Here’s a quick look at my personal supplementation program. Talk to me about nutritional supplementation that’s right for you.
Dr. Greenwood’s Personal Supplement Program
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Never Too Late to Get Fit
If you start exercising now, even at 50 years old, you can boost your health. A Swedish study followed 2,205 men for 32 years (from age 50 to 82). Those who increase activity from “couch potato” or “casual walker” to high – which is at least 3 hours of highly active sports a week – cut their mortality in half compared to guys that stayed glued to the sofa. There’s little reason to believe that these results don’t apply to women as well.
But start now because in this study, the risks didn’t start to drop until 5 years. But after 10 years the risk level was the same as a lifelong jock!
Find the gym boring? A lot of us do. Check out Aikido. A Japanese martial art that emphasizes self-defense and natural movement while helping you get fit and strong… and a healthy sweat! It’s good for body and brain.
We have classes for adults, teens and kids. Learn more at www.GreenwoodAikido.com and come try a free class.
Neck Pain – Comparing Options
Medical Study Compares Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Medicine
A study the journal Spine, a leading medical research journal among orthopedic doctors, compared chiropractic, acupuncture and medical treatment for both spinal pain and overall health. The study was a well designed randomized controlled clinical trial conducted over a nine week period. Participants covered a broad socioeconomic and age range.
On pain relief, improved function and range of motion there is no comparison. In these areas chiropractic is nearly 5 times more effective than acupuncture and nearly 10 times more effective than medicine. The drugs used in the medical group included two non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (ibuprofen and naproxen) along with an analgesic (Celebrex)
The “General Health” results were not a measure of back pain, but were a standardized test allowing the patient to rate their own perception of their overall health. Interestingly, people receiving chiropractic care not only got better improvement in pain and functionality, they also experienced greater overall improvement in their own sense of health and well being.
Back in 1895 when Dr. D.D. Palmer first discovered chiropractic he adjusted the spine of a deaf man and his hearing came back. Like many developments in medical science and technology the event was somewhat serendipitous. Dr. Palmer thought that he had discovered the cure for deafness. Deaf patients came from all over to see if he could replicate the feat. To his and their disappointment there were no more deafness cures. But something else happened. His patients began to report that other ailments began to resolve such as stomach problems, headaches and many other illnesses. Dr. Palmer realized that chiropractic was correcting a deeper problem in the body – what became know as vertebral subluxation – which we now realize is a major source neurological imbalance and dysfunction leading to pain, illness and disease.
A Beautiful Life
If you have kids you know the nightly ritual that starts with, “Alright kids, let’s get ready for bed,” which they somehow hear as, “Alright kids, start running around screaming and acting squirrelly. When their heads are finally resting quietly on their pillows they always want a story. For my girls it’s usually, “Daddy-tell-us-a-story-about-when-you-were-little.”
I’m pretty brutally honest about myself and they seem to love finding out about what a weird little kid I was. They never tire of hearing about when I pooped my pants at the drugstore as my sister and I waited an impossibly long time for my mom to finish shopping. They love hearing the story of my near-death experience when I accidentally got my skateboard going straight down the harrowing 45 degree slope of Arbor Street near my childhood home in Pasadena and I was travelling way too fast to ditch it before I realized what was happening.
I think by telling these stories it helps my kids understand that we were all weird little kids at one time and it’s foibles and imperfections that make life precious and beautiful. The Japanese have a word, wabi-sabi, that is sometimes translated “flawed beauty.” It’s an aesthetic of the imperfect. In a way we can each start to think of ourselves as artists of our own life. And rather than imagine a life of perfect order and symmetry we might do better to embrace a different aesthetic, one that allows for our shortcomings and fallibility.
In our home we have wood floors that my wife and I laid ourselves. At first we were fastidious about attending to every little mark or blemish. But over time you can see a part of our life on that floor, places where the dog ran down the hall, where the kids played with their toys, where we dropped a mug. If I were to return to my own childhood home I think finding little artifacts like this would be most precious of all.
It’s easy to think of the value of our life in terms of our function. You meet someone and ask, “What do you do?” But I believe that many of our modern anxieties come from a belief that our value is equal to our usefulness. If the goal is to have a beautiful life then we might consider our aesthetic more carefully.
Oscar Wilde once said, “Art is useless.” By saying this he was saying that art transcends utility. Over 2,000 years ago Chuang Tzu, a Chinese Taoist philosopher wrote something similar: “Everyone knows the usefulness of the useful, but no one knows the usefulness of the useless.” He went on to esteem the virtues of hunchbacks, cripples, of knotted, fruitless trees and other things which might have been considered useless at the time.
We might consider echoing Oscar Wilde and say that “Life is useless.” On the face of it this phrase sounds rather bleak, but it is actually the exact opposite. It affirms life by saying that the important aspects of life transcend utility. Your value as a person is unrelated to what you accomplish, what you own, how slender you are or how much money you make. When we see a baby we only want to look at it or hold it. We don’t feel the need to make it useful or put it to work. We can experience a baby for something entirely intrinsic without making any demand of it. Looking at a baby we are reminded, as Plato suggested, that “Beauty is the sign of another, and higher, order.”
This isn’t to suggest that we ignore the practical concerns of life, or that we simply languish without any desire for accomplishment. But I am suggesting that none of these things should form the central aesthetic of our life. Roger Scruton, an English philosopher of aesthetics put it well when he said, “If you consider only utility above beauty then the thing you create will soon be useless.” It’s ironic that attempting to validate our life through being useful, without first considering the aesthetic, can form very seed of uselessness and unhappiness. Ultimately a beautiful life is whatever you decide it is. After all, you are the artist. But we would all do well to first consider the deeper aesthetic sensibilities that inform our life’s pursuits and embrace life fully with all its blemishes.
Neck Pain
Chiropractic is among the safest and most effective approaches to most neck pain
The most significant study on neck pain to date was reported in the medical orthopedic journal SPINE (1/18/08) and revealed the prevailing medical fallacies in the diagnosis and treatment of neck pain. Scott Haldeman, DC, PhD, MD, stated that the use of highly invasive practices such as surgery are not indicated when addressing the most common examples of neck pain. In contrast, procedures such as chiropractic adjustments are indicated, along with other non-invasive measures, when dealing with these types of neck pain.
Exhaustive reviews of the medical literature show that chiropractic is the safest and most effective choice in most cases of common neck pain.
The study results emanate from a six-year review of more than 31,000 research citations with subsequent analysis of over 1,000 studies. The multi-disciplinary report, based on research spanning seven years by clinicians and scientists from multiple clinical and scientific disciplines from 9 countries and associated with eight collaborating universities in four countries, is widely regarded as one of the most extensive reports on the subject of neck pain ever developed.
The study offers the most current perspective on the scientific evidence related to the care and management of neck pain. The United Nations and the World Health Organization designated the years 2000 to 2010 as the “Decade of the Bone and Joint.” The findings are already impacting the manner in which neck pain is perceived, addressed, and studied around the world.
Periarticular Fibrosis and Neuropathy
The buildup of fibrosis (scar tissue) in the spinal joints from cumulative strain and injury is the most common underlying cause of spinal pain. When a ligament injury or other soft tissue injury occurs scar tissue begins forming withing 24 hours. Even minor everyday strains can accumulate into significant amounts of scar tissue. The formation of scar tissue that sets the stage for chronic pain, even after the original strain or injury has healed. Scar tissue has three properties that make it a problem: (1) It is less elastic than the original ligament tissue so it causes joint stiffness which leads to joint degeneration. Inactivity leads to degeneration; even local inactivity in a joint. (2) It is weaker than the original ligament so it sets the stage for chronic re-injury and (3) It is thicker than the original ligament so it leads to stenosis (narrowing of the nerve canals) and chronic pinching and stretching of spinal nerves as they pass by the fibrotic facet joint.
Regular chiropractic care, even when there is no pain or symptom, is important in preventing spinal and nerve problems that can turn into major health problems. Like regular dental care, it’s better to take care before the pain comes.
Neck Alignment Problem Can Cause Lower Back Strain
The most common postural distortion in the neck is the “head forward” posture. The average human head weighs 10 to 12 pounds and for every 1/3 of and inch the head moves forward the forces in the lower back are 3 times greater. So neck alignment is important even in many cases of chronic lower back pain.
The Myth of Neck Adjusting and Strokes
Dr. Haldeman points to a number of other neck-related studies. One important report that was presented by the Neck Pain Task Force brings considerable question to the linkage between cervical (neck) manipulation and the development of a unique form of vascular problem known as vertebrobasilar artery insufficiency or vertebrobasilar artery stroke. The findings from an analysis of nine years of data involving approximately 110 million person years revealed similar incidence of this type of stroke in patients who had sought chiropractic care as in patients who sought the care of general practitioners of medicine. “Researchers found that the likelihood of having a stroke following a chiropractic office visit is no different from the risk of stroke following a visit to an MD’s office,” Dr. Haldeman explains.
To learn the facts about chiropractic and stroke click here