Sarpy Chiropractic Blog

We've been discussing a little bit lately, some of the most common things that bring people in to us with back pain and neck pain. Physically, one of the most common things is bending down to pick things up off the ground. But there's something that we find causes pain with people even more commonly than anything physical they do - emotional stress. Initially you might think that sounds kind of crazy, but think about the last time you were either really angry or really sad and how your body felt, especially when angry. Your jaw starts to clench, you feel your shoulders tighten up, you might even be making fists with your hands because your boss made you so angry or your spouse wasn't listening to you or whatever it was. Think about all the things that happen in your body when you feel those emotions. There's a lot of stuff that goes on, your body fires off certain chemicals, you get a lot of adrenaline and that makes everything more hyperactive and your muscle ...

Today, I want to address the lifelong debate - Ice or Heat? There may always be a few exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, I'm going to give you a basic guideline to follow to make the situations you find yourself in, easier. If you have a new injury or a fresh injury, maybe you rolled an ankle, bent down and felt your back twinge, or even just woke up with a neck kink, if it's new then you 100% of the time should be using ice. In a perfect world, you should be icing an injury for 15 minutes at a time, every hour.  Unfortunately, this may not be possible while leading a busy life, so focus more on icing your injury as much as you can, as the more you ice, the quicker you'll receive positive results. The reason that you don't want to use heat in those circumstances is because there's always inflammation. Where most people struggle with this is with back pain. We don't see any inflammation on our backs because there's suc...

There's a term that's been going around for the last couple of years known as "Text Neck." I'm sure a lot of you have heard it and what it means is that everyone's on their phone so much that they're constantly looking down and causing hunching in the upper back and painful neck issues. This is a problem that you want to start paying attention to immediately for the sake of your long term spinal health! There are small changes you can make that will limit a lot of the damage being caused and these changes can keep you from developing the kind of posture that will cause serious problems at an older age as well: 1.) Take breaks . Set a timer if you have to but restrict yourself from staring at your phone for hours at a time. Shorten those periods to 20 minutes when you're on your phone; try sitting in a supportive chair; or resting your phone up higher on a desk. 2.) Be aware that when your mid-back is hunched, you're causing so many other ...

Today, I want to discuss with you when you should and shouldn't get an x-ray if you're having neck and back pain. Chiropractors get asked this question a lot and we often fall in to two camps - either we blanket x-ray everything or we only x-ray when we think it's needed. Thirty or forty years ago, the standard was to automatically x-ray when you visited a chiropractor, physical therapist, or doctor. However, what research has shown us over time is, x-rays and MRI's aren't necessarily going to show us what we need to see. When it comes to back pain especially, less than 5% of problems are what we would consider a red flag. Some red flags that could cause back pain are an infection in the bones, cancer that has spread to the bones, a fracture, etc. With those, 95% of incidents will have been picked up in the original history. You as the patient will say something that triggers us, as the clinician, to recognize that your problem might not be a normal mecha...

Today, I want to share a book with you that I think should be on every healthy lifestyle reading list and that's Fat for Fuel: A Revolutionary Diet to Combat Cancer, Boost Brain Power, and Increase Your Energy by Dr. Joseph Mercola. What this book will teach you to do is to find the cleanest and most efficient fuels for your body, how to repair from the daily damage we inflict on ourselves, and how to slow down that dreadful aging process. For example, we all understand that the better gasoline you put in your car, the better it will run and function, so why not consider this same concept while eating? We are constantly fueling our bodies with fast food, sodas, artificial sweeteners, and multiple prescription drugs, yet we sit and wonder why our body isn't working correctly. There are plenty of diets out there that interest those who want to lose a few pounds or get a little healthier but that's all they are - diets. What you need to consider is a lifestyle change, a...

If you can "crack" your own neck and back, then do you need to bother seeing a Chiropractor? And, is it safe to do this to yourself? The reality is when a Chiropractor locates a part of your spine that is restricted there is a lot more specifics to it than just a "stuck" joint. The joint has lost its normal flexibility in certain directions, and there will also be a disturbance created to the nerves that pop out from the spine at that location. When a Chiropractor adjusts your spine, we are applying just the right amount of force in the specific direction necessary to get that joint mobile again. This will also essentially create a reboot of the nervous system, just like when you reboot your computer with a forced close because it keeps freezing. The reason we have to be so specific is that the joints above and below the "stuck" joint begin to move more to compensate for the lack of movement (our body is extremely clever like that), and we only wan...

If you, or someone close to you suffers from migraines then I'm sure you know and appreciate how debilitating it can be. It literally leaves people with no other choice but to lock themselves away in a dark, quiet room until the migraine passes. It is miserable! Too many sufferers are told that the only option they have is to take frequent doses of heavy medication whenever they feel their symptoms coming on. But this isn't the only option. In fact there are many natural options that have been proven to work for people over the years, so here are 5 of the most effective ones: 1. Drink enough water. Drink half your body weight in fluid ounces at least, more if you are working outside in the heat and sweating a lot.  Dehydration is one of the most common causes that leads to or exacerbates  headaches and migraines. 2. Clean up your diet. Food triggers are probably the most common cause of migraines. So start with a detox diet where you remove all of the common triggers ...

“If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” — Rabbi Harold Kushner Whenever health is mentioned, most people think about a healthy diet or a healthy physical appearance, however, a healthy attitude and perspective on life is far more important. Without these you will never have health or happiness! In my opinion, we are given this gift of life to grow, expand, and experience all that life has to offer - including the challenges, the stress, and the "bad" things that happen. So we must have gratitude, as it is the key that unlocks our ability to appreciate what we have and who we are, which in turn enables us to face life's challenges without being knocked off course. From a technological and convenience standpoint, life has never been easier. We have all the modern comforts: we can travel the world within a day, tha...

EXERCISE "To enjoy the glow of good health, you must exercise." - Gene Tunney I could write a year's worth of blogs on exercise, but today I'll break down the 3 types of exercise everyone must be doing. Exercise is extremely important because not only does it keep you healthy, but when done correctly it prevents injury, and the rapid loss of function so many of our geriatric population experiences. 1. Cardiovascular Training Without oxygen, the cells in your body die. So it makes sense that the better your blood is at transporting oxygen, the healthier your cells can be. So your workout routine must involve some kind of fitness exercise where you are pushing your lung capacity and working up a sweat. This in turn will increase your body's ability to circulate oxygen throughout your body. And the best part about cardiovascular training? Research is emphatically showing that it isn't how long you work out for that is important, it is how intense y...

Do you ever wake up with pain or tingling in your hands, or your hands have even fallen asleep? This condition is commonly referred to as Thoracic Outlet Syndrome (TOS). The nerves that supply your arms and hands can get pinched off in a number of spots - the 2 most common places are in the neck itself, or in between the muscles at the Thoracic outlet where your nerves and blood vessels form a bundle before spreading out into the arms. So what can you do about it? Firstly, make sure you are sleeping on a pillow that supports your neck. Look out for our video in the next few weeks where we show you how the pillow should look and feel, but essentially it needs to be a pillow with a a concave so that your neck is properly supported. Next, get adjusted by your Chiropractor. If the nerves in your neck are getting pinched, then a simple series of adjustments should clear the problem. Also, getting your upper back adjusted will help because most people who suffer from TOS usually have a...

DIET "Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live." - Jim Rohn  Other than your attitude about your health, what you eat may be the single biggest factor that determines how healthy you will be. Unfortunately in today's society, technology has actually made eating a healthy diet harder, not easier! Only 2 generations ago everything we ate had once been living, either as a plant or an animal. You didn't have to worry about pesticides and all the other loads of chemicals that end up on our foods. The soils we grew our food in still provided a solid core of nutrient value to the foods, and were not over-farmed yet. Cheap alternatives like high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified foods (GMO's) were not being constructed in labs and made more accessible and cheaper than real food. Nowadays? If you aren't armed with the knowledge of how to read labels, then you can be very easily conned by some swift marketing, thinking...

Did you know that approximately 70% of back pain episodes occur in the first hour of the morning? When we sleep in bed for 6-8 hours, it allows the discs in our spine to rehydrate after a day of walking around and slowly compressing them and squeezing out all of the fluid. Then when we get out of bed it takes about an hour for the compression to start working on the discs again, which leaves us more vulnerable to irritate, inflame, or even herniate those discs. So how can you protect against this? Firstly, do everything you can to avoid bending at the waist. When you bend forward, your lower back is in it's weakest and most vulnerable position and people often cause a lot of tissue damage like this resulting in pain. It's even worse first thing in the morning because bending forward is also the easiest way to bulge or herniate a disc in your lower spine. When you first get out of bed do it slowly instead of just jumping out, then get walking and after about 10-15 minute...

There is still a common misconception out there that it is very important to stretch before you run or play a game of sport. While it might sound crazy to you, I am suggesting to you that you stop it. Static stretching to increase your flexibility is an extremely important part of your health care regime and everyone should be stretching multiple times a week, if not every day. What's most important though is the timing of it. When you stretch, you are lengthening your muscles and other soft tissues, so after stretching you're joints are actually vulnerable to injury for approximately 90 minutes. So you need to stretch either after a workout, or ideally when you are relaxing at home and not planning on following the stretching session with a workout. However, I am also not suggesting you start a run or a workout cold, otherwise you will create even more injuries than of you stretch. Instead, what you need is a dynamic warmup. Getting the blood pumping through all of you...

"It's never too late to be who you might have been" - George Elliot In society, we have fallen into a trap where success is measured by what we gain or achieve. Unfortunately, we tend to only measure material things like money, climbing the corporate ladder, or a new car. Success isn't what we achieve, success is who we become. You can have all the wealth in the world, but without the health to enjoy the quality of your life, or strong relationships with the people around you to share it with, what is the point? As humans, we are designed to live between 90-120 healthy years on this planet, so becoming “successful” has to start with your health. No one wants to live a life of sickness , yet the average person living in America will spend their last ten years of life, and their entire savings, dealing with major health issues. Dying from a heart attack at 55 years of age isn't due to bad luck! Cancer rates continue to increase. Diabetes is an unst...

"The only disability in life is a bad attitude"  - Scott Hamilton If you want to live a healthier life, this is where it all starts - Attitude. You will never take the necessary steps to build the required disciplines to become and stay healthy if you don’t have the correct mindset. This includes your attitude about life, about the world, about others, and about yourself! You may have noticed how closely health and happiness are linked? This is because when you are living a healthier life, you are experiencing a higher quality of life. You’re benefiting from more energy; you’re showing yourself love and respect; you’re fighting disease; and living a longer life all while simultaneously improving your mood. The principles of being healthy are actually very simple, but following them on a regular basis is very difficult. It's hard to live a healthy life. There are obstacles everywhere: sugary junk foods that taste better than broccoli; reality TV that...