Have you ever hoped for a stronger immune system for your or your family? Fewer colds, zero missed days of work or school, less time and money spent at the doctor, even a smaller chance of cancer and other diseases? Today we are going to talk about one of the most amazing connections in your upper spine - the nervous system is intimately connected with your immune system.  Your upper spine surrounds and protects your brain stem, which tells your immune system to fire up when there is an invading pathogen, bringing up your white blood count, T-Cells, phagocytes, and telling and all these powerful cells where to go and what to do.  When a misalignment of the upper spine causes a disconnect from your brain and immune system, the stimulation caused by a gentle corrective adjustment gets your immune system fired up!

Many families seek chiropractic because of its benefits in improving the immune system of their children. In a recent study with children who had ear infections, 93% of all ear infections improved for children under the age of five who were supervised under a chiropractor’s care. 43% of the children improved within one to two visits, and 75% were better within 10 days or fewer.  Though we could credit the resilience of children for this stat, many adults have also seen an improvement in sinus issues, frequent colds, and more serious immune problems.  We have even had adult cancer patients seek care to help boost their immune systems.

In general, when we aren’t feeling well we tend to stay at home and hunker down.  If you can find the energy to make it into the office when you’re feeling sick, it will help you get through your illness more quickly and it may also be less severe.  Let us know and we can make some extra time at the beginning or end of our shifts, and we will make sure to wipe down the table carefully and sanitize everything before the next person arrives.

What is your most important asset? Is it your home, your retirement fund, or your business? We all take great measures to ensure these precious treasures are in good order.

Just like you may have your most crucial financial resource, our bodies also have their most important asset. It is one of first structures to form while we are developing in utero. In fact, it’s so important that it’s the only organ that your body completely covers in bone for its protection. Did I also mention that it also controls everything in your body? By now I’m sure you're not surprised to hear me tell you that your body’s most important asset is your brain!

Now, everyone wants their financial assets to be in tip top performance. You want your house in the best condition, your 401K getting the best return, and your business making its highest possible profits. But have you ever thought about how well your body’s most valuable resource is performing? Even though your thinking may be just fine, the duties of your brain extends well below your two ears. It has to send messages all the way down your spinal cord and out to the body via the nerves. If the bones in your neck or back shift out of alignment, they can “pinch” on either the spinal cord or the spinal nerves and our brain’s messages won’t get through to the body. When the body and brain can’t talk, our amazing brains are rendered much less useful. The disconnection can lead to a host of health problems including chronic diseases, chronic migraines, spinal pain, tingling, numbness or pain in your limbs, and fatigue.

But don’t worry, these misalignments in your back can be corrected! Your chiropractor’s job is to help take pressure off of the spinal cord so the brain’s messages can fully reach every part of your body. Because when your brain is working at 100%, you can enjoy your other assets with 100% ease.

As a prenatal chiropractor, my job is to support the dreams and wishes of each and every mama who walks through our door.  Some come to our office with scheduled c-sections, many are excited for their epidural, but plenty have dreams and goals for a natural birth. For you mamas who intend to have a natural birth, did you know that taking care of those pregnancy aches and pains will make it much more likely to achieve that goal?

Dystocia is the fancy word for difficult labor.  It can be long, painful, or both, and may or may not involve a poorly aligned baby.  At any rate, if natural birth is the goal, we don't want it.  (Let's face it, even if you are planning for a beautiful birth with an epidural or drugs, we likely don't want a single extra minute added to our labor!)

Labor, along with every activity in the body, is controlled by the nervous system. As we often discuss in our office, the nervous system is divided up into our sympathetic or "fight or flight" nervous system, and our parasympathetic nervous system, which does digestion, healing, relaxation, and you guessed it... labor. So when our bodies perceive stress, it turns on all of our fight or flight hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, our breathing and heart rate increase, blood rushes to our limbs, and guess what happens to the labor process?  A big stall.  It tightens up our psoas (hip flexor muscle) and our cervix.  Whether it's contractions that stop with a new person entering in the room, a mama facing her fear about adding a new person to the family and stops labor altogether, we know that the sympathetic nervous system is more powerful even than a pitocin drip, with which the woman was contracting every two minutes until this new stressor entered.

So what does this have to do with my pain?  Well, pain ramps up the sympathetic cycle.  It fires the same hormones that make our bodies struggle to relax and release, makes us more prone to fear, which in turn cranks up pain levels even more.  This is a vicious cycle that we never want, but especially during labor.

Focusing on the tone of the nervous system, with specific chiropractic, craniosacral therapy, and meditation/relaxation such as Hypnobabies, can not only help your body feel better, but will also prepare it to stay in parasympathetic throughout your labor, thereby preventing dystocia, shaving minutes to hours off of your labor, and creating the peaceful entrance that we all desire for our children to arrive earthside with.

Want more information or ready to take the leap and get out of sympathetic mode?  Contact us today.

Have you ever had one of those days where you just felt “out of it”?  Maybe you locked your keys in your car or blanked on remembering a coworkers name.  Maybe you even forgot your wife’s birthday. No matter how serious the blunder, at some point throughout the day someone may have jokingly asked you, “Is your head on straight!?”  Now, the person asking this was most likely just kidding around...

But if the person asking was your chiropractor, they were serious.

The reason chiropractors hope your head is on straight is that misalignment to this area is very detrimental to not only your body, but also your brain.  The upper part of your neck surrounds the base of your brain. Two arteries pass through the top neck vertebra, which are responsible for a portion of all of the blood flow to your brain.  So here are the top 3 reasons why it is important to regularly get your upper neck checked for misalignment so you no longer feel “out of it”.

1 .  Taking pressure off your upper neck helps your body work better

Every single function that your body performs must first start from a signal starting in your brain.  The brain sends signals down to the brainstem, to the spinal cord, and out to the body. If the upper neck is out of alignment, there is pressure on the brainstem, which will cause interference in the messages the brain is sending out to the body. When your body hears this altered message, it can’t work like your brain intended it to. Chiropractors focus on removing the interference by adjusting the bones back into alignment so the body can work at 100%.

2 . Aligning the upper neck helps you think better

As stated earlier, there are two arteries that pass through you upper neck called the vertebral arteries.  If the upper neck is misaligned, it can pinch off a portion of blood flow to the brain. This can result in a variety of symptoms including migraines, brain fog, dizziness, and trouble concentrating.  

3 . Keeping the upper neck aligned helps prevent arthritis

If a car is out of alignment, it tends to wear out faster on the side that it is shifted to.  Your spine is the same way. Any time your neck is misaligned, one side has to take on more stress than the other, which can result in arthritis formation.  Keeping the upper neck aligned will help balance the entire neck and prevent any arthritis from forming or getting worse.

So, who is ready to get their head on straight again?

Despite what our media and culture tell us, pregnancy and giving birth are things a woman's body is absolutely designed to do!  However, the spine and pelvis need more support during this time than ever, as extra weight, a shift forward in the center of gravity, and extra relaxin (a hormone that makes things move around more than usual to prepare for birth).  Small misalignments often magnify with pregnancy unless we do something to balance our bodies.

Here are some of the most common reasons for misalignment, low back or pelvic pain, sciatica, pelvic or pubic bone pain, and round ligament pain:

-Having a shorter leg or a scoliosis as an underlying condition

       -Standing with more weight on one leg

       -Holding older children consistently on the same hip

       -Sitting at a desk with your body or head frequently twisting more to one side

       -Sitting too much, especially while slouching back.  

       -Sleeping!  Though it may be quite difficult to find a comfortable position while pregnant, keeping good alignment helps prevent further pain and problems.  It's all about the pillows, ladies!

If you'd like to learn more about how to achieve, support, and maintain proper alignment throughout pregnancy, come to our Bellies and Birth class!  Please call or email us to schedule for the next class. If you need help immediately, we would love to do a consult and see if chiropractic and the Webster's Technique could be of benefit to you.

Here's another one for the expecting mamas (and dads!). Many women have become very aware of their round ligaments during pregnancy.  The job of these amazing ligaments is to connect the front part of the uterus to the pubic bone, located at the front of your pelvis.  Before about 8 weeks of pregnancy as the uterus grows higher out of the pelvic cavity, it's not possible to feel them. By the time baby arrives, they are well over a foot long and about as wide as your pinky finger!

If your round ligaments are painful, you may notice it during such movements as: rolling over in bed, coughing, sneezing, laughing hard, going from sitting to standing, or after a long walk.  Both a dull ache and a sharper pain ( that makes us grab under our growing bump to put pressure against the ligaments!) are very common during pregnancy.

While some growing pain in the round ligaments is normal, persistent or significant pain in the ligaments point us to a potentially deeper issue.  When the pelvis and sacrum are not aligned properly,  the uterus may sit in the same misaligned direction of the pelvis as it grows larger and expands upward. One ligament may pull much harder than the other side to try to keep the uterus vertical.

Soft tissue on the round ligaments is enormously beneficial.  This can be done with a rebozo (see the Spinning Babies website for more info), or simply with hands.  In order to maximize the benefits, make sure you are getting regular Webster's adjustments in your sacrum by an ICPA trained chiropractor.  You can work on these ligaments daily to every other day to minimize tension and help your uterus relax well into your pelvis.  Here is the video we have created to help you work on them!

As always, we love to connect and answer any and all questions you have about pregnancy and your round ligaments :)

This one is for all the pregnant moms out there!

If you're like me, you are doing all you can to invest in your health and the health of your future child.  Here are some of my favorite resources that I enjoyed to feel good while pregnant, prepare for the birth, and support myself and my spouse.

For exercise, walking and yoga felt like a perfect combo for my 3rd trimester.  The Twin Cities has TWO amazing options for yoga, Everyday Miracles right down the hall from us in NE Minneapolis, and Blooma in SW Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Plymouth.  Both have great resources in other areas - childbirth, lactation, massage, etc.

For those who are feeling like they've had enough appointments and commitments, here are daily exercises from Spinning Babies to balance your pelvis and get ready for labor that you can do right from your living room .  Don't worry, you don't need to buy the video, there are many exercises and tips as you scroll down.

If you are interested in having a doula to support you for labor, MN Childbirth Collective is a great place to meet with potential providers who match your values and style.  As an added bonus, they meet for Parent Topic nights on Monday evenings right down the hall from us at Everyday Miracles!  If you qualify for MN Care, Everyday Miracles provides a doula free of charge, covered by your insurance.  They are also fantastic at helping mamas with other resources, such as car seats and breast pumps.

We love helping and serving pregnant mamas. Please call or email us if you have any specific questions or would like your spine and pelvis to be checked to help feel great and optimize your body for labor!

 

We ALL are striving for something.   Whether you want to further your career, train for that half marathon next month, be a more patient parent or spouse, or maybe you want to beat your buddy in that golf league you just joined, you likely have a goal you’re trying to reach. No matter what that goal is, you need to be at peak performance to reach it.

When most people think chiropractic, they usually think relief from headaches, neck pain, and low back pain. Unless someone has experienced chiropractic, they may not realize how many benefits chiropractic can have on overall performance. In this short blog I want to explain to you the three ways chiropractic care can help you improve in any area of life.

Chiropractic helps restore the brain-body connection

Your brain is responsible for every function in your body. In order for your muscles to swing a golf club, your legs to stride across the finish line, or your mouth to deliver that killer sales speech, your brain must be able to effectively send messages down your spine, through your spinal nerves, and out to your body. Chiropractic adjustments make sure your spine is in proper alignment so your brain can communicate with your body at 100%.

Chiropractic adjustments increase activity in the prefrontal cortex

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for higher level thinking - executive functions, complex tasks, personality expression, and decision making. A recent study found prefrontal cortex activity to be increased by 20% after adjustments to misaligned vertebra. Activity in this area means a clearer mind, better mood, and sharper thoughts, all things important for performing at your best.

Getting adjusted puts your body in a parasympathetic state

Your body has an automatic nervous system that is divided into two main components - the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic, or fight or flight nervous system, is turned on when your body is in a stressed out state. Your body makes all the stress hormones – cortisol, adrenaline, and more to get you through the stressful period. Blood moves away from the brain and digestive organs out to your arms and legs, you become more jumpy, and sleep, relaxation and digestion are difficult for your body. When your body is in a sympathetic state for a prolonged period of time, it can wreak havoc on your body, causing any and all chronic disease. The techniques we use at Lifelong Health Chiropractic focus on helping your body turn off the sympathetic nervous system and activate the other part of the autonomic nervous system, called the parasympathetic nervous system. When your body can freely move back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system in response to what’s happening in your body and life, you can heal and perform at your highest capacity.

Want to get a leg up and perform better? Look no further, send us a request for a complimentary consult. And since we are obsessed with helping all of you function at your best in life, please email us with your favorite performance improvement techniques!

Relaxin is a hormone created to open up your pelvis in pregnancy so your joints, muscles, and ligaments allow the passage of your baby through the birth canal. Your body is absolutely designed to open up and let baby out, and relaxin is a crucial part of this beautiful design.

The fabulous part about relaxin is that things stretch and move easily. Those with tight hamstrings, or a stiff ankle (or knee or hips, etc) may gradually feel more ease while getting up off the floor, walking, etc. Many expecting moms feel less pain in their limbs or spine than when they’re not pregnant.

Relaxin doesn’t discriminate – it affects both stiffer areas and ones that are already relaxed. Often those who have stuck joints also have a hypermobile joint above or below (especially in the spine). So it becomes important to protect these hypermobile areas from moving too much, especially in late pregnancy (or often much earlier in subsequent pregnancies). Lots of popping, cracking, “throwing out” your back, joint sprains or strains are all signs of excessive hypermobility. Pregnancy belts, such as the Serola belt, can help stabilize hypermobile joints. Braces or kinesiotape on knees, wrists, ankles, etc. may provide extra support.

Using the Webster’s Technique to assess for pelvic misalignment and nerve interference during pregnancy helps us find and correct only the fixated joints. Adjustments to remove nerve interference and create balance in pregnancy are extraordinarily gentle and specific.

If you experience back pain, sciatica, pain in your pelvis, hip pain, extra popping or cracking in your back or hips, trouble rolling over in bed, round ligament pain, or groin pain, you may have a misalignment in your pelvis. Call us for a consultation to see if the Webster’s Technique could help you feel and birth better.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month! Diagnosis of and medications for conditions such anxiety, depression, and ADHD are rising and at an all time high. This comes as no surprise with the increasing amount of physical, chemical, and emotional stressors that the modern American is exposed to. As chiropractors, we do not diagnosis or treat mental health in any way, but we want to give you 5 things you can do to boost your mood, no matter where you are.

 

1. Practice Gratitude

Gratitude is one of the easiest ways to boost happiness – you can practice it literally any time of the day, in any way (written, drawn, alone or with others, spoken, mental). There is now a body of research pointing to how practicing gratitude on a daily basis can boost your mood, help you feel better in body, mind and spirit, just see this link. The easiest way to practice gratitude is to start a gratitude journal. Every morning and every night write down 5 things you’re grateful for. You can also practice gratitude by telling someone who has made a difference in your life.

 

2. Exercise

 

Getting a workout in is always an effective way to boost your mood and overall energy. Exercise will increase blood flow to the brain as well as cause your body to release mood-boosting endorphins.

You can reap the benefits from doing either strength training or cardio workouts. If you’re pressed for time, try doing a tabata workout (Read our blog on tabatas HERE).

3. Take care of your gut

If you have an interest in healthy eating, you’ve probably heard about the gut-brain connection. There is a direct correlation to the health of your gut and your mental health. People who tend to have inflamed and leaky guts will also have inflamed and leaky brains. When proteins from our foods are able to slip into our bloodstream and pass the blood brain barrier, our brain’s immune system attacks these proteins and causes an inflammatory response. This can lead to symptoms like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. If you’re concerned about gut health, start by drinking a serving of bone broth with each meal and avoiding inflammatory proteins such as gluten and dairy.

4. Spend time with nature

 Spending time outside will ground you with nature and help calm your body. Activities such as gardening, going for a hike, or even sitting outside on the ground have all been shown to reduce stress and boost your mood.

5. Get Adjusted

 Outside of the plethora of other benefits chiropractic adjustments have on the body, they also can help regulate emotions. Chiropractic adjustments have been shown to lower the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. When your body produces less of these hormones, your body will be in a relaxed state, making you less likely to feel anxious or depressed. In addition, when chiropractors make adjustments to the top bones in your neck, pressure is taken off of the brainstem, which is a key area for regulation of emotions.