Tuesday, September 30, 2008

How to fix a muscle injury

Once an injury occurs, you need to use ICE. Don't argue with me about how much you don't like it or how you enjoy your jacuzzi. You need to ice the area.

Most of the patients that hurt themselves on the weekend come in on Mondays complaining that their pain is "just getting worse and worse." They were putting heat on their injury.

Use ice for 20 minutes and then take the ice off for at least 20 minutes. Do this 3-5 times per day for the first 3 days.

You are going to be icing for probably 3-4 days until the pain starts go down, which indicates that the bleeding has stopped and the injury has started to repair itself. Then use an exercise that directly works the muscle.

Lets say that you injured your back. You can use a broomstick and do 3 sets of 25 repetitions. You might do squats, straight leg dead-lifts, or hyperextensions. If your pain increases while you exercise, you're going to continue icing and wait another day. If the pain doesn't get worse, it's safe to exercise.

The next day you will do the same exercise but might add a small amount of weight. You want to add just a bit of weight, maybe a pound at a time. Just add a bit of weight every day, increasing as much as you can tolerate each workout. It might hurt but you will have to listen to your body and will have to learn the difference between a good hurt and a bad hurt. If you are unsure, ask me. The pain is the pain of exercising an injury safely, not re-injuring it.

This exercise method will flush blood through the injury while forcing the new mending tissue to be strong and in alignment.

After 10 days of 3 sets of 25 repetitions, start increasing the weight and lower the reps to 15. So now you will do 3 sets of 15, but the weight might be significantly more. After a week of that, increase the weight again and lower the reps to 10. For further strength, you can increase the weight and do 5 repetitions.

At this period of time you should be icing only 3 times per day. Do it in the morning, after the exercise, and before bed.

By now it's been about 4-5 weeks. During this time do NO OTHER HEAVY WORK, so that your resources can focus on the injury. It is important to work slowly and make no quick or fast movements in the beginning. Use light weights that can be handled with high repetitions. Do exercises daily for the greatest improvement.

You should be back to full recovery with chiropractic adjustments, Graston therapy, Cold laser therapy and daily exercise such as outlined in this blog.

Treating the network that holds you together

In October of 2007, there was a conference at Harvard. The main topic was not heart disease or cancer. It was fascia.

Fascia is a network of soft tissue fibers that are intertwined within our muscles, tendons, ligaments and organs. It basically holds everything in proper place. It supports our bones. It gives our body structural stability.

It’s important in the understanding of pain.

It has been discovered that most spinal surgeries fail. The reason is because in order to perform the surgery, the spinal fascia must be cut. When this happens, the bones may be fused, but the architecture that is necessary to hold everything snug and in place has failed. It’s kind of like fixing the cavity of a tooth, but destroying the gums in the process, so the tooth falls out anyway. This explains why spinal surgery has such a terrible success rate. Maybe it’s better to try a conservative approach like chiropractic first.

Stability is more important that flexibility in some cases. Our body requires enough flexibility to have all the joints go through NORMAL ranges of motions. If the fascia is not strong enough to keep our spine stable, our muscles will work excessively. This leads to trigger points in the muscles and pain. This can lead to abnormal ranges of motion and stiffness that stretching can address, but stability is of primary importance.

I thought this was interesting because I have noticed over the years from patients that some patients responded better to strengthening exercises more so than stretching. For example, many people with herniated discs find that strengthening exercises reduce their pain more than stretching their back. Current research now supports that observation.

Trigger points in muscles are inflammatory in nature. They have injected needles into trigger points within muscles and analyzed the chemical components and found conclusively that they are full of chemicals related to inflammation.

This explains why an anti-inflammatory diet is so beneficial.

How does that change our approach in helping you?

After reading all the notes that I got from the chiropractic journals, I came to the following changes in my treatment approach:

1. Kinesiotaping patients with lower back pain can aid tremendously in their pain because it assists in supporting the lumbar fascial component. They found that the fascia criss-crosses from the left latissimus dorsi to the right buttock/hamstring. If you are using kinesiotaping yourself, I’ll show you how to do this.

2. Stability exercises prior to stretching. I used to stretch patients a lot. Now I will be more pro-active in having patients stabilize the back first. I’m sure this will result in less pain and greater recovery.

3. Graston Technique helps heal fascial restrictions. This is an awesome soft tissue method. The patient has to be super motivated to want to get better, can not be on any blood thinning drugs, and can’t be too old. For many people, the Graston Technique can achieve excellent results due to its application to the fascia.

4. Cold Laser Therapy- helps speed the healing of soft tissue injuries. It does this by stimulating mitochondria within the cells to increase metabolically by 150%.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Syndrome X

Great, did some pharmaceutical company just invent a new disease that we have to take a pill for?

Not really.

This is a disease of convenience.

Have you ever heard these statements:

“My cholesterol is above 200 and my doctor says I need statin drugs that I have to take for the rest of my life.”

“I don’t get it. I eat right, walk three times per week and don’t smoke. How come my cholesterol is so high, I’m still overweight and am tired all the time?”

Most people try to adhere to a diet too high in carbohydrates. We eat too much bread products, flour, sugar and hydrogenated fats. I know it seems unlikely, but read the labels of foods and you’ll see these things hidden in there.

Trans-fats, deep fried foods and most packaged foods will raise your LDL and lower your HDL. High glycemic index foods lower HDL. High insulin in your blood stimulates an enzyme in our body that produces cholesterol. So if your insulin is high your body will produce cholesterol.

Most of the drugs stop the production of the enzyme to produce cholesterol but they don’t lower the insulin. That’s hard to do because every time we eat, we have the opportunity to raise it or lower it within 30 minutes.

Our insulin levels rise even further when tissues, such as muscle, become resistant to insulin. Combine this with a diet of the wrong fats and lack of chromium, magnesium, and potassium and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Then if the person doesn’t exercise, it further promotes insulin resistance. This is the disease named Syndrome X.

There is probably not going to be one drug or nutritional supplement that will correct all of this. That is the importance of a holistic approach to this problem. Attempting to alter your cholesterol in a short period of time for a problem that has developed over a long period of time is unlikely to work.

Here are some active steps that help with Syndrome X:

1. Never eat a food that is primarily carbohydrate, protein or fat. There should be a balance between the carbohydrate and protein with no trans-fats. The reason for this is to prevent a rapid increase in insulin.

2. If it’s been processed, eat less of it. Try for one day to eat only natural foods. Eat some nuts and tons of fruit for breakfast. Have cheese and grapes for snacks. Eat a big salad with raisins, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, and eggs. Use olive oil and vinegar for a dressing. Eat chicken and vegetables for dinner. Drink only water. Don’t buy anything that took a computer and a lot of work to formulate. See how you feel that day and start building from there. It takes planning at first but pick one day and try it.

3. Do some exercise every single day. Try some push ups against the kitchen counter, walk fast around the block. Spend your retirement money and refinance your house to buy a 15 pound bicycle. Build from there.

4. Take anti-inflammatory supplements as outlined in our book found in the waiting room.

Think of what would happen if there were no more conveniences anymore. Imagine if we had to go HUNT for our food. We’d probably end up eating lots of fruit that we find and vegetables that we could grow. We would have to kill wild animals to get meat. We would spend our entire day running around looking for stuff to eat and trying to out sprint another animal to kill it. Sounds like an awful existence but it would solve some of the problems we have with syndrome X.

The point is to become a little more like that to be healthy.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

You don't know SQUAT!

When examining patients, I have found that many people don’t have enough strength to sit up out of a chair. Even young people will use momentum or their arms to sit up from a seat. I am not talking about people in tremendous pain. These people have difficulty getting out of their car seat, off the couch, and out of low seats.

For those of you that can remember, we used to have a couch in the waiting room years ago. About 2-3 times per week, I would be called to help them out of the chair. They didn't have the leg strength to lift themselves up.

When asked to demonstrate a squat, you get all types of crazy movements due to weakness in the thighs, buttocks or core. Some patients even refuse to do a squat. They fear that their kneecaps will be instantly destroyed. They fear that they will never walk again. They fear instant and sudden surgery.

Patients will sometimes even say that squatting is bad and that they don't want to do it.

Then I ask them in my characteristically sarcastic tone, “well how do you get off the toilet seat, or a chair, or the seat in your car?”

Of course the answer is that you must squat.

While there are some people that probably shouldn't squat, most people can if they squat properly. The key is to do it so that it’s less stressful on your knees. The main point is that squatting is a natural movement that we should train. It's an exercise that should be done, not avoided.

In our website, there is a link to another website called crossfit. It has videos on how to properly perform squatting movements without barbells. My favorite squatting exercise is the "tabata" squats. This is where you squat down multiple times for 20 seconds, then rest for 10 seconds and then repeat the cycle for 8 times. It's a killer!

Check out the “links” section. If you have any questions just let me know. Some people have had a hard time getting to the website. Remember to not type www. prior to the name.

http://adamstorychiropracticcorp.chiroweb.com/

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