Sinus Drainage = Good Health

This year’s wintery weather is typical of Tennessee. Warm, almost balmy days change abruptly to wet and chilly to downright cold. This kind of weather can cause some serious discomfort as nasal passages expand and contract, and sinus drainage ensues. Sometimes sinus drainage is intrinsically linked to neck pain and headaches. Remember that all bodily systems are interconnected. Blood circulation is linked to lymph circulation. Both of these systems interweave throughout muscles like plumbing through the walls of a house, and everything is controlled through signals from the nervous system. 

When your head feels stuffed up, whether you are draining mucous or dry, you can bet your lymph system is working overtime. Lymph is like the gray water system in your body. In your house, gray water pipes drain away used bath water, dirty dish water, and used water from the washing machine.  Among other functions, lymph circulation carts away dead immune cells and vanquished invaders, like bacteria. When the mucous membranes inside your head work overtime to protect your body from viruses and bacteria during these damp winter months, the obvious results are usually found in your Kleenex. Your lymph system is also working overtime, doing its thing to clear away old cells and make way for new, healthy tissue. This can cause extra pressure in the base of your skull, and even in your neck, where there is a heavy concentration of lymph nodes. You may feel these swollen lymph nodes as little tender lumps under the shelf of your skull, or in the muscles of your neck.

This added pressure from lymph can irritate the muscles and nerves in your neck. If you have an existing subluxation, or misalignment in the spine, added lymph pressure can cause head and muscle aches. Getting your spine adjusted can have a double effect:  1) Removing subluxations can jump-start the nervous system, which is responsible for getting the message to your circulatory system to move the junk on out, and 2) Removing pressure on the cervical nerves can relax your neck muscles and relieve the pain signals being beamed to your brain. 

Drainage is a good thing. Drying up your mucous-producing membranes will allow foreign critters like bacteria and viruses to set up shop inside your body. It may not be pretty, but health is often not pretty. Instead of stopping the symptom of sinus drainage, get it jump-started with a chiropractic adjustment. You’ll get over the sinus invasion much faster, and actually help the cause of your problem instead of masking it.

Practice Health Consciously

Do you clean your house just to keep the dirt from showing? Do you eat just to shovel in nutrients, or do you enjoy the way your favorite foods taste? Do you maintain a relationship just to have someone else’s backside make a divot in the couch next to you? Do you pay attention to your health only when it is going downhill? The depth and quality of your relationships, health, and life depends entirely upon you.

Trudging through life like it is a chore is a waste of time. Your attitude makes all the difference. As a chiropractor, I observe people in my office who hurry through their days to get home, only to hurry through feeding their families, getting the kids to bed, then becoming a tube zombie for the evening. Then they start the whole process again the next day. At some point, these people’s bodies rebel against them. Their backs start to ache, they fall and injure themselves, or they wake up with excruciating neck pain. These incidences seem like just more proof that life is tedium, just an obstacle to get through.

 I have a different perspective. When you feel aches and pains, realize that your body is sending you a signal to wake up! Smell the roses! Take a walk, spend an afternoon building something with your kids. Take care of yourself, and those you love, because you enjoy it. The healthiest people I know are those who maintain their health before it starts to crumble. Instead of playing catch up, they stay ahead of the game. They wake up ready to conquer whatever comes their way. When they do get an injury (probably from playing ultimate Frisbee or climbing mountains), they accept the challenge and get to doing what needs doing in order to heal.

 When you ignore those you love, they drift away from you. The same thing happens to your health. The funny thing is, when you start really taking care of yourself by making proactive decisions about diet and exercise, then the rest of your life gets better. Visit your chiropractor before you feel aches and pains. Get your health up and running, and maintain it! 

Live your life to its fullest. Nobody else can do it for you.

Triple Omega Fatty Acids--Go Eat Some!

I often advise people to take a triple omega fatty acid supplement. Omega fatty acids are essential fatty acids—so called because we can’t make them, so we need to consume them. We can make other fatty acids by metabolizing our foods, but essential fatty acids come from a diet of healthy fish, vegetable oils, and flax seeds. You may have heard of eating fish oil for improved vascular health. Fish oil is one of the healthy omega fatty acids. There are three that you should be consuming regularly; omega 3,6, and 9 fatty acids. The number denotes where on the carbon chain the double bond exists in the structure of the molecule.

The potential benefits of consuming triple omega fatty acids range from cancer prevention to lowering the risk of a heart attack. These essential oils may help with depression, varicose vein symptoms, and digestive health. The benefit that most concerns me, as a chiropractor, is the role this supplement plays in the health of your nervous system. Triple omega fatty acids help form the insulating sheath called myelin, which protects and enables your nervous system. I first began taking the supplement during my pregnancy with my baby boy, to ensure that his brain and the rest of nervous system had the best tools possible to form and function optimally. I still take the supplement because I am breastfeeding, and because I can feel the benefits of better health in my own body.

Eating appropriate nutrients and taking appropriate supplements boils down to two things: giving your body the raw materials it needs to grow, heal, and protect you from invading micro critters, and giving your body these ingredients in the most usable form. Try to find vegetarian, or whole-food forms of your supplements. These products are derived from an actual, natural food. Synthetic supplements are often more difficult for your body to utilize, so you don’t get the full benefit of the supplement. In some cases, a simple shift in position of one part of the molecule makes the whole thing totally useless to your metabolism…so you have essentially thrown away your money on a product that is just passing through. Of course, getting your nutrients from a natural food source is best, but often we don’t know how nutritious modern food really is. Strip-mined tomatoes from Texas are missing more than just taste; many health benefits are lacking as well.

Adding one serving of healthy fish to your menu weekly, sprinkling in some flax seeds to your bread or cereal, and cooking with extra virgin olive oil are all ways to increase your essential fatty acid intake. If you are worried about heavy metal poisoning from eating more fish, take the fish oil supplement. Look into increasing your consumption of triple omega fatty acids; your eyes, heart, immune system, nervous system, circulatory system and good mood will all thank you.

The Broken System

If I tried to sell you a snow suit to wear in the Bahamas, you would call me crazy. If I tried to sell you Twinkies as a weight loss supplement, you would think I was a liar. If I tried to sell you surgical operations that are unnecessary and prescription drugs that do more harm than good, you would have to call that par for the course in America’s current health system. Today, I read an article written by Donald Petersen, Jr in Dynamic Chiropractic that gives some interesting statistics. According to the NCHSData Brief No. 42, released in September of 2010, in 2008 the percentage of Americans on prescription drugs in a given month rose to 47.2 percent. It is four years later, and you can bet that now over half of the population of America is taking a prescription drug. 

Intrigued by these numbers, I did some more digging. I encourage you to follow my lead and find out some facts. A Google search should yield some good information for you. America spends almost 300 BILLION dollars on prescription drugs annually. If health comes in pill form, we should be oozing it. According to the CIA, we rank around 50th in life expectancy, and 47th in infant mortality rates out of 221 countries rated in 2011. These two categories are largely what the World Health Organization uses to rank the health of a nation. Granted, the actual numbers are not terrible; apparently, we can expect to live to the age of 78 and only 6 out of 1,000 infants born alive die within their first year in America. Here is the point I want to drive home: we spend BILLIONS more (on what pharmaceutical companies insist on calling healthcare) than any other industrialized nation, and we have worse health results than at least 47 of them. How is that logical?

Yes, we need healthcare reform. It will never happen on a mass scale. It absolutely will not happen out of government decree. You need to take control of your own body, and take responsibility for your own health. You do this by eating well, exercising and sleeping well, and taking holistic care measures. Yes, I am a chiropractor, and yes, I am promoting my profession in place of mainstream medical treatment for wellness care. From my perspective, nationalizing healthcare is about pushing a system that is broken. Follow the money trail. Sickness for profit is no way to get healthy. 

Ignore all those smiling, nodding faces during the voiceover and pay attention to the words at the end of the drug commercial: side effects include loss of function, loss of money, loss of control, and loss of life. If this is better than the symptoms you are experiencing, then by all means, take the drug.