Welcome readers! Dr. Bob and the rest of our team hope you’re doing well and living your life to the fullest! If you’re not, and if that may be because of pain or discomfort, we’re ready to give you two words that may change your health outlook: Referred Pain. Referred pain is whenever you feel pain or discomfort in areas of your body that’s actually originating from a different source elsewhere in your body! Referred pain can be caused by a wide variety of things, but we like to look at it as one of the many ways our bodies communicate with us! A couple examples of referred pain can be a heart attack that triggers pain in your jaw, or an injured organ causing you pain in your back. Isn’t that fascinating? To put it plainly, referred pain occurs because the nerves within the human body are all connected. The human nervous system is one of the most elaborate, complex aspects of our bodies, and because of it we are all able to experience the world around us in different ways. Your nerves are what help you interact and communicate with your environment, by letting you know when a pot is too hot, when the weather outside is about to turn, or if someone bumps your shoulder as you pass. So how does all of this connect to chiropractic care? One of the main parts of the nervous system, the central nervous system, is housed by our spines! The human brain and spinal cord are known as the central nervous system and that is essentially the command center for the human body overall. From the central nervous system, your peripheral nervous system and autonomic nervous system connect and tangle throughout the body like winding rivers or roots. These nerves are so delicate and numerous that if the adult nervous system in its entirety was to be stretched out, it could reach up to 100,000 miles! As the spine protects the spinal cord, there are spaces in between the spines’ vertebrae that allow nerves to reach out around your back. Do you remember our previous blogs and videos discussing subluxations? When a vertebrae presses or pinches down on a nerve, the result can be pain and discomfort and this is known as a subluxation! The purpose of chiropractic care is to correct and reset subluxations by adjusting the vertebrae to get off those pinched nerves. As nerves spread throughout your body and help communicate all kinds of stimuli back to your brain, your brain communicates ‘back’ by making you feel pain or discomfort when something goes wrong. Have you ever heard about how whenever people get in car accidents they have different levels of pain or injury based on their level of awareness during the incident? It’s truly interesting; people who are aware they are about to be in an accident tend to ‘tense up’ as a response from the brain letting them know the impact is coming, but those who are unaware have no visual stimuli response and their muscles are more relaxed during the accident. The more tension that resided in the muscles before and during the accident, the higher likelihood of experiencing injury! You may not be aware of this, but your nervous system operates at an unprecedented speed. The amount of time it takes for you to see a car coming, realize it’s going to hit you, and either react or prepare for impact can all take place in portions of a second. We wanted to share this with you because not only is it an amazing feature of our bodies, but it explains so much in relation to chiropractic care and maintenance. As amazing as it is in the many connections and structure, the human body is imperfect and requires regular care and maintenance. Chiropractic care is most effective with regular treatments to keep adjustments’ in place despite our day-to-day activities. Subluxations can occur with even the slightest movements, such as getting in or out of your car, stepping down stairs, reaching up high for something, playing a sport or exercising! The really miraculous thing about the spine and the nervous system though is that if you’re experiencing a subluxation, your nerves may communicate that pinching by ‘enabling’ pain in related parts of your body! Referred pain can be traced along specific nerve paths to specific areas of the body; some nerve paths connect directly to your ankles and feet, whereas others flow down to your wrists and fingertips for example. Dr. Bob has knowledge about what kind of pain or discomfort displays itself through referred pain based on the different vertebrae in the spine! If you’d like to learn more about a few examples of this, we recommend you follow the link below to one of our recent Facebook videos where Dr.Bob discusses referred pain and how it connects to chiropractic care!
If you’re experiencing discomfort that you’re not able to find a solution for, it may be time to turn to chiropractic care! Dr. Bob would love to see you and help you feel well again; all you have to do is reach out to us to set up your first appointment!
We look forward to helping you heal, and we’ve got your back covered. Take care!
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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!  Staying on top of your health and wellness is so important! Working out, eating well, and brushing your teeth are things we hopefully do regularly. Did you know that your chiropractic care is just as necessary for your body's maintenance?
Hi everybody! Dr. Bob here with Lowcountry Chiropractic. Today's blog is going to be dedicated to the maintenance for your chiropractic care. Anyone that has a car knows that they have to go in and get it serviced regularly. Rotating your tires, getting an oil change, and things of that nature need to happen regularly. This helps your car run better and last longer. Everyone I know brushes their teeth, works out, and tries to get enough sleep regularly. Why do we do these things? Inherently we know, like keeping up with basic maintenance on our cars, these things are going to help prolong our health, lifespan, and quality of life. They will also help prevent serious issues down the road if we take care of ourselves. Taking care of your body and putting good things into it will promote good things coming out of it. You can prevent cavities, help create a better sleep schedule, and keep your body fit and working at its optimal health all by maintaining these normal services to your body. With chiropractic care, it is very similar. Most people who come into my office, depending on what the condition is, are going to need some level of intensive care in the beginning. This is very normal, especially if they've never been to a chiropractor before. It is also very normal if the problems and issues in their spines and bodies have been around for a long time. There are four different goals of chiropractic care:
Wellness and maintenance care is a very important step in this process. It is something that is done or should be done anywhere between once a week to once a month. Most people need some care on an on-going basis to ensure that the work we've done on their spine is being maintained. This way things don't fall out of place and the problems don't reoccur. If you want to stay healthy, you have to continue going to your chiropractor. Once we've done all the work to get you lined up you're going to be exposed to physical, emotional, and chemical stresses in your life. These stresses will eat away at the weak areas in your spine that we work on fixing. These stresses can lead to you getting out of alignment again if you don't keep up with maintenance. A good analogy would be to look at what braces do on teeth. When you put them on, it doesn't take long for those teeth to change their position and become aligned. What does take time, up until the braces come off, is the remodeling of the gums and soft tissue around the new position of the teeth. This allows the teeth to stay in their new correct positions when the braces come off. Maintenance care in chiropractic is very similar to that. We know that we are subject to a lot of stresses in our lives that tend to harm our spine. Wellness care is there to make sure that we are doing everything we can for you to deal with these stresses. This will prevent you from returning to the state of health you were in when you first came into my office. Now, some people do come into the office and they don't have a lot of issues or pain. They might not need intensive care at the beginning of their treatment. But, they are certainly going to wellness care going forward just like anyone would. I hope this helps to clarify a little bit about why wellness care is so important in chiropractic. If any of you out there thinks you need a chiropractor, you probably do. If any of you out there is hurting, come in and we'll take a look. We will sit you down and go through a very thorough workup and take some x-rays if we need to. Then, we will get started on getting you back to health and maintaining your health with regular care. I hope this helps. I hope everybody out there is staying safe and well, and I look forward to next time. Take care! |
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