 A brand new year is here! I want to share some of the best tips you can do for your body to keep healthy and happy in 2021!
Hello everyone! It's Dr. Bob Salamon with Lowcountry Chiropractic. Welcome back to the blog and a very Happy New Year to you! I hope you're staying safe and well out there, and I hope you're taking care of yourselves! Welcome to 2021! I think we are all very happy to see it here, and we are all happy to get out of last year and all of its craziness. With a new year comes resolutions to work out, eat better, and be healthier overall, right? Sadly, these resolutions usually only last for a short time. In honor of that and in honor of 2021, I want to help you achieve your goals. So, I wanted to share a list of things with you that you'll be able to stick with and make part of your everyday life, to make sure this year and beyond are the healthiest they can be. If you do everything on this list that you're about to read, you will get healthier without question. It's a simple list, but I won't lie to you; it won't be easy. Each of the listed items takes effort on your part to incorporate them into your lifestyle. I personally have nothing to do with this list, outside of providing it for you, except for the last point we will talk about today. Let's kick off this new year and jump into this list to start on a healthier and happier you! #1 Go Green! I'm not talking about saving the earth, I'm not talking about saving trees from getting cut down, and I'm not talking about global warming. I am talking about eating healthy and eating green things. Some of the best ways to eat green are by eating things like salads, fruits, and vegetables. It's not only about eating green things but also about eating multicolored things. They call this kind of diet "eating the rainbow" because those are the things that have a lot of phytonutrients and antioxidants in them like berries, nuts, peppers, romaine lettuce, and much more. I eat a lot of my green food raw. I eat salads a lot, but at night I'll have a piece of fish with green beans and the green beans will be raw, because when you cook food it tends to remove the nutrients from it. When I say "go green" I really mean that you need to get away from eating food that's white or brown, and you need to eat colorful things that come out of the ground or grow on trees. Eating this way will help you become much healthier! Another reason to eat green is that they are alkaline in nature and not acidic. You'll find acidic elements in starches, bread, pasta, candy, and sweets. Fruits and veggies will make your body more alkaline. This is so important because diseases like cancer thrive in an acidic environment, and you don't want that! #2 Refine Your Life! What do I mean by this? I'm talking about refined sugars. You want to try to eliminate eating foods that have unnaturally occurring sugars in them and replace them with foods that only have natural sugars. Unfortunately, almost all the products you see on the shelves of a grocery store have a ton of refined sugars in them. Why do we want to avoid refined sugars? There are a lot of reasons, but the two most important are as follows:
#3 Get a Supplemental Plan! I'm not talking about a medicare supplement for insurance. I'm talking about health supplements to the foods that you eat. We are not going to get 100% of everything we need from the food that we eat every day. To help with this, you want to try and supplement your intake with various items. I take Juice Plus+, which is whole foods in capsules. If I'm not getting 100% of all my fruits, vegetables, and berries every day this supplement helps to bridge the gap between what I am eating and what I should be eating for a healthy body. In terms of supplementation, I take fish oil and coconut oil which are huge anti-inflammatories. You might want to consider adding one or more into your diet. Another supplement you should look into adding that I always talk about is vitamin D3. It is an extremely great and inexpensive supplement to boost your immune system. Boosting your immune system is so important when we are already dealing with COVID, the flu season, and more. You want your immune system to be working at 100% so it can defend itself against some of these dangerous things that are out there. I recommend most people take between 3000 to 5000 IUs of D3. I'm taking 10,000 right now during the pandemic. I will say that I haven't felt anything in terms of a sniffle or a sore throat since this pandemic has started, so I know it's doing something good for me! #4 Don't Be a Couch Potato! We've had a lot of couch potatoes in 2020 and so far into 2021 because a lot more people are working from home and they're not as active as they should be! You need to incorporate exercise into your routine. You need to add not only cardiovascular exercises like running, walking, swimming, or biking, but you also need to add in cross-training with weights, high-intensity interval training, and more to trick your body (in a good way!) to keep improving. If you do the same workout every time, your body gets lazy. You have to mix it up, which is why I do Crossfit. Every class is different, incorporating different body parts every session. Don't be a couch potato! You have to get up and start a habit. It takes three weeks to make or break a habit, so let's do this! #5 Rest and Relax! This means getting enough sleep every night, and that means at least 7-8 hours, which is recommended by the experts. The primary reason to get enough sleep is that during your REM stage of sleeping, your body is taking the time to repair itself from all the work you've done throughout the day. The neurons, synapses, the coverings and linings of your organs, your blood vessels, and your whole body heals and repairs itself when you're sleeping. #6 Don't Worry - Be Happy! What does this mean? Experts say about 95% of what we worry about is either really not important or is never going to happen, so we really shouldn't be worrying about them. We spend too much time worrying about things that aren't going to occur or even impact us. What I would challenge you to do this year is to take a more positive approach to life if you're not already. Try to look at the glass as being half full instead of half empty, and look at the blessings you have in your life instead of the negative things. Put a list together if you have to, but we all have many things we can be grateful for in life. This can give you a little joy and optimism as you go through this year. #7 Get Connected This is the one thing on the list that you need me for! I'm not talking about getting connected on social media (shoutout to Creative Consulting for doing an amazing job!). No, this is getting your brain and body to talk to one another. This is the only way your body is going to stay optimally healthy. There is a little thing called the spinal cord that connects the brain to all of your body parts, along with the nerves that go out from your spinal cord. If you don't take care of your spinal cord and the spinal nerves, your brain (which makes all of your body's decisions and sends out all the messages out to your body) will be sending those messages out, but they will reach their destinations improperly. So, the body is not going to be effectively doing the work that the brain wants it to. Also, if those nerves aren't working properly, the body can't communicate back to the brain. The brain will then not know what decisions it should really be making. How do you keep this connection working properly between your brain and your body? Go to a chiropractor! I am trained to remove subluxations of the spine, which are conditions where the vertebrae are irritating a spinal nerve and interfering up the conduction of mental, electrical and chemical impulses from the brain to the body. I and my fellow chiropractors are trained to remove those subluxations from your body and allow your brain and body to communicate as they should! It's amazing what benefits you'll see when your body is free from subluxations. By removing subluxations, your body can experience:
I don't want you to stress out and think that you have to do this list perfectly. You just need to follow it fairly well, because if you're not doing any of them and you implement even some of them into your life, you'll see a huge improvement in your health this year. You'll lose the weight that you want to lose, you'll build muscle mass, you'll sleep better, you'll have more energy, you'll have better focus, and you won't get sick as often. The real important thing on this list, outside of the essential chiropractic care, is nutrition. Nutrition is the most important thing you can do for yourself in 2021, but of course, I want you to do this whole list! I hope this helps and gives you a little encouragement for the new year. This is going to be a better year for you but you have to want to make it better! ! If you need any help with the items on this list, we do offer consultation on each of these topics. Come see me, call me, or email me to get started. Remember, I am Dr. Bob and I've got your back covered. See you next time, readers. Stay safe out there and Happy New Year!
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 In this week's blog, we are going to be discussing the different cause knee pain. Is it actually the knee itself or could it be something completely different?
Hey everybody! It's Dr. Bob Salamon back at it with another blog! I hope wherever you are while you're reading this that you're staying healthy and safe out there. Today we are going to be talking about knee pain. I get a lot of patients in my office who come in with knee pain from playing soccer, from falls, and car accidents. However, it is also very common for my patients to come in with unexplained knee pain. For some mysterious reason, they woke up one day and their knee hurt, but they didn't experience any direct trauma to cause this pain. They come to me looking for answers, and that is what we are going to be talking about and focusing on today. In any situation when a patient comes into my office with knee pain, it is my job to figure out whether the pain is coming from a knee issue or somewhere else in the body, and then work at resolving the issue. Remember, we work on every extremity. Chiropractic care isn't just about the spine. We will work on everything from the bones in your skull all the way down to the tips of your toes. If an extremity is causing you pain, we will figure out why and how we can fix it! Knee pain is very unique and interesting because the pain can be caused by damage directly to the knee, but often times the pain is caused by an issue in another area that is seemingly unrelated. For example, say you are playing a sport and you twist the wrong way while playing. Potentially, the pain you're feeling in your knee could be coming from a tear of a ligament or meniscus in your knee. When I examine someone in this situation, I do testing to check the stability of the knee ligaments and other soft tissues. After I go through this testing and I feel like I can help you without sending you out to get an MRI (which is truly the only way to determine if there is a tear of a ligament) then I start getting to work fixing the problem. If I believe something has been torn or seriously damaged that needs surgery or other medical attention, I will send these patients to someone who specializes in those injuries. With any patient that comes to me in this situation, I start working directly in the affected joint to make sure that all the attachments to that knee are working properly. Like I hinted above, knee pain can come from areas that are not related or presumably related directly to the knee. What do I mean by this? If you have a pelvis that is out of alignment, you are by definition not walking symmetrically. This will cause you to put pressure on one leg more than the other, and on one knee more than the other. Putting this extra pressure and strain on the side of your body that is not affected can cause extra wear and inflammation, which can cause pain. I've recently had this situation happen with one of my patients. This gentleman had gone away on vacation and was running on the beach. The beach he was running on wasn't flat, so he was running at an angle. He came back to see me after vacation and said that he was having unexplained knee pain. He had no idea where it had come from, he hadn't had an accident nor did he experience any trauma while he was gone, but had been left with this mysterious pain. So, I took a look at his knee, and it turns out that his pelvis was extremely out of alignment. All we had to do during his appointment was simply adjust the pelvis. The next time he returned after his adjustment, he shared with me that this mysterious knee pain had gone away. In this situation, it wasn't the knee that was the problem, it was the pelvis that was causing the issue. Sometimes the subluxations of the pelvis or even sometimes the lumbar vertebrae can cause knee pain because the nerves that come out of the low back go to supply the legs, knees, and feet (among other things). This means if you've irritated those nerves, you could be feeling unexplained pain in any of these extremities but not where the actual damage has occurred. In these cases, I correct these subluxations and let the body heal itself. If you've had trauma directly to your knee, then the problem causing the pain could be those torn ligaments or soft tissues that I mentioned above. I will, however, not rule out the possibility of other causes until I conduct a full exam to determine if something is potentially torn or damaged and needs to be referred out to an orthopedic specialist. The other area that could be involved with your knee pain are the muscles found in your buttocks area and the front of your hips. Problems with the gluteus maximus/medius, the piriformis, and the psoas (hip flexor) can cause knee pain. If those muscles are not working symmetrically because one side is weaker than the other, the strong side will pick up the slack, thus creating more physical stress on those joints, often the knee. When you come to see me with this kind of pain, one of the first steps I take in figuring out what is causing this knee pain is to do some muscle testing. These tests will show if a muscle is weak. If you do have a weakness, there are some simple exercises that will facilitate and strengthen the weakened muscle to help your body work properly and eliminate that pain. I hope this helps give you another avenue to explore when addressing knee pain. I hope that you remember if you are having knee pain, it doesn't necessarily mean that there is something wrong with your knee. If you are suffering from knee pain and you don't know where to turn, you've found the right place. Please reach out to us. We would love to check you out, and if I think I can help you, we will get started getting you taken care of right away. If I think that the problem is outside of my scope,, I will refer you to someone who can address your issue. Remember that many times knee pain can be effectively addressed with muscle work and chiropractic care. I hope this helps! Be well, stay well, and remember that I've got your back covered! |
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