Blog
Posture is Power: Make it Your Health Ally
Why we put posture first
Posture underpins everything we do at Bay Area Spine Care Office. It´s role in wellness is essential and as such, your posture is indicative of your spinal health. That´s why every new person we meet receives a full physical examination that evaluates:
- Balance
- Range of motion
- Movement
- Posture
Static postural analysis helps us determine your postural shortcomings including deviations and compensations in the musculature which can contribute to spinal degeneration and pain. Once we have a clear picture of how your posture is influencing your spinal health, we tailor it down to your particular lifestyle: are you seated most of the day, working at a computer; are you on your feet, bending over frequently? Your lifestyle determines your posture, yes; but your posture determines how you feel as a result of your lifestyle.
The Importance of Body Weight Exercises
Why take on more weight than your body can handle
Trying to start any exercise plan can be difficult, especially from scratch. If you Google, “Help me get in shape,” god help you read through all the results. There are so many schools of thought when it comes to exercise that finding some semblance of agreement between all the blogs, beginner’s guides, and fitness-instructor-recommended articles can be impossible. At Bay Area Spine Care Office, we believe in exercise as a means of:
- Preventing spinal degeneration
- Controlling weight
- Improving the function of every system in the body
- Boosting energy
In summation, exercise helps you feel, look and perform better. Once you have convinced yourself of the value of exercise, the next important step is starting in a logical manner.
The Connection Between Spinal Adjustment and Weight Loss
Chiropractic contributes to weight management
A healthy weight is the worst-kept secret for maintaining a healthy spine. Every additional pound over your target weight increases the burden on your spine, causing muscle strain, subluxation and a whole host of other problems. Therefore, people looking to prevent or manage back pain should make maintaining their target weight a top health priority. And chiropractic can help in this respect; this is not a direct cause and effect and a chiropractic adjustment should never be claimed to directly cause weight loss. But it can contribute to a set of conditions within your body that make losing weight and keeping weight off easier. Read on to find out how.
Starting the New Year With Fewer Headaches
Tension and migraine headaches benefit from chiropractic care
If you suffer from chronically recurring headaches, you likely have two priorities once the pain sets in:
- To reduce the frequency and severity of the headache in the present
- To reduce the chance of the headaches recurring in the future
This means that you are in the business of treatment and prevention that we practice at Bay Area Spine Care Office. While it may be unrealistic to expect to banish headaches forever, you can reasonably expect to reduce the toll they take on your life. We can go about this together by identifying your particular triggers and setting store by natural, preventative techniques. One of the problems with the western approach to medicine is that it often treats symptoms rather than causes. With headaches this is explicitly clear: our standard narrative is to take an aspirin to take the edge off the pain. And while this is good in the short term, we need to go deeper to reduce the grip of headaches on our lives as a whole.
Improving Wellness Despite Chronic Pain
Maintaining your wellness despite chronic pain
A Google search for, “chronic pain,” returns hundreds of thousands of results. Clicking through the first few pages takes you along the whole spectrum of the 21st century’s greatest (and worst) tool: from reputable sources to shady corners of the web, it can be hard to find a semblance of agreement about chronic pain, let alone an understanding. When you redefine your parameters and ask, “What is chronic pain,” you have gotten to the root of the problem. Chronic pain, whether you take it as an abstract idea or a distinct syndrome, is little understood at this point on the time continuum of western medicine.
Our Hands, Your Health: Spinal Adjustment After the Holiday Season
After the holidays, hit the reset button with spinal adjustment
As 2018 approaches, many of us are distracted by the myriad engagements of a busy holiday schedule. As a consequence, many of our normal routines are chucked out the window. The health our spines can be easy to lose sight of amidst the holidays, as discussed in our previous blogs. Just as many people will carry hangovers into the first day of 2018, so will many of us carry back pain from one year into the next. Spinal adjustment offers us a chance to write a fresh script for our spines in 2018.
This Holiday Season, Keep Pain Relief Natural
The holidays offer myriad ways to not focus on our health
Between christmas parties, family engagements, and shopping til you drop, it can be hard to keep your health in perspective. Many of us will reach the end of the holiday season at the end of our rope, both physically and mentally. Along the way, so many of us will make poor health decisions, foregoing what we know is right for what is simply easy.
Say you have chronic back pain which you manage through regular physical activity, stretching, and chiropractic. The holiday season can leave you too busy to get outside and run, too busy to stretch and certainly too busy to stop by the chiropractor for an adjustment. Instead, many of us will reach for the easy option: OTC painkillers which treat the symptoms but not the root cause of our pain.
Keeping your Spine Happy this Holiday Season
When it comes to holiday health objectives, focus on your spine
Spinal health is the gift that keeps on giving. Ask anyone with chronic back pain- if they could get back to a vantage point of having no pain, they would trade all the christmas gifts in the world for it. But Christmas offers a unique set of challenges to our spines: from increased food and alcohol intake, to decreased activity levels, it is not a time that is generally kind to the spine.
Preserving the Spinal Health of Young Athletes in Alameda
Our spines were all young once upon a time…
When it comes to spinal health, our youth don’t know how good they have it! Because the structures and muscles of our spines are naturally resilient at a young age, we rarely put thought into taking extra-special care of this pinnacle of health. One further advantage of being young is that you are more active across the board than all other age groups. In general, higher levels of activity bode well for the health of your spine. However, because young people are more active than other age demographics, they also face a unique set of risk factors for back pain. Back pain risk factors for young athletes include:
- Too much physical activity
- Poor training techniques
- Poor posture while performing physically demanding movements
- Traumatic injuries
- Overuse injuries
And these risks increase depending on the sport you play; football and other high-impact sports contribute to horrific spinal injuries; gymnastics incorporates physically demanding disciplines which can affect the spine negatively.
Remaining Active to Defeat Sarcopenia
Sarcopenia is age-related muscle loss
It is going to happen to all of us; at some point in our 30s we begin to slowly, but steadily lose muscle mass. As we approach seniority between the ages of 65-75, this muscle loss accelerates. Losing muscle mass is a leading contributor to frailty and loss of independence in old age. It makes us weaker and less able; it also increases our vulnerability to injury from even simple motions. From a chiropractor’s perspective, sarcopenia is doubly alarming because of its effect on the spine.