Stress
Filed under: Case of the month, Spinewave Bulletin, Symptoms, Testimonials
“Chiropractic is as valuable to our family care as our GP.”
I first came to Neil after hearing him speak about managing stress through chiropractic care 3 years ago. Anything that helps me manage running two businesses and raising a young family immediately appeals to me. Spinewave educated me to understand how my workload and every demand on life puts stress on my nervous system, which interferes with the brain’s ability to communicate messages clearly. Neil showed me, very tangibly how this works. After assessing my physical state, he made me raise each leg and hold it up while he applied downward pressure; I could not hold my left leg up at all. He carefully assessed my upper neck and made a small adjustment, and just like that the “block” was cleared and I had full control over my leg. My brain could communicate with my body once again.
I had also always fobbed off a frequent twinge in my shoulder and painful muscle spasms as one of those random pains that you just have to put up with; or exaggerated emotional responses put down to a stressful workload that I had little control over.
I am now in tune with my body: that random shoulder twinge is actually not so random. Like clockwork, when my work pressure increases, my shoulder starts to twinge. If I ignore it, it gets worse. Before being treated by Spinewave, I would let this go until the pain shot all the way down my arm. I would then resort to physio treatment, not really knowing what other options I had. Physio would take at least 6 sessions of slow recovery. Now I see Neil, I get immediate relief (no more than 2 or 3 adjustments) to being fully functional again, and each adjustment is almost half the cost per treatment that I paid before. Read more
Scoliosis
Filed under: Case of the month, Spinewave Bulletin, Symptoms, Testimonials
“I was truly shocked when I saw the x rays but it certainly explained my problems.”
So often I’ve heard from clients that a therapist of some description has run their fingers down their spine and told them they have scoliosis. This is not how you define scoliosis. It’s defined by x ray only and the curvature has to be more than 10 degrees.
Spinal fusion started becoming popular in the 1900s. And then by the mid-1900s Harrington rods were introduced by Paul Harrington. In all this time, cutting the spine open and fusing bones together still seems like the logical first step to people with back pain – costing ACC hundreds of thousand of dollars every year – even in light of the spine being the key signalling device for the central nervous system to maintain harmony within the body. Some research has even suggested that scoliosis might manifest itself due to lesions in the posterior columns of the nervous system during the early years. This central nervous system dysfunction was hypothesised to be a decreased vibratory sensation1,4. So as a side note: Adjust the child.
For the brain to be aware of its internal and external environment, and to lead adequate self-directed healing, the spine needs to be mobile.
The risks of surgery become quite overwhelming: Neurological damage, loss of normal spine function, additional strain on unfused vertebrae, excruciating post-surgical pain (sometimes only a year down the track), infection, and in the instance of scoliosis, further curvature progression. Due to these complications, re-operation is necessary, sometimes referred to as reconstructive, re-corrective, revision, or salvage surgery. Complication rates vary, but failure of fusion has been found in more than 50% of treated patients and among 25 adult patients, 40% required salvage surgery2. What we know now, from a patient’s perspective at least, is the preferred plan of action would likely be avoiding unnecessary risk, i.e. avoiding surgery (or keep it as the final option) once all conservative measures have failed.
While mechanical medicine was making its surgical advances in the 1950s, so too was chiropractic. The developer of chiropractic after his father, BJ Palmer, reported on a case of scoliosis in 1951 amongst his extensive plethora of research. BJ Palmer also had at that time, the biggest collection of pathological and anomolous bones in the world. BJ reported 4,392 total specimens, containing 13,697 skeletal elements. It was estimated that these 4,392 specimens represented approximately 3,000 persons. BJ Palmer assembled the Osteological Studio in a room for student study. Even then, the collection was known to the professors of anatomy in many of the nearby state medical colleges. These specimens were available to them and were often studied by them to better qualify them for carrying on their lecture work in their own classes. Read more
Brain Fog
Filed under: Case of the month, Spinewave Bulletin, Symptoms, Testimonials
“I had not been sleeping well, suffered from headaches, and generally felt drained with a constant sense of doom and what I call ‘fogginess’ most of the time. I never thought for one moment that chiropractic work could be of help.”
Brain fog is an unofficial diagnosis for poor concentration, lack of mental clarity, inability to focus, indecision or forgetfulness. The term I like to use more is a sense of disconnectedness.
Disconnectedness implies a cognitive dissonance between thought and behaviour; and a dissonance between perception and reality. When perception of body or emotion is distorted, you may feel something, but that’s not what’s really going on.
There could be a hundred-and-one physiologic reasons for brain fog ranging from toxic, to neurologic, vascular, hormonal, infectious, traumatic or elemental deficiency. However, in context of “fogging of the brain” in relatively normal people – giving the definition of “normal people” a wide berth itself – all roads lead to brain. So we can look at the brain becoming fogged because of its inability to maintain normal cortical function.
The cortex is the outer layer of the brain that requires constant stimulation to keep us engaged in life. It’s where our higher “human” functions come from. The cerebral cortex is also the area that becomes damaged, shrinks and dies in the process of Alzheimer’s Disease, which would obviously be an extreme case of brain fog.
For optimal performance on a day to day basis, the cortex requires the appropriate amount of “arousal” to keep it stimulated in a positive fashion. This can also be called eustress: the right amount of stress which is healthy and promotes learning and growth. When the cortex becomes overstimulated, or over-stressed, this is called distress and has a negative impact on its function and performance. Finding balance is the key.
Arousal is a term that can be used to describe a level of physiological activity in the body leading to activation of the cortex, because all roads lead to brain. The inverted-U theory states that as arousal increases, so too does performance, up to a point where further increases in arousal cause performance to decrease (see graph).
The challenge with modern day society is that we’re over-stimulated, most of the time, beyond the point of optimum performance for the brain. Especially when we’re setting big challenges for ourselves with high expectations, or simply trying make ends meet. Either end of that challenge spectrum eventually ends in burn out unless managed properly. As the curve begins to dip over the other side, signs and symptoms of stress start to manifest in the form of pain, skin or gut problems, fatigue, moodiness or brain fog. And then if cortex is pushed too far, anxiety and panic set in.
The trouble with an “unofficial diagnosis” like brain fog is that it presents with “unofficial symptoms”, from “unofficial causes” like an over-stimulated cortex, which obviously won’t be detected in a blood test. So how do we figure it all out and correct the problem? As the Germans would say: We have ways and means. Read more