The Health Benefits of Honey Go Far Beyond Soothing a Sore Throat…

8 Aug

Most people have experienced the soothing effects of sipping on a warm cup of tea with honey while suffering from a cold, but the health benefits of honey extend beyond relieving the ache of a sore throat. Here are a few facts about honey:

  • There are over 300 different types of honey in the United States Variations come from the different types of flowers from which the bees collect their pollen. A few of the different types are, buckwheat, orange blossom, tupelo, wildflower, sage, blueberry, alfalfa, clover, and eucalyptus. Different floral sources result in an array of colors and flavors ranging from light and mild in flavor to dark and robust.
  • Honey may hold the key to finding new antibiotics. Researchers have discovered that bees create a protein called defensin-1 that they add to the honey. Scientist hope that the same compounds in honey can one day be used to “treat burns and skin infections and to develop new drugs that could combat antibiotic-resistant infections.”
  • Honey contains antioxidants. Eating foods with antioxidant properties is important because “Antioxidants— substances that slow the oxidation of other substances—counter the toxic effects of free radicals, which can cause DNA damage that can lead to age-related problems such as arthritis, strokes, and cancer.”

So, if you are interested in adding honey to your diet, there are a few things to keep in mind… Honey should never be given to an infant under twelve months old. Look for local honey sources (farmers markets are a good place to start), but know that unprocessed honey can cause an allergic reaction. And if you have a bee hive in or around your home, know that calling a professional to move the colony to a safe place for both bees and people is an option.

There Are Miracles Performed Every Day!

4 Aug

There is no doubt that we live in a very turbulent time.  If you open the newspaper, go online, or turn on the television, the news typically only shows the darkest side of society.  You’ve heard the term, “If it bleeds, it leads.” News editors know that ratings (and their profits) go up the more they focus on violence, mass shootings, racism, and hatred.

But while a lot of bad stuff happens in the word, there is also much, much, much more good occurring at the same time.  Here is a perfect example…

On April 28th, 2016 an incredible act of heroism took place and you probably didn’t see it on the news.  It was posted on Facebook and was shared tens of thousands of times at the time this article went to press.

Nicole Morgan was out with a friend and her six-year-old son, Mickey, buying sunglasses when she put her bag on her shoulder and felt a sensation like she had been burnt with a hot poker.  She had just been stung by a bee.

It was not a big deal.  She had been stung before.  She was not allergic as far as she knew, and she scraped off the stinger that was still in her shoulder.

They stopped in another store, and that’s when things started going bad…

She was disoriented, having trouble breathing, and could not move. She thought she was going to die. Panic had set it, and it was the panic on her son’s face that may have saved her life. Here are her exact words as posted on Facebook about what happened next…

“That was of course until another man came running towards me and knelt down next to me and asked what had happened and if he could help. I told him that I had been stung by a bee and that I needed to get to the hospital and then I became unconscious (this took all of about 4 minutes from the start of the anaphylactic shock in Pick n Pay to the point where I became unconscious in the walk way at Cedar Square). This man was Obakeng Seutane. He dispersed the crowd that had gathered around me and put my hands behind my head to help open up my constricted wind pipe and then calmed my son down. He then told Mikey that he was going to take me to the hospital and got me up with the help of another man and carried/dragged me down the passage towards his car. He put me in the backseat and strapped me in (God only knows how, as I was still unconscious throughout). He put my son into the front seat, introduced himself and explained to Mikey that he was going to have to drive very fast to get his mom to the hospital (Life Hospital). Once there, I was put into a wheel chair and taken to emergency where I was administered adrenaline shot, after adrenaline shot, after adrenaline shot into my chest and various different antihistamines.”

After a lot of treatment, things got better. She wrote,  “Although I had ‘regained consciousness’, I am unable to recall anything at all from the time I fell unconscious at Cedar Square until I woke up in ICU at 19:30 that night and remember thinking to myself, Wowee, I am actually here! I am alive!!! All thanks to my son, whose terrified face caught Obakeng’s eye as he was walking past on his way to gym with his earphones on and decided that we needed his help!”

Nowadays, people tend to walk around while looking down at their smart phone and when they notice someone who needs help, they move along thinking someone else will step up. Perhaps this story will inspire more people to pay attention to their surroundings and offer aid when it’s needed.

We love helping our patients and their friends and relatives through their tough times and getting them feeling better! We are here to help you stay feeling better and looking younger! Don’t be a stranger. You really can afford Chiropractic care! Don’t wait until you can no longer move!

Study Shows Many People with Migraines Have These Vitamin Deficiencies…

2 Aug

You are what you eat.  We’ve all heard that statement over the years.  And it makes complete sense since the foods you consume are the building blocks your body uses to create its cells.

Eat junk and your body struggles to do its job.  It has to work harder just to keep you healthy— much less perform optimally.  Eat a poor diet long enough and you can develop any number of diseases and quite possibly shorten your life.

Eat the right nutrients and your body has a much easier time keeping you healthy, energetic, and feeling great.

However, this does not mean that if you eat correctly, then you will never get sick. There are a lot of other factors that play a role in your longevity. But if you do eat right, then you’re giving yourself a much better chance at living a long and healthy life.

As obvious as this sounds, until recently, nutrition was often misunderstood and completely overlooked by doctors and scientists studying the disease process.  Believe it or not, many “experts” used to say nutrition played little to no role in many health issues and diseases.

It was common to hear sayings like, “Supplements are a complete waste—they are nothing more than expensive urine.”

While some are still ignorant as to the importance of proper nutrition, most doctors and researchers today understand the power of eating correctly and getting your body all the nutrients it needs.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for top athletes to hire nutrition specialists to design their diet so as to optimize their training, recovery, and performance.

On the other end of the spectrum, researchers are finding that improving the diet of the sick can help improve their quality of life and ability to function on a day to day basis.

For example, a team of researchers at the  Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have found that a high percentage of children, teens, and young adults who suffer from migraines appear to have mild deficiencies in vitamin D, riboflavin, and coenzyme Q10.

In particular, they discovered that patients in the study with more severe riboflavin and coenzyme Q10 deficiencies were more likely to have more than 15 migraine episodes per month.

Dr. Suzanne Hagler, a Headache Medicine fellow in the division of Neurology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and lead author of the study writes, “Further studies are needed to elucidate whether vitamin supplementation is effective in migraine patients in general, and whether patients with mild deficiency are more likely to benefit from supplementation.”

While putting the right foods into your body is important, you also need to know that putting the right thoughts into your head may be just as important.

Why?

Because having a positive mental attitude is one of the best things you can do to stay healthy and feel great.

There is plenty of evidence that stress makes you sick.  In others words…

Stress Kills

But relieving stress is not as easy as eating properly.  Eating properly is about willpower.  Once you know what the proper foods are for you, you can stick to it.

Stress is a different ball game.  Many times, reactions to environmental stimuli have become practiced behavior and occur automatically— without you thinking about it or making a conscious decision.

Some top animal behaviorists believe that when a dog is aggressive and blows up at another animal or dog, they get a surge of dopamine.  Dopamine is very addictive, and these dogs seek out this “dopamine fix” in the future.

What’s worse is, just the sight or smell of another dog can trigger the dopamine surge and the aggressive behavior.  This is not a cognitive process by the dog.  In other words, the dog doesn’t decide to be aggressive, he is a slave to the effect of dopamine.

Of course, humans are not dogs, but many believe humans go through similar processes.

It seems as through when humans experience their stress triggers, chemical reactions take place to produce stress.

This is why just yelling at a dog or a person to calm down is not the answer.  It is not that easy.

What’s the answer?  Your perception of the stimuli or event must be modified.

World famous exotic animal trainer and behaviorist Kayce Cover has developed a technique to do this for dogs called, “Perception Modification.”  It deals with completely changing the way dogs view a trigger so they no longer react, have stress, fear, anxiety, and aggression.

Humans need to do the same thing.  We must not try to just deal with the things we do not like. We must change the way we perceive them so we actually like them.  As Wayne Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Don’t forget, if you ever have any questions or concerns about your health, talk to us. Contact us with your questions. We’re here to help and don’t enjoy anything more than participating in providing you natural pain relief.

Do Thoughts Really Shape Reality?

1 Aug

While some believe that our thoughts shape our reality 100% without question, others say beliefs like that have no place in the real world.  Whichever camp you may be in on this topic, here is some information you may find interesting and helpful…

New research shows that sad music is not “sad” to everyone.  In fact, researchers found that sad music can provide either enjoyment, comfort, or pain to different people.

The study surveyed 2,436 people in the United Kingdom and Finland.  The participants identified reasons for listening to sad music, emotions they felt, and memorable events linked to the music.

Researchers said the majority of participants focused on the pleasurable aspects of the sad music.  In other words, the sad music had a positive impact on their emotional state and improved their mood.

However, researchers also found that some people associate painful experiences such as a divorce, a bad break up, the death of a loved one, or other depressing events with sad music.

One researcher wrote:

Previous research in music psychology and film studies has emphasized the puzzling pleasure that people experience when engaging with tragic art.

However, there are people who absolutely hate sad-sounding music and avoid listening to it. In our research, we wanted to investigate this wide spectrum of experiences that people have with sad music, and find reasons for both listening to and avoiding that kind of music.

The results help us to pinpoint the ways people regulate their mood with the help of music, as well as how music rehabilitation and music therapy might tap into these processes of comfort, relief, and enjoyment.

The findings also have implications for understanding the paradoxical nature of enjoyment of negative emotions within the arts and fiction.

What does all this have to do with thoughts shaping reality?

One way to interpret these results may be to say that pleasure and pain are relative.  In other words, the same stimulus can cause pleasure or pain depending on how the person perceives the stimulus.  In this case, the same sad songs make some people sad and others happy.  It seems like it’s all about how you look at something and not what that something is that makes the difference.

So, do thoughts really shape reality?  We will leave that up to you.  But it looks like they might have at least some impact on it.

Sincerely,

Dr. Binder

Whiplash: What’s the “Best Evidence” These Days?

28 Jul

Whiplash, or WAD (Whiplash Associated Disorders), refers to a neck injury where the normal range of motion is exceeded, resulting in injury to the soft-tissues (hopefully with no fractures) in the cervical region. There are a LOT of factors involved that enter into the degree of injury and length of healing time. Let’s take a closer look!

Picture the classic rear-end collision. The incident itself may be over within 300 milliseconds (msec), which is why it’s virtually impossible to brace yourself effectively for the crash as a typical voluntary muscle contraction takes two to three times longer (800-1000 msec) to accomplish.

In the first 50 msec, the force of the rear-end collision pushes the vehicle (and the torso of the body) forwards leaving the head behind so the cervical spine straightens out from its normal “C-shape” (or lordosis). By 75-100 msec, the lower part of the neck extends or becomes more C-shaped while the upper half flexes or moves in an opposite direction creating an “S” shape to the neck. Between 150-200msec, the whole neck hyper extends and the head may hit the head rest IF the headrest is positioned properly. In the last 200-300 msec, the head is propelled forwards into flexion in a “crack the whip” type of motion.

Injury to the neck may occur at various stages of this very fast process, and many factors determine the degree of injury such as a smaller car being hit by a larger car, the impact direction, the position of the head upon impact (worse if turned), if the neck is tall and slender vs. short and muscular, the angle and “springiness” of the seat back and relative position of the headrest, dry vs. wet/slippery pavement, and airbag deployment, just to name a few.

Some other factors that can predict recovery include: limited neck motion, the presence of neurological loss (nerve specific muscle weakness and/or numbness/tingling), high initial pain levels (>5/10 on a 0-10 scale), high disability scores on questionnaires, overly fearful of harming oneself with usual activity and/or work, depressive symptoms, post-traumatic stress, poor coping skills, headaches, back pain, widespread or whole body pain, dizziness, negative expectation of recovery, pending litigation, catastrophizing, age (older is worse), and poor pre-collision health (both mental and physical).

Research shows the best outcomes occur when patients are assured that most people fully recover and when patients stay active and working as much as possible. Studies have shown it’s best to avoid prolonged inactivity and cervical collars unless under a doctor’s orders. It’s also a good idea to gradually introduce exercises aimed at improving range of motion, postural endurance, and motor control provided doing so keeps the patient within reasonable pain boundaries. Chiropractic manipulation restores movement in fixed or stuck joints in the back and neck and has been found to help significantly with neck pain and headaches, particularly for patients involved in motor vehicle collisions. A doctor of chiropractic may also recommend using a cervical pillow, home traction, massage, and other therapies as part of the recovery process.

It is important to be aware that fear of normal activity and not engaging in usual activities and work can delay healing and promote chronic problems and long-term disability. It’s suggested patients avoid opioid medication use due to the addictive problems with such drugs. Ice and anti-inflammatory herbs or nutrients (like ginger, turmeric, and bioflavonoids) are safer options. Your doctor of chiropractic can guide you in this process!

We realize you have a choice in whom you consider for your health care provision and we sincerely appreciate your trust in choosing our service for those needs.  If you, a friend, or family member requires care for Whiplash, we would be honored to render our services.

My Baby Has Colic – Can Chiropractic Help?

27 Jul

There is NOTHING quite so troubling to a young couple as a crying baby who can’t be settled down, especially if the infant is their first child! One of the leading causes of a distressed baby is colic—at least, this is probably the condition blamed the most for cranky baby behavior!

WHAT IS COLIC? By definition, the term “colic” applies to any healthy, well-nourished baby who cries more than three hours a day, three days a week, for more than three weeks. Colic remains a bit of a mystery. (Perhaps if a baby could speak, he or she might tell us their stomach hurts, they’re constipated, or something else.)

Colic usually starts when an infant is about two weeks old if the child was carried to full-term; however, for a premature baby, colic may manifest later on. Colic often self-limits or resolves on its own by month three or four. Whether or not a child is breast fed doesn’t appear to have any effect on colic, and there are no identifiable difference in older kids who had vs. didn’t have colic when they were babies.

WHAT CAUSES COLIC? As stated above, the exact cause is not well understood, which according to WEB-MD is why there is “no clear way to help it”. Here are some “theories” on causation: a growing digestive system, gas, hormone changes, noise or other sensory oversensitivity or overstimulation, a “moody” baby, and/or an immature or still developing nervous system.

RULE OUT OTHER ISSUES: Make sure there is no infection (check the baby’s temperature), acid reflux or stomach conditions, brain or nervous system pressure, eye problems, irregular heartbeat, or injury to muscles, bones, or to the extremities. Observe your baby for irritability, rubbing eyes, pulling on ears, and look for redness, rash, or other skin changes.

IS THERE A TREATMENT? Common attempts or methods a parent can try at home include using a pacifier, changing the baby’s formula, alternate between breast feeding and formula, minimize air swallowing when feeding (try a bottle nipple with a smaller hole), soothing background music, singing to the baby,  white noise or another type of sound machine, the sound and perhaps vibration of a clothes dryer or washer (but DON’T put the baby directly on the machine!), a vacuum cleaner sound, rocking the baby, a baby carrier that holds the baby over your chest, a baby swing, a musical mobile over the crib, switch off holding the baby when you feel stressed out, and when all else fails, place the baby in your car and drive around – as long as you’re not so tired that you risk falling asleep at the wheel!

Had enough? Bring the baby to a chiropractor! Gentle techniques work great for most babies with colic! One technique described in research studies has to do with gentle manipulation of the mid-thoracic region, as that region of the spine includes the nerves that innervate the stomach area. In MOST cases, only a few treatments are needed before parents observe improvement in their child’s symptoms. If possible, both parents should observe the procedure as it frequently “gets lost in translation” when trying to explain to the other spouse what took place. Infrequently, if results fall short of satisfying, the TEAM approach between your MD and DC may be best for everyone involved!

We realize you have a choice in whom you consider for your health care provision and we sincerely appreciate your trust in choosing our service for those needs.  If you, a friend, or family member requires care, we would be honored to render our services.

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