 Hello, everyone! This is Dr. Bob Salamon with Lowcountry Chiropractic. As always, I hope you’re doing well and staying healthy! In my last blog, we talked about the downsides of pain medication. Today, we’ll be discussing headaches and how chiropractic care can help. It’s a good segue from our last discussion, since many people reach for over-the-counter painkillers to soothe headaches. However, per my last blog, this does not address the root cause of the headache; it simply masks the pain. Headaches are extremely common. In fact, approximately 45 million Americans complain of headaches each year. We all experience a headache every now and then, but some people experience headaches on a more regular basis. When you get a headache, you may choose to lie down, take some pain pills, or just wait for it to fade. But did you know that there’s a better, drug-free, effective treatment? That’s right– Chiropractic care is a great treatment option for those who suffer from headaches. If you are interested in learning more, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s get started.
First, let’s discuss what a headache actually is. A headache is generally defined as a pain or discomfort in the head or face that can be sharp, constant, throbbing, or dull. The location and intensity of the pain can vary. Most headaches begin in the nerves of the muscles and blood vessels if they swell or tighten. Basically, it is not actually your head or brain that is hurting, but rather the muscles, blood vessels, and membrane surrounding it. There are also different types of headaches. In fact, there are over 150 types. Let’s take a closer look. Types Of Headaches Headaches are generally divided into two categories: Primary and secondary headaches. Primary headaches are caused by the overactivity of or problems with pain-sensitive features in your head. These types of headaches are not a symptom of an underlying disease. Some of the most common types of primary headaches include:
Secondary headaches are symptoms of something else happening in your body and are usually caused by underlying medical conditions. They can be relieved by treating the primary cause or condition. Some of the common types of secondary headaches include:
In rare cases, some secondary headaches can be caused by life-threatening conditions. For example, spinal headaches are secondary headaches that occur due to a spinal fluid leak. Additionally, thunderclap headaches are secondary headaches that come on suddenly and give off intense pain that can last 1 to 5 minutes. These headaches can be a sign of a brain bleed or head injury. Chiropractic Care And Headaches So how can chiropractic care help treat headaches? Since primary headaches, such as tension headaches, are often caused by stress, neck, or back strain– or sometimes a combination of both– chiropractic care can provide relief through spinal treatments called adjustments. A chiropractic adjustment can relieve acute or chronic neck pain, which can reduce the number of headaches you experience. A chiropractor can diagnose the type of headaches you are experiencing, and then create a tailored treatment plan that best suits your needs. This will determine and treat the root cause of your headaches, rather than masking the pain. If the actual cause of the headache is not addressed, the headaches are more likely to keep occurring. Chiropractors will also use diagnostic imaging such as x-rays to identify any interferences or subluxations. Subluxations are misaligned vertebrae that can interfere with some of the body’s natural processes. Since the vertebrae are in such close proximity to the spinal nerves, misalignment can place pressure on the nerves and disrupt the nervous system, causing pain, headaches, and even neurological conditions. Research has shown that chiropractic care is an effective treatment for tension headaches and neck aches! Additionally, your chiropractor can discuss your lifestyle and provide recommendations and nutritional advice that may be helpful in preventing future headaches. For example, some foods are known to trigger headaches, such as alcohol, chocolate, cheese, and caffeine. If you sit all day at a desk or computer, it will be helpful to get up, stretch, and walk around every 30 minutes to an hour. This will loosen your muscles and relieve tension. By making these small modifications to your lifestyle, you may be able to prevent headaches and get the most out of your chiropractic adjustments. Here are a few other things to consider:
As you can see, chiropractic care is a great, drug-free, and effective way to treat and prevent headaches. I encourage you to stop reaching for over-the-counter painkillers and try an adjustment instead! If you have any further questions about chiropractic care, feel free to reach out to us. I hope you found this article informative. If you or a loved one are suffering from headaches or any type of joint or back pain, you may benefit from chiropractic care. Consider reaching out to Lowcountry Chiropractic! We specialize in different chiropractic techniques, as well as both therapeutic and Swedish massage. Send us an email or give us a call and we’ll assess the situation and develop a treatment plan to address your needs. We want to help you live a healthy and pain-free life– it’s what you deserve. As always, this is Dr. Bob and I have your back covered!
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 Do you struggle with headaches regularly? Chiropractic care is highly recommended to help with your headaches! You don't have to suffer anymore, let chiropractic care help you!
Hey everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic and another exciting blog! I hope you are staying safe and well out there! Today, we are going to be talking about something that affects many people worldwide daily, and that is headaches! Hopefully, through this blog and what we are going to be talking about today, I can help give you some information on how to combat your headaches naturally! There are many different types of headaches out there; classic migraines, common migraines, cluster headaches, tension headaches, and many more. Each of these different types of headaches is caused by different things. Migraine headaches will have onset symptoms that appear before getting the actual pain in the head like sensitivity to light, floaters in your eyes, and auras. Each of these early-onset symptoms acts as a warning to an individual that a massive headache is on its way. Migraine headaches are a little more complex in general because they're usually related to some hormonal or chemical imbalance in the brain. Today, we are going to put migraines to the side and talk about tension headaches. Generally speaking, tension headaches are headaches that will progress as the day goes on. You may wake up feeling great, but as the morning wears on into the afternoon, you start to get a headache. You might feel the pain in your temples, behind the eyes, or maybe even in the back of your head. These headaches may or may not require you to take some medications to help you get through the rest of your day. Let's talk about tension headaches and their causes. Primarily tension headaches are vascular, meaning they are caused by the changes in your blood vessels or capillaries in your brain. Your capillaries carry blood to and from your brain, and the pressure on the walls of those tiny capillaries is really important. If you have too much pressure on the walls of your capillaries, it can cause inflammation. That inflammation, as we all know, can cause some serious pain. Tension headaches can also be caused if the capillaries in your brain expand, causing your blood vessels in your brain to make up more space, resulting in serious pain as well. Do you know the "normal" amount of headaches that your body can suffer every week? Zero! No headache is normal, and there is no such thing as a "normal" headache or a "normal" amount of headaches to have every week. I have so many patients that tell me that they get "normal headaches" about 2-3 times a week. This isn't a normal thing to experience, we are shooting for zero headaches every week! If you're getting more than zero headaches every week, it might be time to find a new way of dealing with them and preventing them! Back to blood vessels! What controls the sizes of these blood vessels in your brain is the nerve supply. Remember that every organ, blood vessel, tissue, gland, skin cell, and everything in your body has a nerve supply that comes out of the spine and spinal cord. If that nerve is somehow inhibited, meaning there is pressure on that nerve or it's pinched in some way, the signal from the brain is not getting through to that nerve as it should. In these situations, isn't it conceivable that maybe that blood vessel could dilate because it's not getting the right supply? Or, conversely, could that blood vessel constrict for the same reason? The answer is yes to both of these questions because interference with nerves can either speed things up, slow things down, enlarge things, shrink things, and stop things from happening as they normally should. To ensure that these blood vessels are the proper size and you have the proper amount of blood flow going through those vessels in the brain, one of the things that helps with tension headaches is chiropractic care! How does it help? What chiropractors are trained to do is to take the pressure off the nerves that may be pinched because a vertebra or a bone in your back is out of place. My job is to analyze where in your spine the bones are out of place, called a subluxation, putting pressure on nerves and affecting a lot of things in your body. Subluxations can get in the way of every system in your body, along with creating the tension headaches we are talking about today. My job is to correct those subluxations with my hands so that those nerves are freed up and they start working properly. This allows the blood vessels to go back to their normal size and help the headaches go away! The other alternative to help with your tension headaches is to take medication. The medication that is out there can solve the problem short-term by removing some of that inflammation off the blood vessel. Just like any medication though, it doesn't correct the cause of the problem. If the cause of the problem is a subluxation of your spin and irritated nerves, the medication can't fix that problem. Chiropractic aims at fixing the problem that's causing these symptoms. Also, every medication has side effects. Looking at the list of medications that are out there for headaches, one of the side effects of long-term use of anti-inflammatories is that they can lead to liver damage! This liver damage is just one of many side effects connected to this medicine! If you are using medication regularly to help with your tension headaches, you might want to consider chiropractic care because the results are incredible and you can avoid those side effects. If you come into our office to help your headaches, we will do a complete exam, go through your medical history, give you a full consultation, and we will take some X-rays to see where those subluxations are. If I can feel where those subluxations are or what is causing your headaches, we will get to work right away working to fix these issues causing you pain. Chiropractic care is an all-natural treatment for headaches and there are no medications involved. If you're struggling with headaches and you want a new approach from the one you're already using, look us up! We would love to help you. I hope all of this information helps! Don't forget, I'm Dr. Bob and I've got your back covered! Have a great day, and we'll see you soon!  Something is lurking in the joints of millions of Americans every year: the very real pain of arthritis.
Hi everyone! It's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic. I hope everyone is doing well. Today we are going to be discussing a topic that is very prevalent in our country, and that is arthritis. A lot of people have it and suffer from its pain every day. In this blog, I want to put arthritis into perspective. I want to explain what arthritis is and some of the many ways you can treat it. There are many different types of arthritis; there is rheumatoid arthritis, which is an autoimmune problem, psoriatic arthritis, enteropathic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, gout and many more. In this blog though, we are going to be discussing the most common type of arthritis, and that is osteoarthritis. It is also called DJD or DDD, which stands for degenerative joint disease or degenerative disc disease. Why is it important to get a grip on your arthritis? The main reason is that it is a degenerative condition. If you don't take care of it, it will more than likely get worse as you get older. Why is that important? Osteoarthritis will and can destroy or at a minimum cause a lot of pain in your joints. It can appear in your hands, your spine, your knees, hips, shoulders, and almost everywhere else in your body. This type of arthritis causes pain because of the inflammation surrounding the joint it is affecting. Let's talk about osteoarthritis. Our bodies get out of symmetry as we go through our daily lives. Typically, this type of arthritis is caused by asymmetry, and your joints start to work improperly because they are not working symmetrically. This can happen in your spine as well. You'll find that if you have a vertebra or two that is locked or misaligned, it's going to put a lot of stress on that joint. What the body does in reaction to this misalignment is it takes calcium out of the bloodstream, and sends it to that affected area to strengthen it. In theory, that sounds like it would make total sense, but what happens is that calcium deposits can form which leads to spurring. In addition, asymmetry causes the discs in your spine or cartilage in your peripheral joints to wear thin. You don't want spurs in a joint that aren't supposed to be there; they're going to get in the way of your ligaments, tendons, and the space the joint uses to properly move. These spurs are going to cause you a lot of pain because of the inflammation they cause. As we know, inflammation leads to serious pain. This is what is happening to your body when you have osteoarthritis. The next question then becomes, how do you manage this condition? As I mentioned before, if you don't do something about your osteoarthritis, it is going to get worse. The medical approach is usually some kind of steroidal anti-inflammatory product or injection to the affected joint. These products are created to take out some of the inflammation so you feel better. These remedies don't do much for correcting the cause of your arthritis, and steroids carry their own set of pretty nasty symptoms that might not appear until much later. How can chiropractic help? Chiropractic looks at a particular joint (in your spine, shoulder, hands, etc.) and figures out whether or not the bones in that joint are moving properly. What chiropractors do is adjust or treat that bone or bones to restore the proper motion to that joint. Once this happens, your body can work symmetrically and the degenerative process can be stopped. If the degenerative process is slowed down or stopped the inflammation will decrease, and the pain will get better. If you have arthritis, chiropractic care is something that you need to seriously think about incorporating into your health protocol. I also recommend a few supplements to my patients that help with inflammation connected to osteoarthritis that help with the pain in a natural way. 1. Fish oil! If you're going to use this, please use high-quality fish oil. 2. Coconut Oil! Most people don't know much about the benefits of this oil, but just like fish oil, it can do wonders for inflammation. If you want to add this oil to your diet, take a couple tablespoons preferably after a meal. Always make sure you use high-quality coconut oil. I recommend virgin, organic cold-pressed brands. 3. Turmeric is a great spice that you can put in your food or take in pill form that also helps with inflammation and the effects of osteoarthritis. Exercise can also help, but if the joint is damaged you want to be careful about doing too much repetitive exercise to the affected joint. Also, be very careful when doing too much weight-bearing or load-bearing exercises with that joint. Getting in a pool and swimming and some lightweight workouts are good to keep your affected joints moving. I hope this helps! If you're suffering from osteoarthritis or think you might be, please make an appointment to come to the office. We will do a very thorough exam (including x-rays), show you exactly what's going on and what is causing your problems. We will then get to work on fixing those problems so you can get healthy, out of pain and prevent that degenerative process from getting worse. I am Dr. Bob Salamon, and I have your back covered! Stay well!  Headaches are an incredibly common ailment for millions of Americans every year. Did you know that proper chiropractic care can help get rid of them for good?
Hey everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon here with Lowcountry Chiropractic. I hope everyone is well and safe. Today we are going to be discussing a condition that millions of Americans suffer from weekly, and that is headaches! There are many different types of headaches: classic migraines, common migraines, cluster headaches, sinus headaches, headaches that could be caused by brain tumors, brain bleeds, and many others. The one type of headache that is the most common and one that most people suffer from is something called a tension headache. The reason why I want to talk about headaches is that they can be very debilitating; they can affect your quality of life, they've been known to keep people out of work, they can affect productivity, they can make you very tired and irritable, and they can affect your relationships with your loved ones. It is a very important topic that needs to be addressed! So we are going to be talking about tension headaches and discuss some of the natural treatments and medical treatments that are available out there to treat headaches. Most tension headaches are vascular in nature. This means that they have to do with the size of the blood vessels in your brain or in your head. How does this work? In your head, you've got many arterioles and capillaries that are supplying blood to the brain. If these vessels get too big or too small, this can cause headaches. We've talked about how blood needs to flow through a vessel of a certain size to properly do its job. Say that the blood vessel constricts, and it is now much smaller than its original size. You still have the same amount of blood that needs to get through that blood vessel. So what happens is that blood puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the walls of that blood vessel, and that pressure can create both high blood pressure and headaches. Conversely, if the blood vessels dilate and get bigger, they increase the vascular volume in your head. This will put pressure on your brain inside your skull and create inflammation. Inflammation, as we know, often leads to pain. You can sometimes wake up with a tension headache, but more often than not, this isn't the case. They are more likely to appear mid-morning or around midday. One of the most common locations to have a tension headache is in your temples and above your eyes. They can also begin at the base of your skull and come up and around to the front of your forehead. The common medical treatment for headaches is pain medication like anti-inflammatories, or vasodilators, which increase the size of the blood vessels, or vasoconstrictors, which has the opposite effect. These medications do work, but they're not a permanent fix. They don't get at the cause of the problem. They also have side effects, just like all medications. Let's talk about what can generally cause a blood vessel to change its size. You'll remember that we have a network of nerves that come out of the spine. Those nerves individually control various locations of your body. The nerves in your neck innervate blood vessels in your head. So, in the chiropractic world, if your vertebrae are lined up and the foramen where the nerves exit are open and there is no nerve interference, then the brain will send the correct messages through the nerves, the nerves are sending proper messages to the blood vessels, and the size of the blood vessels is maintained at the perfect diameter. Therefore, if this is the case, you won't get those tension headaches. But, what happens if you've gotten into a car accident or had a fall, bend over a computer all day, or pick up something incorrectly? These things will affect the alignment of the vertebrae in your neck. This will put pressure on these precious nerves that control the diameter of the blood vessels. When those nerves are pinched, blood vessels will be impacted. So, irritated nerves can constrict those blood vessels or dilate them. Remember, nerve responsibility here is to maintain the integrity of the blood vessels. The role of the chiropractor is to treat the cause of your headaches, which are the misaligned vertebrae or subluxations. We are not treating the symptoms (the headaches) rather we are treating the cause (the subluxation). Removing the cause will help the symptoms go away and will help them stay away! Medication merely just treats the symptoms and not the cause. Medications are a temporary fix or a bandaid. That's how chiropractic care can provide incredible relief for headaches. If you're suffering from headaches, please give us a call and look us up. We'll set up an appointment and do a detailed exam including x-rays to determine whether or not your headaches are being caused by a subluxation. If they are, you are a candidate for chiropractic care, and we will get to work adjusting your spine and correcting the subluxations. I hope this information is helpful to you, and we will do our best to help you in every way we can. I'm Dr. Bob, and I have your back covered!  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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