Advanced Family Chiropractic

Dr. Robert Berry

Health

IF I get adjusted once, do I have to continue?

|

Ask Your Chiropractor

HOW is that a bad thing? Anyone who has experienced chiropractic care would gladly get adjusted for the rest of their lives.

I’m not sure about you, but when I had my first haircut, I was never told that in order to keep my hair looking neat and well-kept, I would have to keep returning for haircuts for the rest of my life.

If you started to exercise today, for how many years would you need to continue exercising in order to maintain a good level of fitness?

If you started to eat healthy today, how long would you need to continue to eat well in order to maintain a healthy figure and healthy digestive system?

If you started thinking positive today, would you need to continue doing so in order to be an overall positive person?

If you slept for 24 hours one day, could you stay up for the next three days, and still feel great and be healthy?

Is it necessary to keep brushing and flossing your teeth for as long as you live? No. Unless you care to keep your teeth.

You can survive without ever bathing again, but, your life and the lives of those around you will be healthier and more amicable if you practice good hygiene on a regular ongoing basis for the rest of your life.

So, truly, the answer to this question must come from each individual’s decision on whether or not they feel it is an important part of their healthy lifestyle. That decision is ultimately up to you.

As a chiropractor, I make exactly the same recommendations to each of my patrons as I would to any member of my family. In order for you to be stronger and healthier, chiropractic adjustments are a regular part of your lifestyle. And, just like the other lifestyle choices I mentioned, the more consistent and committed you can be, the better the health outcome will be proportionately. I will be adjusting my daughter, my wife, and will be getting myself adjusted on a regular basis for the rest of our lives. I know that because of it, we will be healthier and stronger. It is up to you to decide what you want to do with my recommendations, and whether or not you choose to apply them to your own life.

It amazes me that people will spend thousands of dollars on something as material as a vehicle to upkeep its maintenance, but do not value their own bodies and lives equally (or more), to provide it with the essential preventative maintenance that it needs to function and produce for the rest of your life.

Your body provides you with things most people take for granted, on a daily basis. Just ask my patrons who were restricted to wheelchairs. Don’t you owe it to your body to maintain it the best way that you (and your chiropractor) possibly can?

You are only as healthy as your spine and nervous system. What spine would you like to have five years from now? Or 10 or 15 years from now? The choice is yours. Chiropractic care can help you achieve your short- and long-term goals.

You can live for weeks without food and days without water. What most people take for granted is that you will not live at all, for any amount of time, without your nervous system “alive and kicking”. And a gradual deterioration of your nervous system would be like slowly starving or dehydrating yourself. It is just a matter of time before function and life cease. Both the quantity and, more importantly, quality of your life depends ultimately on the state of your nervous system. It is high time that you decided to take better care of yours. Be proactive and see your chiropractor today, and continue to see them regularly, as well as indefinitely.

Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood

|

THERE are plenty of reasons to put our cellphones down now and then, not least the fact that incessantly checking them takes us out of the present moment and disrupts family dinners around the globe. But here’s one you might not have considered: Smartphones are ruining our posture. And bad posture doesn’t just mean a stiff neck. It can hurt us in insidious psychological ways.

If you’re in a public place, look around: How many people are hunching over a phone? Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the iHunch. I’ve also heard people call it text neck, and in my work I sometimes refer to it as iPosture.

The average head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds. When we bend our necks forward 60 degrees, as we do to use our phones, the effective stress on our neck increases to 60 pounds — the weight of about five gallons of paint. When Mr. August started treating patients more than 30 years ago, he says he saw plenty of “dowagers’ humps, where the upper back had frozen into a forward curve, in grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” Now he says he’s seeing the same stoop in teenagers.

When we’re sad, we slouch. We also slouch when we feel scared or powerless. Studies have shown that people with clinical depression adopt a posture that eerily resembles the iHunch. One, published in 2010 in the official journal of the Brazilian Psychiatric Association, found that depressed patients were more likely to stand with their necks bent forward, shoulders collapsed and arms drawn in toward the body.

Posture and Emotional State

Posture doesn’t just reflect our emotional states; it can also cause them. In a study published in Health Psychology earlier this year, Shwetha Nair and her colleagues assigned non-depressed participants to sit in an upright or slouched posture and then had them answer a mock job-interview question, a well-established experimental stress inducer, followed by a series of questionnaires. Compared with upright sitters, the slouchers reported significantly lower self-esteem and mood, and much greater fear. Posture affected even the contents of their interview answers: Linguistic analyses revealed that slouchers were much more negative in what they had to say. The researchers concluded, “Sitting upright may be a simple behavioral strategy to help build resilience to stress.”

Slouching can also affect our memory: In a study published last year in Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy of people with clinical depression, participants were randomly assigned to sit in either a slouched or an upright position and then presented with a list of positive and negative words. When they were later asked to recall those words, the slouchers showed a negative recall bias (remembering the bad stuff more than the good stuff), while those who sat upright showed no such bias. And in a 2009 study of Japanese schoolchildren, those who were trained to sit with upright posture were more productive than their classmates in writing assignments.

How else might iHunching influence our feelings and behaviors? My colleague Maarten W. Bos and I have done preliminary research on this. We randomly assigned participants to interact for five minutes with one of four electronic devices that varied in size: a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop and a desktop computer. We then looked at how long subjects would wait to ask the experimenter whether they could leave, after the study had clearly concluded. We found that the size of the device significantly affected whether subjects felt comfortable seeking out the experimenter, suggesting that the slouchy, collapsed position we take when using our phones actually makes us less assertive — less likely to stand up for ourselves when the situation calls for it.

Smaller Phones Are Worse

In fact, there appears to be a linear relationship between the size of your device and the extent to which it affects you: the smaller the device, the more you must contract your body to use it, and the more shrunken and inward your posture, the more submissive you are likely to become.

Actually design a device around the human body and to be ergonomic in the first place, instead of changing the designs…

Despite all this, we rely on our mobile devices far too much to give them up, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Fortunately, there are ways to fight the iHunch.

Keep your head up and shoulders back when looking at your phone, even if that means holding it at eye level. You can also try stretching and massaging the two muscle groups that are involved in the iHunch — those between the shoulder blades and the ones along the sides of the neck. This helps reduce scarring and restores elasticity.

Finally, the next time you reach for your phone, remember that it induces slouching, and slouching changes your mood, your memory and even your behavior. Your physical posture sculpts your psychological posture, and could be the key to a happier mood and greater self-confidence.

Amy Cuddy is a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the forthcoming book “Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.”

The Reason That Posture is So Important

|

Why is posture so important???

To most people, “good posture” simply means sitting and standing up straight. Few realize the importance of posture to health and performance.

The human body craves alignment. When we are properly aligned, our bones, not our muscles, support our weight, reducing effort and strain. The big payoff with proper posture is that we feel healthier, have more energy, and move gracefully. So while the word “posture” may conjure up images of book-balancing charm-school girls, it is not just about standing up straight. It’s about being aware of and connected to every part of your self.
Posture ranks at the top of the list when you are talking about good health. It is as important as eating right, exercising, getting proper rest and avoiding potentially harmful substances like alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. Good posture is a way of doing things with more energy, less stress and fatigue. Without good posture, you cannot really be physically fit. Without good posture, you can actually damage your spine every time you exercise.

Ideally, our bones stack up one upon the other: the head rests directly on top of the spine, which sits directly over the pelvis, which sits directly over the knees and ankles. But if you spend hours every day sitting in a chair, if you hunch forward or balance your weight primarily on one leg, the muscles of your neck and back have to carry the weight of the body rather than it being supported by the spine. The resulting tension and joint pressure can affect you not only physically, but emotionally, too, — from the predictable shoulder and back pain to headaches, short attention span, and depression.

Poor posture distorts the alignment of bones, chronically tenses muscles, and contributes to stressful conditions such as loss of vital lung capacity, increased fatigue, reduced blood and oxygen to the brain, limited range of motion, stiffness of joints, pain syndromes, reduced mental alertness, and decreased productivity at work.

According to the Nobel Laureate Dr. Roger Sperry, “the more mechanically distorted a person is, the less energy is available for thinking, metabolism, and healing.”

The most immediate problem with poor posture is that it creates a lot of chronic muscle tension as the weight of the head and upper body must be supported by the muscles instead of the bones. This effect becomes more pronounced the further your posture deviates from your body’s center of balance.

To illustrate this idea further, think about carrying a briefcase. If you had to carry a briefcase with your arms outstretched in front of you, it would not take long before the muscles of your shoulders would be completely exhausted. This is because carrying the briefcase far away from your center of balance places undue stress on your shoulder muscles. If you held the same briefcase down at your side, your muscles would not fatigue as quickly, because the briefcase is closer to your center of balance and therefore the
weight is supported by the bones of the skeleton, rather than the muscles. In some parts of the world, women can carry big pots full of water from distant water sources back to their homes. They are able to carry these heavy pots a long distance without significant effort because they balance them on the top of their heads, thereby carrying them at their center of balance and allowing the strength of their skeleton to bear the weight, rather than their muscles.

Correcting bad posture and the physical problems that result can be accomplished in two ways. The first is by eliminating as much “bad” stress from your body as possible. Bad stress includes all the factors, habits, or stressors that cause your body to deviate from your structural center. Bad stress can result from a poorly adjusted workstation at work, from not having your seat adjusted correctly in your car, or even from carrying too much weight around in a heavy purse or backpack.

The second is by applying “good” stress on the body in an effort to move your posture back toward your center of balance. This is accomplished through a series of exercises, stretches, adjustments, and changes to your physical environment, all designed to help correct your posture. Getting your body back to its center of balance by improving your posture is critically important to improving how you feel. At Advanced Family Chiropractic, We focus on your postural correction. It usually involves a complete and thorough history, exam and most likely x-rays . To see is to know… not to see is to guess !!  Feel the healing begin as you walk through our door !

How is your posture?