One of the most common reasons many people come for chiropractic treatment is for treatment for fibromyalgia but what exactly is fibromyalgia and what are the most common symptoms. Over my twenty years of practice experience I have encountered many patients suffering from this common but relatively mysterious condition.

The majority of them had no idea about the cause or the actual disease. This disease causes symptoms in the body such as constant achiness, fatigue and soreness which can negatively effect a person’s well being.

Let me give you the basics of the condition, common symptoms and an understanding of how chiropractic can help you overcome the disease and stay healthy.

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We have a wonderful article about healthy living written by a guest writer this month, Ms. Jennifer McGregor. Her article is titled "Easier Solutions to a Healthier Life."

The year 2021 is still fresh. There’s still time to make meaningful changes to your lifestyle that can leave you healthier and happier than ever before. But rather than setting out to achieve a complete overhaul of your lifestyle, why not try a different approach this time?

Lasting change often comes from taking baby steps. As you make small-but-significant decisions that benefit your health each day, you can set yourself up for better long-term health and well-being. Healthways Medical Group is always looking for ways to help our patients and audience lead healthier lives. That’s why we’ve listed some realistic habits you can begin working into your life today.

Happy new year everyone, with over 20 years of experience in the field of personal injury, I am very familiar with the rollercoaster of events that can happen when you are involved in an unfortunate accident.

Unexpected accidents continue every year and not only cause physical injury but can also produce emotional and psycological scarring and even death.

It is with that realization that accidents are very serious and victims of personal injury should be provided all the useful information to make the right decisions for their care.

Let's look at an article about a popular, safe and effective sports medicine treatment performed by trained physicians known as PRP. It is used for many different disorders and injuries of the muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage and nerves as well as joint disorders.

We have been performing PRP in our clinic for over 10 years and have had great success bringing people natural healing with minimal side effects and avoiding surgeries year after year. For more information, please contact our clinic.

Inflammation is a key immune response to infection or injury. It means that immune cells are actively helping the body to heal.

But inflammation that persists could be a sign of an underlying health problem. If the body is in a state of chronic inflammation, it is unable to heal properly.

Over time, chronic inflammation could lead to serious conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and cancer.

Fortunately, certain vitamins can help reduce inflammation and decrease the risk of chronic disease.

One of the things I really enjoy is teaching my patients about yoga because it helps the body stretch out tight muscles, relax the mind, and release stress.

In my book, “Metamorphosis Change your Body, Change Your Mind,” I talk about a complete guide to weight loss including using yoga. Here I will share a highly effective stretch known as Parsvottan-Asana or Intense Pectoral Stretch.

This is a great stretch for people who are working on the computer constantly, stuck behind the wheel, and tense in the chest area.

Over my many years of Medical Practice, one area I continue to enjoy is sports medicine. Sometimes people ask me, “what exactly is sports medicine, is it working with sports teams?” I tell them possibly, but it’s really a term that means working with common sports injuries and, also, everyday injuries that occur in any everyday lifestyle.

Here is a summary of an article I found in my studies that gives a great descriptor of sports medicine “Everything You Need to Know About Sports Injuries and Rehab,” by Dr. W. Morrison. 

Overview

Sports injuries occur during exercise or while participating in a sport. Children are particularly at risk for these types of injuries, but adults can get them, too.

You’re at risk for sports injuries if you:

• haven’t been regularly active
• don’t warm up properly before exercise
• play contact sports

Read on to learn more about sports injuries, your treatment options, and tips for preventing them in the first place.

Water is crucial to life, second only to oxygen in the body’s essential needs.  You can go months without food, days without water but only minutes without oxygen. 

With so many choices of drinking waters, it’s great to know about the basics of water and good health to simplify your life and create a better ripple effect to the world around you. 

Unfortunately, not all water from public municipal systems are safe for drinking.  Let’s not forget what happened in Flint, Michigan where dangerous lead leaked into people’s homes and many people consumed it. These days, there seems to be a level of ignorance and lack of understanding of what constitutes good healthy water. 

Let’s look at some known health functions regarding water and the human body.

One of the easiest things everybody can do to increase their health is to incorporate daily stretching into their lifestyles. Stretching your body regularly has many benefits and is very easy to perform. It doesn’t involve anything other than yourself and can be performed anywhere you feel comfortable within minutes (about 8 minutes).

As our bodies age and undergo the effects of work and physical activities, our muscles have a tendency to tighten up and shorten. So it is important to stretch them out to restore them to the correct length and tone. This is specifically important for things like muscle tendons that affect the joints of the body.

If the muscles are either weak and lax from such factors as chronic injury, lack of exercise, or age, or too tight from something like an acute injury or increased intense physical activity or exercise, it is possible that the muscle tendons (muscle attachments to bones) will not glide correctly in and around the joints in their natural positions.

The effect is like a bridge with the cables drawn too tight or too loose. The natural position is altered and negatively affected which if not corrected will go on to create further accelerated degeneration in the joints and muscles. These negative effects may not allow the muscles and joints to perform their optimum dynamic functions.

by Edwin Chun, D.C., CPT master level ACSM, NASM

Back pain is one of the leading causes of pain and disability in our society. Even healthy young people can experience it and about 80% of people will experience a significant event in their lives that causes low back pain.

There are many different causes to back pain, some being simple such as physical injury to some being complex such as internal diseases like kidney disease and cancer. Also, there are different presentations to back pain. Some have simple pain in the back or neck (spine) to more complex symptoms such as pain in the spine with pain in an arm or a leg.

In addition, there are different qualities to the pain such as sharp, stabbing to dull, throbbing which depend on the pain generators in the body. Many people experience back pain and simply choose to ignore it and wait for it to go away. Even in the medical community about 20 years ago, doctors were trained to tell patients not to worry about common back pain complaints and that most of the time it would just go away.

The only treatment given for back pain was pain medication. This was before the opioid epidemic that caused many people to lose their lives to addiction. Now medical doctors are trained to encourage patients to see other healthcare providers such as chiropractors and physical therapists without using medications.

Did you know that most major chronic diseases respond better when a person is not overweight? Healthy weight loss, which is the reduction of unhealthy body fat as measured scientifically, almost always improves health in all diseases (i.e. high blood pressure, diabetes, cancers, arthritis etc.). It also improves longevity and vitality. It is one of the most important signs of good health. The following is a straight forward article from an Australian university that is a great reminder for us all.

Summary

• Yo-yo dieting makes you gain more weight in the long run because it lowers your metabolism.
• Obesity rates are on the rise because lifestyle is becoming increasingly inactive.
• Any type of regular physical activity, no matter how moderate, can help you to lose body fat.
• Eating a balanced, nutritious diet and being physically active is the best way to stay healthy and help reduce your risk of disease.
• To maintain a stable weight, your energy intake needs to equal the energy you use. If you use more energy than you consume, you will lose weight. On the other hand, if you eat more than you use, you will gain weight.

 You are what you think about, easily stated and understood. The human experience is controlled by how we think about life. Lets read an article by Yash Naik on how we can improve our life with positive affirmations.

Affirmations are basically positive statements that you repeat them consistently in order to create a desired belief or mindset. So basically, they are statements that describe a desired goal, a habit or a situation.
Now, the logic behind this is to penetrate that particular statement/affirmation into your subconscious mind in order to create your desired reality. Now, if an affirmation is used in the right way, it programs your mind to act according to the repeated words. So, this process triggers your subconscious mind to work on those statements. Hence, this helps you manifest those repeated words in your reality.

Let's look at one of the amazing scientific benefits of exercise and mental function. This is a study from Stern et al. (2019) on the "Effect of aerobic exercise on cognition in younger adults: A randomized clinical trial."

Summary:

Regular aerobic exercise such as walking, cycling or climbing stairs may improve thinking skills not only in older people, but in young people as well, according to a new study. The study also found that the positive effect of exercise on thinking skills may increase as people age.

By now you are probably familiar with the problematic issues of single use plastics. They have been in the news for some time now.  Single use plastics include items like straws, plastic bags, food wrappers, and fast food containers, plastic forks, knives, cups, coffee stirrers etc. These items are designed for convenience and meant to be thrown away after one use. The truth is that they are too convenient so that as a society, we have become lazy and created so much of it, that it has become a serious problem trying to get rid of it.  Estimates of the effects of not only single use plastics but all plastics on the environment is staggering. Of all the global plastic created by man since its inception, most of it is still creeping around in the environment and has not broken down or truly been recycled, which is what most of us are led to believe.  Mounds of plastic trash is being hidden away in landfills or floating around in oceans, lakes and waterways.  After many years, much of it in the environment is gradually being broken down into what is known as microplastics which are tiny little pieces of plastic, some too small to even be seen with the naked eye. Microplastics are being ingested in the human diet and the diets of animals as they commonly find their way into ocean marine life and other animals like birds, which mistakenly eat it thinking it is plant life. Humans then turn around and eat some of these fish and get them into their bodies.  Some estimates indicate that there are microplastics in the majority of fish living in the major lakes of our country.  This means that it can be very easy for these things to make it back into human life and start to effect human health negatively as plastics are associated with diseases like cancer, hormone abnormalities, endocrine disruption and more.  A great recent documentary to learn more about this global epidemic is the Plastic Problem on public broadcasting: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-plastic-problem-7kdvzo/

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As a healthcare provider for over 20 years, I have seen the damage that can be done from unhealthy diets that have been increasingly affected by a worsening state of environmental health. Yearly, many of you already know about stories of contamination of lead in public water systems, the increasing amount of uncontrollable fires, increased smog and air pollution, increased methane and carbon emission from factory farms and increased chemicals, even nuclear wastes in our oceans. All these pollutants find their way into our foods in small or large amounts and they affect human health negatively. One statistical number that we shouldn’t ignore is the rising level of obesity and cancers, so much so that it is now common to see people developing cancer every day.