 We are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and are going to talk about chiropractic care in a very different way:
Hey everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon with Lowcountry Chiropractic! This week's blog is going to be about chiropractic philosophy. This is going to be something a little different from what I usually write about. The guiding principle of chiropractic is that the body is a self-healing and self-regulating organism that needs very little outside assistance to get, and stay, healthy. This concept also comes from a popular chiropractic phrase, "Above down, inside out". That's how healing works and is the guiding principle of chiropractic. Let's break down this analogy. The "above" part is referring to universal intelligence. This is the idea that our bodies are made by a creator and this universal intelligence is what helps us be self healing and the human body to work efficiently. The "inside" part of this phrase relates to innate intelligence. This is the intelligence within our bodies that helps regulate and control it, so it can function properly.
A lot of times I talk to my patients and say, "You know, the doctor is inside you!". When I say that, I am referring to innate intelligence. Where does innate intelligence come from in terms of physiology? It's the nerve system, which is the brain, the spinal cord, and the 62 nerves that come off of the spinal cord that supply all the body parts. The biggest component involved, I would say, or the biggest system in innate intelligence is the nerve system. If the nerve system is free to do its thing, the brain and the body will constantly communicate back and forth, all the processes that go on inside the body will happen seamlessly, and the other systems (immune, digestive, endocrine etc.) will work as designed. All the chemicals and hormones that the body produces will be produced in the right quantities and at the right time. You will then be at optimal health. When you are at optimal health, you are more likely to not have aches and pains, more likely to sleep better, have more energy, and be more focused. In a perfect world, that's how it works. Sadly, we don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where there are car accidents, falls, sports injuries, heavy lifting, and improper sleep. When we introduce these types of stresses into our life it can cause us some serious issues. This stress will cause the vertebra that is protecting all of those 62 nerves to shift out of place. When those vertebrae shift out of place, the nerves can become irritated or pinched. This is called a subluxation. A subluxation is what interferes with our innate intelligence and our inborn ability to heal and self regulate. The body will then be unable to do what it needs to do because there will be an interference in the line of communication between the body and brain. There are two other types of stress besides the physical ones. There is emotional and chemical stress that can be put on the body. Chemical stress refers to toxins in the foods we eat, the water we drink, and prescription medications that are introduced unnaturally into our bodies. These chemicals can cause subluxations. Emotional stress refers to work, family and financial pressures that will tighten spinal musculature and cause subluxations. Chiropractic care is based around finding subluxations and correcting them. This allows our innate intelligence to work as our universal intelligence wants it to. That's the story in a nutshell of how chiropractic works, how innate intelligence works, and how universal intelligence works. This is also why everybody needs to be seeing a chiropractor regularly because every day we experience all kinds of stresses in our lives that can cause subluxations and mess with that innate intelligence. If you are not operating at optimal efficiency and productivity, or have aches and pains, or if you've been in a car accident or other trauma, you need to get checked! I would like to be the one who checks you. Give us a call, text us, or email us and let us know what your issues are. We will get you set up and start getting you well! I hope this has helped and I hope you enjoyed this little bit of philosophy today. I'm Dr.Bob, and we will see you next time. Take care!
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 Having trouble sleeping? It might be something more than just having too many things on your mind or too many cups of coffee. It might be something much deeper, and something that can be fixed by the hands of a chiropractor!
Hello everybody! Dr. Bob Salamon here! Today we are going to talk about sleep issues and how chiropractic care can help you sleep better at night. To do that we need to talk about the two most important hormones affecting our sleep patterns. One is cortisol and the other is melatonin. Cortisol is a hormone that is produced in the adrenal glands, which sit on the kidneys. The adrenals produce more cortisol in the morning, when your body senses daylight. The cortisol increases your blood sugar levels, blood pressure levels, and prepares your body for the activities of the day. The adrenal glands produce cortisol to help wake you up and feel refreshed in the morning. As the day goes on your cortisol levels begin to drop, and an increase of the second important hormone begins. That hormone is melatonin. Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland in the brain. As the day comes to an end and your cortisol levels drop, your hypothalamus in the brain sends a message to the pineal gland to produce more melatonin. This will make you drowsy and will eventually put you to sleep. So as the day progresses, cortisol levels decrease and melatonin levels go up. In the morning, the opposite occurs. What does this all mean? First of all, you want to make sure you have the right production of cortisol and melatonin at the right times. Believe it or not, what regulates brain function and what regulates the cortisol and melatonin production are nerves that come out of your spine. If these nerves are not working properly, then you may have a situation where not enough melatonin is being produced at night and you have trouble falling asleep. You also might have an issue of not producing enough cortisol in the morning and you have trouble waking up. How does a nerve stop working properly? It's pretty simple! It's called a subluxation. A subluxation is when a spinal bone misaligns and irritates or pinches a nerve that exits an opening between one vertebra and another.. When this happens, the messages between the brain and the body and the glands are not transmitting as they should. So, in this case, these two glands (the pineal and adrenal) may not produce melatonin and cortisol in the proper amounts and at the proper times. Chiropractic care is designed to realign the spine, correct the subluxation and allow the nerves that connect the brain and body and deliver messages back and forth to one another to function properly.. When the brain and the body are connected, good things happen! In this case, hormones get produced in the right amounts at the right times, allowing you to sleep better and wake up more refreshed in the morning! If anybody is out there is suffering from insomnia or having any other sleeping issues, give us a call or look us up. We'd love to talk to you about it. I've personally had lots of patients who come in after their first adjustment and say, "I haven't slept like that in years!". I hope this blog helped explain the physiology behind sleep issues and how chiropractic can help these issues, and I look forward to seeing you in the office!  Headaches and migraines plague 4 million people every day. But could there be something more effective than just popping ibuprofen after ibuprofen that could help reduce and even eliminate this daily pain? Chiropractic care just might be the best step for you!
Hello everyone! Dr. Bob here from Lowcountry Chiropractic! I hope you are all doing well. Through this week's blog, we are going to be talking about headaches. Headaches plague the majority of us in the US. I don't know many people who have never had a headache before or who don't have them on a somewhat regular basis. We are going to talk about headaches and how to manage them or eliminate them if possible. Now, there are two basic types of headaches. There are migraine headaches and tension headaches. There are others too, like cluster headaches, etc. But for all intents and purposes of this blog, we are going to be focusing on the tension headache because they are the most common. Migraine headaches tend to be a little more difficult to manage because a lot of the time they are hormonal or chemical in nature. Let's talk about tension headaches. Those are the headaches where usually you wake up fine in the morning, but as the day goes on you start feeling pain in your temples or the front or back of your head. Sometimes they go away on their own, and sometimes you take ibuprofen and they go away. These headaches are very common and most people suffer from them. What causes a tension headache? They are usually caused by a vascular problem, meaning the blood vessels. These blood vessels are found in your head and brain. If the blood vessels in your brain are dilated, they will take up more space in your brain and put more pressure on your head. That can cause headache pain. If the blood vessels are too constricted, the blood flowing through the walls of those blood vessels puts a lot of pressure on them and can cause headache pain as well. How do you manage a tension headache? We in chiropractic believe that chiropractic care is one of the best natural ways to control tension headaches. Why is that? Well, if you remember, the nerves that come out of your spine, and there are many of them - 62 to be exact - those nerves control and regulate your body. These nerves come off the spinal cord and run through the openings between the spinal vertebra called foramen. If one vertebra is a little out of place (called a subluxation, as we've discussed in previous blogs) it can pinch or irritate a nerve and affect the transmission of the messages from your brain to the rest of the body. In the case of tension headaches, we are talking about message interference with blood vessels. If you have subluxation, it could constrict blood vessels or dilate these vessels, resulting in headaches. So subluxations are a very common cause of headaches. If you have a subluxation in your neck, these muscles will get tense and tight and start pulling on the back of your head, and that can create a lot of tension and headache pain as well. A chiropractor is trained to realign (or adjust) these spinal bones, get pressure off the nerves and allow the body to function as it should. In this case, blood vessels go back to their normal size and the headaches go away. We've had tremendous success in this office helping people with headaches. We've had people come in who have had headaches their whole lives and after they get adjusted several times, their headaches disappear. It's pretty cool! The medical model for treating headaches is to prescribe medication that can reduce headaches, but it doesn't correct the cause of those headaches. You will continue to get headaches and continue to take medications to minimize those headaches and that is just a vicious circle. Chiropractic care gets at the cause of the problem. In this case, the cause of the problem is the subluxation or that irritated nerve. So when you adjust the bone and get the pressure off the nerve, good things begin to happen. I hope that this helps you. If any of you are suffering from headaches and you want to get rid of them naturally without taking medications, just call us! We will do a very in-depth examination and if I feel that I can help you, we will get started right away and get those headaches gone. I hope the rest of your day is good, and we will see you for our next blog! |
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