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Headstart 2018: A New Year Full of Health
After the dust of Christmas settles…
…and the confetti of New Year has been swept from the streets, you may be feeling slightly burnt out. The holiday season, for all its fun, is a hectic time of the year. As we are uprooted from our normal routine, stress tends to accumulate in the body and mind. This stress manifests itself physically; mental stress is directly linked to muscle tension, which can pull the spine out of alignment. What’s more, higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol contribute to inflammation. This is hardly a good recipe for the start of 2018.
A Holiday Full of Natural Pain Relief
This holiday season, focus on natural pain relief
You are halfway through a marathon day of cooking with family that will culminate in the first of three consecutive nights of holiday dinner parties. You haven’t been able to exercise or stretch and now your back is throwing you a curve ball. The last thing you need is a stiff, sore back as you try to enjoy dinner with family and friends. So you do what anyone in your position would: reach for the ibuprofen or aspirin. The problem in this scenario is that you are only treating the surface symptom- which is the pain, and waylaying it til a later time. In this scenario, you will have to keep taking painkillers to fend off the pain.
When Holidays Spells Back Pain: Don’t let your Spine Jeopardize your Holiday Travel Plans
Sitting in ill-designed chairs for hours on end is a nightmare for people with back pain.
The holidays offer many of us the chance to take off from home, whether in car, plane or train, to visit family and friends in far flung places. But for people with chronic back pain, the thought of hours spent in the car or stuck on a plane causes trepidation. When it comes to the cheer of Christmas, the last thing we want our patients to be thinking about is the pain in their back.
Spinal Health: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
What gift could be better than a healthy spine?
If you are looking for a gift for a loved one this holiday season, whether they be old or young, an awareness of spinal health is one of the best gifts you can give. Chances are, anyone over the age of 30 is going to have experienced back pain. A recent study from the Gallup-Palmer College of Chiropractic interviewed more than 6,000 people over the age of 18, and 63% of them acknowledged having experienced back pain bad enough that they sought medical help. Us ailing adults aside, what’s going on with the spines of our youth? As we move rapidly into the future, young spines are under more threat than ever.
Sports-related Sciatica: an All-natural Approach to Healing
Weight lifting and lower back pain go hand in hand
Building muscle is important for just about every sport. But lifting is one of the worst motions for your spine; when you add larger weights into the equation, the risk only increases. A further factor that can aggravate lower back pain is insufficiency in the core muscles which stabilize the spinal segments in the lower back and prevent any slippage of the vertebrae from occurring. If you then lift with poor posture, you are setting yourself up for lower back pain due to nerve compression caused by vertebrae moving out of position.
When the nerve-under-compression in question is the sciatic nerve, serious problems can ensue
As you find in our last blog here, sciatic nerve pain is insidious: it comes in many forms. But there is a simple way you can determine if you may be suffering from sciatic nerve compression using the straight-leg raise. Grab yourself an exercise band, then lay flat on the floor. Using the exercise band around the bottom of your foot, raise your leg, making sure to keep your knee straight. If this causes pain in the lower back, or other sciatica symptoms, give our office in Fremont a call to find out how we can start fighting back against sciatica today.
A You-Specific Plan for Sciatica
Sciatica is a silent killer
And while the root problem is similar in all cases, sciatica is experienced in a variety of ways. For some the pain may be dull, for others it is sharp; some people experience it nearly constantly and others infrequently. But there are certain characteristics that can clearly help you determine whether it is sciatica that has got you down:
- Localized pain in the back, buttocks and hips
- Radiating pain
- Numbness, burning and tingling in the extremities
- Weakness in the legs
- Lost range of motion
Why We Design Treatments Specifically for your Spine
Back pain is a more complex phenomenon than the traditional narrative has led us to believe.
Back pain is so much more than the acute effect of an injury. Conditions such as chronic non-specific lower back pain have shown us that back pain is a complex problem, involving your musculoskeletal health, biomechanical function, and neurological perception of pain. No matter what is causing your back pain, you will agree that it is a bane on your well-being. Extricating yourself from the throes of back pain should therefore be a primary health objective for any adult who wants to live a longer, healthier life.
Reading in Bed Without Hurting Your Back
Reading in bed is the ultimate way to relax
Likewise watching Netflix or other forms of television in bed provide a much needed way to unwind. No one would argue that getting in your comfy clothes and submerging yourself under the covers is one of the best ways to relax. In fact, as practitioners of holistic wellness, we believe that true relaxation is a cornerstone of well being. But it is always worth investigating whether your relaxation is taking a toll on your spine. Unless you put time and effort into perfecting your bed’s ergonomic set up, you could actually be causing damage to your spine as you relax.
Sacral Insufficiency Fracture: What You Need to Know
There is nothing worse than a mysterious pain in the backside
Sacral insufficiency fractures can cause exactly that- pain without a seeming rhyme or reason. The unfortunate truth is that you don’t need to be involved in a car accident, have a serious fall, or sustain any kind of trauma to the back to start feeling symptoms of pain in the sacrum. “Sacral insufficiency fractures,” are stress fractures that result from normal stress on a structurally weakened bone.
Easing the Pain in your Tailbone
The tailbone is one of the most unfortunate places to experience pain
The coccyx, better known as the tailbone, has such a crucial location, and is used for so many activities throughout the day, that it is bound to cause a disproportionate amount of pain. Typical causes of pain in the tailbone, also known as coccydynia, include:
- Traumatic injury to the coccyx
- Prolonged sitting
- Degeneration of the vertebral joints
- Vaginal childbirth
No matter what is causing it, pain in the tailbone can make the simple act of sitting an unbearable torture. It often causes pain during activities such as sex, defecation and menstruation. Most cases of coccydynia will resolve themselves in a matter of weeks, but here’s what you can do in the meantime:
- Avoid activities which exacerbate the pain
- Sit on a cushion with a cut-out beneath the coccyx, or a donut-shaped pillow. Wedge pillows also ease pain and discomfort.
- Use heat and ice
- OTC painkillers including ibuprofen to combat inflammation