Active Family Chiropractic

Empowering Your Health

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Heat Management & Hydration

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It’s summer, time for BBQs and playing outside. It’s also the hottest time of the year. It’s important to think of your heat management and hydration.

Can CBP Help with Heat Management?

In Corrective Chiropractic care (CBP), the goal is to get your spine as close to structurally normal as possible, which keeps the least amount of pressure on your nervous system. Your nervous system controls your whole body. It controls your circulatory system, your vascular system (your veins and arteries), it controls all of the messages in your body, so just about every cell in your body is controlled by your nervous system, which is encased in your spine.

In terms of heat management, your thyroid gland has a lot to do with heat control. People who have thyroid problems they are either too hot all the time or too cold, there’s no in-between for them. A lot of times people who have nerve compression to the nerves that control the thyroid gland or to the kidneys, which have a lot to do with water and hydration, if they have any pressure on those nerves and those nerves are not working at 100%, there is potential for problems.

What about hydration?

This time of the year, when it’s super hot out people are reaching for cold beverages, that aren’t necessarily water. They may be going for an iced coffee, iced tea, or a frozen drink, which is essentially ice, sugar, and potentially dairy. During hotter times, people could be reaching for ice and alcoholic beverages such as beer, because they think it cools them down. In fact, drinking something cold when you’re hot is counter-intuitive, because it can actually cause your body to shut down. If you’re hot you should be drinking luke-warm water or a luke-warm beverage. Beverages like coffee, tea, beer, and other alcoholic beverages take water out of your cells, which makes you more dehydrated. In order to stay hydrated, you want to steer away from these on hot days.

In order to stay hydrated, you need to consume about half your body weight in ounces. If you decide to have coffee or iced tea or even a beer make sure that you drink an additional 8-12 ounces of water per drink to counteract the dehydration effects of caffeine and/or alcohol. Also, make sure to add more water also if you are sweating.

How can dehydration effect me?

If you become dehydrated you will have the potential for your body’s systems to stop or to slow down. This can cause mental confusion, headaches, generalized aches and pains, and lethargy. It can also lead to kidney failure or diabetes if you don’t have enough water.

Along with water, it is important to have an electrolyte balance in your water. If you use a water source like a Britta, which filters out everything from your water, you can go to your health food store and by mineral drops, which you can add to your water. Make sure to stay away from drinks like Gatorade which is basically sugared colored water with salt, it does not have enough active electrolytes to be effective.

You can also find electrolytes in the foods you eat, such as bananas, oranges, and spinach. You want to look for foods that contain potassium, magnesium, and sodium. Eating these foods can help to replace lost electrolytes as well.

Taking care of your spine can help you manage the heat better.

If your nervous system, at the get-go, isn’t working well, because you are not getting your spine adjusted by a CBP chiropractor and you’re not having enough hydration on top of that, you’re going to have a really hard time managing heat. However, if you have regular CBP adjustments and drink a good source of water with electro-lights, you’ll find that you’ll be able to tolerate the heat much better than you had before.

Why Won’t My Child Sit Up Straight?

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All of us has been told as a kid to sit up straight. Did you find it impossible to do? It always seemed more comfortable to slouch, doesn’t it? However, you always see parents telling their children to sit up straight.

Why won’t my Child Sit up Straight?

A child won’t sit up straight for a number of reasons. Usually, it’s because the child has something wrong with the structure of their spine. Because of that, it is impossible for them to sit up straight, no matter how much you try to encourage them to do so. A lot of the habits they do every day, such as using handheld devices, playing video games, sitting slumped at school, all those things can lead to bad posture habits. However, usually, they stem from the structure itself, because we know structural abnormalities start in-utero. They can also happen at birth.

That is why we encourage parents to have their babies and children spinally assessed because they are acquiring subluxations at birth which can influence their posture, which can then influence how they present themselves later on in life as young children, teenagers, and adults.

Are there any exercises that my child can do to help them sit up straighter?

You want to encourage your children to have good posture as they are growing. However, most adults don’t know what good posture is. You see it every day. Parents let their children sit slumped while playing games or using their handheld device for hours on end and don’t realize that this is bad for them. The first step is to understand what normal is and the only way to know what normal is is to see a CBP chiropractor and get a check-up. Regardless of whether or not they have pain every person should have a spinal check-up because that is how you learn what “normal” is. That is how you learn how to identify good posture versus bad posture, not only in yourself but in others.

Is there potential for a child’s growth to be stunted from poor posture habits?

Yes, you can see that the child may grow unevenly. One leg could be longer than the other or their bones will grow in the direction of which they are slumping. Now we’re seeing because of the influx of handheld devices, forward head position on a lot of young children that never existed before. Because these kids have never spent so much time looking at these devices before, it’s actually pulling their head forward and creating structural changes. This is something that previously had only been seen in adults.

How can we correct this?

The first thing to do would be to bring your children to see a CBP Chiropractor for a check-up. Having an understanding of how your child’s spine is structured is very important to identify any structural abnormalities. Knowing to restrict time on handheld devices and encouraging your children to have good posture should be in addition to your CBP care, so make an appointment today.

For more information contact Dr. B @ [email protected]

Is My Spinal Condition Genetic?

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Is my spinal condition genetic?

Have you ever wondered if you were predisposed to a certain health because of your genetics? Unfortunately, new studies have found that your health issues may be influenced by your environment rather than your genetics.

Some spinal conditions are genetic. Very few though, only 10% of the overall diseases are genetic. There is a new branch of science called Epigenetics, and they’re studying gene strands, not just the genetic sequences. They are looking at breaking every person down to their gene sequences and they are discovering that just like your DNA is individualized, that the patterns of the genes are also individualized. So the chances of a parent passing down a genetic disease are very rare. However, we do see that there are 10% of disease processes that are genetically traceable.

What diseases do CBP Chiropractors look at?

In the CBP Chiropractic world, we look at some of the common ones like scoliosis, which has a genetic component to it. Rheumatoid (an autoimmune disease that affects the joints), metabolic (include diseases such as gout are directly or indirectly the result of infections), and psoriatic (which can develop from psoriasis) arthritis have genetic components to them. Most cancers and things like that have no genetic disposition. So spinal things aren’t passed down from generation to generation but we do also see is that posture habits exist.

What are some of the factors that cause my condition?

So you’re all sitting on the same crappy chairs as your parents that need to be replaced or you’re sleeping on hand-me-down furniture because it was given to you by your grandparents. Those choices that you make, whether it be through your spinal care, your diet, your exercise, whatever your parents do, they influence what you do as an adult. That’s how you start to see those spinal degeneration patterns come in.

For example, people with high blood pressure may think it’s genetic, however, it is because you were not exposed to a proper diet as a child and you may have had a diet full of salt and now you’re having trouble. Or your parents smoked around you, so now your arteries are already calcified, that was not your choice. Most of these issues are environmental or it’s self-inflicted, that is where most of these disease processes come from, except for 10%. People can’t blame their “genetics” anymore for the ills of their own health.

Can I reverse years of poor habits?

It all starts with a visit to your CBP Chiropractor. Once you have had a check-up the doctor will be able to identify what has been causing your spinal issues and develop a strategy to help you optimize your health, naturally. Living a healthy lifestyle, eating right and exercising can also help you to reverse some of the damage done. Either way, it is best to meet with a CBP doctor and start your path to health.

For more information talk to Dr. B at [email protected]

 

How does CBP Chiropractic care help Allergies?

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Spring is right around the corner, fingers crossed, and with it comes blooming flowers and trees…and allergies. Did you know that seeing a CBP chiropractor can help alleviate your allergies, naturally? It’s true!

So how can a CBP chiropractor help my allergies?

CBP chiropractic care helps to increase nervous system stimulation from the brain to the body. There are many people who suffer from allergies because of compression of their spinal cord at the very top, at the brain stem.

When someone comes into a CBP office with allergies, the doctor will see a subluxation at C1, which is the first vertebra, the top bone in the neck. The C2 controls sinus function. So, people who suffer from sinus infections, allergies, or hay fever type could have a subluxation in that area. The lower neck area of the spinal cord controls the lungs. When people struggle with scratchy lungs and coughs it can usually be pointed to a subluxation in that area.

What is an allergy?

Ultimately, an allergy is an overreaction of your immune system to a stimulus. For some reason, your immune system is finding a stimulus incredibly aggravating to your body. And what usually starts off those things is exposure at a young age, before your immune system is developed. We get exposed to a lot of things, as babies, that we shouldn’t be exposed to, and because of that, we develop an intolerance later on in life to those items.

If you look at the very common peanut allergy, one of the reasons for that is because they started putting peanut oil into vaccines as a filler because it became cheap. Therefore, babies were exposed to peanuts before their immune systems were ready to handle it and they ended up developing an overstimulation reaction to it. That’s where that allergy stems from.

However, an allergy, in general, is your immune system overreacting to something for some reason. It usually is because your nerves are malfunctioning, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it could be because you were exposed to something at a young age that you were not ready for, that your body was not ready for and now it marks it as a toxin.

Can allergies happen at any time or do they only develop while you’re a baby?

Sometimes people develop allergies later on in life, because of over-exposure. For example, if someone eats too much gluten throughout their lives they can later become intolerant to it because they’ve had too much of it their bodies throughout their whole lives. However, keep in mind if you have bad nervous system flow, then you’re going to be allergic to things that other people might not be, who were exposed to the same stimulus.

It is important that people realize that they can help prevent some allergies. If you have babies, who you are making decisions for, you have to realize the implications of giving them thousands of doses of vaccines before their immune systems are developed. That means they are being exposed to things that their bodies are not ready to handle.

Is there something that can be done for allergy relief?

Getting regular adjustments by your CBP doctor will help increase your nerve system flow and minimize your reactions. Regular CBP adjustments can keep your nervous system subluxation free to flow uninterrupted and deal with overstimulation more quickly.

Have you been suffering from allergies and want a holistic way to “deal” with them? Find a CBP chiropractor like Dr. B who can help alleviate those subluxations that are causing your allergies.

For more information send an email to Dr. B @ [email protected]

 

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