Sarpy Chiropractic Blog

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