer of complication for the recovering mother is the c-section itself; cutting open several layers of skin, connective tissue, and thick abdominal muscle is major surgery. 

The amazing thing about all this is that thousands of women go through this process, and heal beautifully. The human body has an amazing capacity to heal. Let me tell you how chiropractic helped me. After my own c-section, detoxing and hormonal changes, my body was still regaining strength. My core (consisting of major muscle groups in the central body—abs, postural back muscles, even thighs) was very weak; my abdominal muscles had been stretched thin by a growing baby boy, and then cut open. What I didn’t realize was that I was not able to even walk upright; all my concentration was given to just walking and taking care of my son. My dad took one look at me and knew I needed a chiropractic adjustment. He put me in what is called a “knee-chest” position, braced my weak belly with one hand, and adjusted my severely subluxated spine with the other hand. It was not a move taught in most chiropractic colleges; it was one perfected after forty years of experience for him.

I stood up straight immediately. Restoring the mechanical function and nerve communication pushed me days ahead in healing capacity. Although I am a chiropractor myself, I was amazed at the transformation. Because my body had been through a trauma, I made sure I was adjusted often after that. A couple of adjustments a week became once weekly, which became my regular schedule of one to two adjustments per month.

Medieval Medicine

If your computer contracts a virus, would you remove the outer casing and pour a cup of water into the electronic circuits? No, you say? How ridiculous, you say? What about setting your computer on fire? I can guarantee the virus will stop messing up the computer after it has burned to a crisp. There is a procedure being done in “pain management” clinics that is just as ridiculous. Patients who being treated for low back pain are having tiny, sensitive nerve endings burned. Imagine being seared by a branding iron. Now imagine that someone has come up with a tiny tool that bypasses protective skin, muscle, and connective tissue, stabs into delicate nerve tissue, and cauterizes it. In case you didn’t run out of the pain clinic screaming at the first mention of burning nerves, please allow me to help you out with some solid reasoning.

The first reason to avoid nerve cauterization is that nerves do so much more than just report pain. By deadening nerves, you have effectively shut down your body’s method of proprioception (the sensation of the position of your body), sense of balance that relies on messages about joint position, and signals about the range of motion capabilities of the joint effected. This means that you are likely to abuse the already compromised areas of your spine because it can’t tell you to stop a certain harmful movement; you have killed the method of communication.

The second reason to walk out of any office that suggests nerve cauterization is that, besides the fact that killing nerves does not fix your problem, the nerves grow back. Sometimes, scar tissue builds up, too, compounding your original problem. Your body needs nerves; so badly, in fact, that when you kill them, they grow back. Most people who burn their spinal nerves have it done again…and again. And the pain comes back with the nerve endings, by the way.

 The third reason to avoid this procedure, in case you need a third reason, is something called sensitization. The more you poke a sore spot, the more it hurts. A keyed up nervous system will often send more, stronger pain signals to your brain over time, if you never take care of the root problem. Trust me when I say nerves are not the problem. Nerves are the highly sensitive communication pathway for EVERYTHING your body does. The problem causing back pain can be anything from a broken bone to strained/sprained muscles and ligaments. Very often the problem is what chiropractors call subluxation, which is a simple (and sometimes painful) misalignment and fixation of spinal joints, causing inflammation and pressure on nerves. To fix this problem, do not remove the nerves, remove the pressure. Get adjusted at your chiropractor’s office.