Athletes put their bodies on the line; we protect them

Whether your sport is high-impact or low, every time you go out on your chosen playing field you are putting your body at risk for injury. While a good deal of our work as chiropractors is centered around preventing injury in the first place, chiropractic is also an effective tool for treating injuries after they happen. Let’s look at some of the most common injuries sustained by athletes and how we treat them at our office.

Common injuries sustained by athletes

Some of the most common injuries sustained by athletes include sprains, strains and tears, all of which can cause pain and prevent you from playing. These injuries are primarily caused by: 

• Forceful impact
• Repetitive trauma (think the jarring motion on your joints from running)
• Over-training and fatigue
• Failure to warm-up

How we treat athletic injuries

• Manual adjustment of the spine: to realign the spine, and correct the motion and function of spinal joints. 
• Releasing myofascial pain: reducing pain allows you to focus on stretching and strengthening, the factors that matter for rehabilitation. 
• Improving circulation: to cycle blood to an injured area, bringing the oxygen and nutrients necessary for repair. 
• Spinal mobilization: a passive movement of a segment of the spine to increase range of motion.
• Ice and heat: to stimulate the body’s healing response and further improve circulation.

Your specialist for athletic injuries

If you are suffering from a sports-related injury and are interested in healing it quickly and preventing it from recurring, give our office in Houston a call to schedule an appointment today. We can help you get back on the playing field and performing better than ever!

You get regular tune-ups for your car but not your body?

The logic appears to be faulty here. People protect the things they love and spend money to care for them, but will often wait until an injury or serious condition develops to seek help for their own body. At our office, we hope to give you some compelling reasons to start thinking differently about the maintenance of your own body! 

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Sitting All Day Is Unnatural

Humans weren’t made to just sit. We were made to stand, to walk, run, jump, twist, turn, bend, lay down, roll, crawl, climb, squat, and maybe, for a few minutes a day, to sit. But at a certain point in (very recent) history, our jobs became seated, our entertainment became seated, our meals, our commute, etc. The list goes on. Sitting has become as prevalent as standing and it is taking its toll on our bodies. If your typical day consists of commuting to work each way, sitting in front of a computer, then sitting on a sofa and watching TV to unwind (with maybe an hour of exercise thrown in), you could be putting your spine at serious risk. 

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Allergies are a recent phenomenon

I know lots of people who have allergies, you know lots of people who have allergies. A quick google says more than 50 million Americans experience seasonal allergies each year. Allergies are everywhere. And of course, there are countless remedies, pills, exercises, foods, and many experts telling us how to improve our health to reduce our allergy symptoms ad nauseam. But has it ever occurred to you that seasonal allergies are a recent phenomenon local to only a few places in the world? 

This is not your regular conspiracy

No, the big pharma industry did not invent allergies to sell you pills. The problem of seasonal allergies seems to be connected to city planners trying to reduce budgets by planting trees that were easy to maintain. The unforeseen effect of planting cloned trees that were all male is the seasonal allergies we almost all have. Please follow these links to see that I am not making this up.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/botanical-sexism-cultivates-home-grown-allergies/

or

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/16/how-urban-planners-preference-for-male-trees-has-made-your-hay-fever-worse

Another quick reference to easily share with your friends is this one on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh758qVQPqg&t=4s

Why the trees

In nature, there are three tree sexes, monecious, dioecious male or dioecious female. And naturally, there is an even distribution of the three. This is not the case in cities.

The easy to transplant trees, and easy to maintain trees, basically, the cheap trees, mean “cultivation has produced wholly male trees – plants favored by planners since they have no seeds or pods to drop but only pollen. ” The guardian summarizes with this, “Allergenic tree pollen was found to be one of the biggest contributors to hay fever and asthma, and pollen counts have also been rising over the past 15 years.”

So how do we fix it?

 Plant different.

If you want to stop inhaling pills to help alleviate your seasonal allergies then there is going to be some work for us to do. Yes, chiropractic adjustments can help but they only go so far. We need to spread the word that there are more costs to plants than the initial price and maintenance. Our choices in cultivation affect our inhalation, like that? 🙂 Chiropractors can’t be experts in every field, pun intended, but we can pass on our own knowledge and I hope you do too. Keep learning and stop by our office any time to learn more. 

Construction work is another of the professions most affected by back pain

Lifting and bending over account for a large percentage of common back injuries, from muscle sprain to herniated discs. Almost every job in the construction industry requires some kind of lifting. And there is a triple-headed problem that exists here:

1. Often the loads present no clear way to lift in a manner conducive to your back’s health 
2. The loads are too heavy: no one worker should lift over 51 pounds at a time
3. We have forgotten proper body mechanics regarding lifting and bending

Most construction workers reading this will agree that they regularly lift more than 51 pounds at a time by themselves. Because lifting is one of the most harmful motions for our back, it is always good to keep your spine’s health in mind while on-site. 

Prevention of back pain for construction workers

Prevention of back pain begins before the job starts: every construction worker should stretch before a day that will involve even a mild demand of lifting. Having cold muscles when you go to lift is one of the surest ways to injure yourself. Make sure you give yourself at least 5 minutes of stretching time before each day. Furthermore:

• Use a support belt to lend stability to your core, restrict excessive motion and prevent injury. 
•  Focus on core strength: your back is one of your greatest and most fragile assets on the job. It behooves you to spend time at home or in the gym strengthening and stretching the core stabilizing muscles. 
• Limit the loads you are lifting as much as possible and ask for a helping hand when possible.

We take the health of construction workers’ spines seriously. If you need help rehabilitating injuries sustained on the job, or to prevent them from happening in the first place, give our office a call to schedule an appointment today. 

Your spine is always under pressure 

Our spines are constantly under pressure: from the force of gravity to the added compression we do to ourselves with things like poor posture, there is rarely a second when your spine gets a break. Unless you plan to live in space (which comes with its own set of problems), or become fully aquatic, there is little we can do to escape the pressures of gravity. 

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Healthy fascia, healthy human

Get to know your fascia, the layer of tissue that covers our muscles and extends from head to toe. But what is the purpose of this mysterious thin layer that literally covers the entirety of your body without interruption? Primarily made of collagen, the fascia’s main purpose is to attach and stabilize the muscles of your body while encasing and separating vital organs. Because it is thin and tensile, it is quite vulnerable to injury which causes it to tighten and contract and this can be truly painful.

Myofascial pain is not your friend

When the fascia is injured, a primary layer of defense is temporarily stymied: this can pressurize nerves, muscles and organs. And because of its interconnectivity, the pain doesn’t necessarily stop at the point of injury. The acute point where injury occurs may be where most pain is experienced, but myofascial pain is referred pain: it can pop up seemingly wherever. 

Treating myofascial pain

Myofascial pain is undetectable using medical scanning techniques such as x-ray and MRI. Instead, it is most often determined by detecting trigger points in the muscle. We use manual modalities including: 

• Myofascial release
• Active release
• Trigger point therapy
• Electrical stimulation 
• Ultrasound 
• Heat and ice 

These treatments relax your muscles and improve circulation that improves the quantities of oxygen and nutrients that reach the injury. If you are suffering from fascial pain, or suspect that you might be, give our office a call to schedule an appointment today. 

Your spine is always under pressure

Whether you like it or not, the most common positions we adopt during a given day are putting a disproportionate amount of pressure on our spines, and our lumbar vertebrae is where this pressure accumulates! Here are some statistics as measured by the pressure sustained by a lumbar intervertebral disc: 

• Low pressure: lying on your back: ~25kg of pressure 
• Medium pressure: standing upright: ~100kg of pressure
• High pressure: sitting: ~125kg of pressure

Sitting and standing are made worse by leaning forward and bearing weight, while forward head posture magnifies the pressure of the head on the spinal column by up to 10X for every inch it is held forward. So if there is one thing we can start doing for our spines right away, it is being aware! 

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Lower back pain is among the most prolific and life-changing conditions of our time

It can be broken down into two constituent categories:

• Mechanical low back pain refers to pain related to the dysfunction of the moving parts of the spine, i.e. facet joints, intervertebral discs, ligaments, and muscles.
• Compressive pain refers to pain that is caused when nerves exiting the spinal cord are put under pressure.

Chiropractic is a conservative method of treatment that shows great efficacy in improving the symptoms of both conditions.

Chiropractic for mechanical and compressive low back pain 

• For mechanical low back pain, chiropractic adjustment seeks to address symptoms through mobilization of the spinal joints. Through low-intensity, high-frequency adjustments to the affected region, we restore proper alignment and effect great improvement on the symptoms of mechanical low back pain. 
• For compressive back pain, we use decompression modalities to provide spinal elongation. By gently stretching the spine and providing manual adjustments to the affected region, we restore spinal alignment and allow for the retraction of bulging disc material which is often impinging on spinal nerves. 

Chiropractic is a conservative form of treatment that seeks to correct the root of the problem with natural methods. While this doesn’t work for everyone, it is recommended that most cases of non-specific back pain be treated by conservative methods before moving on to more invasive methods such as spinal surgery. 

Low back pain relief

If you are looking to address spinal pain, whether it be mechanical or compressive in nature, give our office a call to schedule an appointment today. We are back pain specialists who will determine the cause of your spinal dysfunction before setting a course for treatment that combines a multitude of natural modalities to effect great improvements in your symptoms. 

For most people, chiropractic comes to mind only after an injury

This is a shame because chiropractic might have prevented that very same injury. While obviously, this is not a 100% guarantee, a body under regular chiropractic maintenance is more resistant to injury and quicker to recover after an injury occurs. Depending on your level of activity (or inactivity!) you can benefit from the preventative healthcare that chiropractic offers.

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