Chiropractic Treatment for Sciatica

Sciatica?  Sciatica is the term given to pain that radiates along the sciatic nerve pathway. The sciatic nerve starts in the lumbar spine, goes to the top of the buttocks, down through the pelvis, and then posterior down each of the legs to the feet.  People usually only have sciatic pain down one leg at a time.  The sciatic nerve is the largest nerve of the body, about the size of your thumb, and it functions to connect the spinal cord to the leg and foot.  The staff at Twisted Spine & Joint has helped many people with this condition and can help you.

Typically, people who have sciatic pain suffer from misalignment of the pelvis, herniated disk, have osteophytes or bone spurs causing inflammation and pain, muscle dysfunction, tumors, infection, or injury to the lumbar spine.  This causes lumbar pain (lumbago), hip pain, leg pain, foot pain, and buttock pain.  Symptoms of sciatica include:  burning along the back of the leg, numbness of the leg &/or foot, cramping of the leg &/or foot, or tingling/paresthesia of the leg &/or foot.  Pain can increase with walking, sitting, driving, sit to stand motion, laying on affected side, bending, and standing too long in one place.

Misalignment or "subluxation" of the pelvis and lumbar spine can be present for years.  Three things cause pain:  1) change in position of a joint;  2) degeneration over time;  and 3) inflammation or muscle spasms.  Sciatica can occur suddenly due to injury, but it can also be due to an old or existing problem.  When different joints or levels of the spine are not moving smoothly, the nerves can become irritated due to inflammation and muscle spasms.  Previous injuries accumulate over our lives and conservative care should be the first choice when treating sciatic pain.   

Sciatica can be diagnosed with a proper medical history and physical examination.  Orthopedic tests are performed by a trained health professional to diagnose sciatica.  X-rays can be used to identify the cause, and sometimes advanced studies, such as lumbar MRI or CT scans are necessary. 

Conservative care is the first choice when treating sciatic pain.  Chiropractors treat sciatica with a series of prescribed adjustments, physical therapy to reduce muscle spasms, core exercises to balance the pelvis and back, stretching exercises to improve muscle balance and to improve spinal health.  If necessary, referrals are made for pain medication, anti-inflammatory medications, and even surgical procedures as a last resort. 



 

Chiropractic Adjustments, Short Term Pain Remedy or Lifestyle?

The answer is yes, chiropractic can be what ever you want it to be. If you have pain and only want to get rid of it chiropractic can help. If you want to make chiropractic part of your bi-weekly or month schedule you can do that as well. Here at Twisted Spine and Joint Center while we like to help people as much as we can we can only tell you the benefits of chiropractic and it's your choice what you want to do with your condition of lifestyle. I can tell you a few things, first short term chiropractic will sometimes yield short term results. The chances are the symptoms did not show up overnight so they may not go away overnight. Once pain is gone, the area that was treated is very fragile and mostly likely not stabilized which can allow many of the symptoms to return. The proper way to fix a musculoskeletal problem is to decrease pain, stabilize and strengthen the area, and prevent future occurrences. Again, we will help you no matter what option you think is better for you, but based on our experience it's better to prevent problems then always try to fix reoccurring ones.    

Chiropractic & Overall Well-Being

It's so wonderful in our Frisco Chiropractic office to find patients who love to get the best out of their health. We treated a patient today in our office that reported he felt a wonderful sense of well-being. He stated for the first time in his life he feels wonderful well-being. I told him "that is exactly what chiropractic is about, of course we can help with pain but maximizing your health potential and getting the most out of your body is the number one goal".

Most patients do not realize this is the ultimate goal of health is to optimize their well-being. We want to help as many people as possible and obviously we will help you reach whatever your health goal is. We see many patients who understand getting out of pain when they have symptoms is important to them, we further lecture to them that if they continue to do what they did before their injury without maintaining or maximizing their health their symptoms will return, and they will be "yo-yo" patient. A "yo-yo" patient is a patient that only uses chiropractic as a method to get out of pain, they come in when their health status yo-yos down and ends care when their health status yo-yos back up.

We find in our Frisco Chiropractic office that patients who choose to use chiropractic as a tool to maximize their well-being, live healthier and better lives. They simply have less symptoms than the "yo-yo" patient and get the most out of their body weather it's training for a marathon to building a barn. As stated before we will help any patient that wants chiropractic and in our expert opinion can be helped by chiropractic, but wellness care in the long run will be more cost-effective and your body will definitely thank you for it. If you want to make chiropractic part of your life like so many people do visit our Frisco Chiropractic website.

   

What Is Next? I Was In An Accident

Having an auto accident is not a fun situation to be in, regardless of whom is at fault. Nearly ten million auto accidents happen per year in the US, which kill over thirty thousand innocent people. Texas is one of the states that has the highest population of deaths annually from auto accidents with over three thousand, part of that is due to the high population of Texas.
With the high amount of traffic on the road and the shear stats of accidents most people will be in an accident in one day or an other in their life. Twisted Spine and Joint Center compiled a list of some objectives that should be done shortly after an accident occurs.

1. Call law enforcement, make sure to give the person on the phone the address and cross roads of the accident so the police and ambulance if needed can find you easier. The police need to gather evidence for the accident while the ambulance can examine the injuries to transport the injured if needed.  
2. If possible try to move your car, leaving your car in the middle of the road can cause another accident as well, move to a parking lot if your care is drivable. If your car is not drivable put out road flares or orange triangle to alert other drives of a disabled vehicle. If you are injured stay in your car.
3. Make sure to get the important data from the other driver such as car, insurance, and personal information. This will help in facilitating the process to the insurance company.
4. Never admit the fault of the accident, even if you did cause it, you will be able to discuss it in time.
5. Try to remember and write down all the detail of the accident for the insurance to find liability, as well as take photos of both cars for damage.
6. If anybody saw the accident get the information on how to contact them and have them write a short statement on how the accident occurred. This can be helpful in court and for the insurance company to find who is liable.  
7. Try to have the police make out an accident report and ask the police officers to give you a copy for your records. If they don't give you a copy at the scene ask them where you can get a copy at.
8. Call your insurance company and open a claim not matter what kind of deal the other person in the accident tries to make. Even if they are willing to pay cash for your car.
9. Call Twisted Spine and Joint Center to be evaluated to see exactly what is wrong with you. We can also help you find an attorney that can help you. We can also refer you to the proper medical specialist to co-treat your injuries.

Not understanding the process after an accident can cost you both time and money when it comes to taking care important aspects after the accident. Here at Twisted Spine and Joint Center we can help refer you to an attorney that can make the legal process at little easier. You are entitled to your medical bills being pain, your car being repaired, and monetary settlement for future medical care if need. Don't let your rights be neglected visit your Frisco Chiropractor  

Your Plano Chiropractor's Deep Thoughts.

From time to time in our Frisco Chiropractic office, Twisted Spine and Joint Center, we are allow to reflect. We reflect on why we are chiropractors and why we decided to help people get better and stay well. I was talking to my colleague simply about the trend of medicine, on how medicine has been wrong about lower back pain for awhile. First they wanted to operated on the discs which is a failed methodology, it has been determined at only one in one hundred disc herniations need surgery yet back surgeries continue to rise and has brought upon a new diagnosis called failed back surgery syndrome. See back surgery failure rate is so high there is actually a term for it. There has been numerous studies that also show fusion surgeries are not needed in approximately seventy percent of the cases and you risk death every time you're under the knife.

There has also been recent scandals in device companies paying doctors to write bogus research journals to say how there products work and are the best. One doctor in particular made around $8.5 million dollars for a few years of work. The main problem with this is that other doctors see the research and based their treatment recommendation off these journals, this is the biggest ethical dilemma plaguing medicine, almost as big as the American Medical Associate taking money from tobacco companies to endorse tobacco as having "therapeutic effects". Recently it has show that it roughly takes fifteen years for a therapy to reach mainstream after the research shows it is effective. What is terribly wrong is that it take forty-four year for a therapy to be eliminated from mainstream after it has been deemed ineffective or harmful.

Sadly to say with medicine you never know what's going to be helpful and what's going to harm you. Think about spinal fusions they have been shown for the most part to be ineffective but they will still be doing them for the next forty years. What medication in the near future will be label harmful or cause disastrous effects? You should choose to do the safest and most natural less invasive treatment first as it is the lowest risk and work your way up the medicine hierarchy to riskier treatment option as lower risk treatments are ineffective. This is where chiropractic comes into play natural safe healthcare without the harmful effects since chiropractic care is the safest healthcare on the planet. If you have musculoskeletal problem chiropractors should be your first treatment option of choice.             

What Is Better For My Muscles, Ice Or Heat?

Well it really depends, both can be harmful and both can be helpful, it really depends on what stage of healing you are in. There are three types of phases during the healing process and your chiropractor will be able to identify and recommend which one is best for you. The phases of healing are the acute, sub-acute, and chronic. The acute phase is usually the first seventy-two hours of the injury, the sub-acute phase is from after the first seventy-two hour to two weeks, and the chronic phase is anything after two weeks.

Due to the physiological process of each phase cryotherapy or heat therapy can be indicated or contraindicated. The first phase is going to be the acute and ice phase, ice will be recommended to help decrease inflammation and help gate with the pain. The process of reducing the inflammation with help the tissues heal faster and regain functionality sooner. If heat is used in the acute phase, while it may feel good at the time, the next day will be extremely painful. Large gatherings of exudate or liquid will be present causing the area of injury to swell, also this swelling will promote pain, and the area of injury will be unusable for a few dates.

The next phase is the sub-acute phase which as stated above ranges from after the first seventy-two hours to two weeks. These phases can overlap and it's your chiropractors job to assess the current situation. In the sub-acute phase I still like to recommend ice treatment most of the time. The ice treatments continue to decrease pain, and only slightly decrease inflammation. If a patient has problems with ice I will recommend an ice-heat contrast therapy, with heat for ten minutes then ice to follow up. The ice-heat contrast therapy can act as a pumping acting to first bring the exudate to the area and the cold to contract and pump it away.

The last phase is the chronic phase, which is after two weeks from the injury date. During the chronic phase heat is going to be beneficial. The heat usually helps the tight muscles to relax and breath so to speak, most people also report just the general feeling that heat feels good. The heat seems to elongate the muscle fiber to make them more pliable meaning the muscle will be able to help preform a larger range of motion. Heat is also used in muscle work or reforming tissues, where the heat is used to relax and elongate the muscles and after the therapy ice is used to make sure the treatment does not have painful effects. If you have an injury it is always important to get it evaluated by your chiropractor first since they are experts in musculoskeletal injuries.  

How Do I Make My Immune System Better?

If you suffer from an erratic and unreliable immune system you may want to listen to this one. While the immune system and neuroimmunology is a rapidly growing field it is also not well understood, there is not a ton of research in the neuroimmunology field. So I will be explaining what we do know and how we can make your immune system and health function better. The immune system is responsible for keeping you healthy from disease and viruses, it can be your best friend and sometimes your worst nightmare. It can quell a serious infections or it can completely overreaction to something as little as dust or dander causing allergic symptoms such running nose, watery eyes, hives, shortness of breathe and other issues.

So first how does our immune work, when the immune system notices something that is foreign to the body it creates an immune response. The immune response is very complicated and still not completely understood, for simplicity sake we will just say the immune response bring cells and chemicals to the area also know as inflammation. Sometimes the inflammation is needed, other times it is completely overblown. So how do we get our immune system to work normally most of the time? How do we get it to work when we want to but not overwork at other times.

Well the first step is to reset the system so to speak. If you're not living a healthy life and you're walking around and very inflamed that's going to be a problem. We need to reset the system, and we need to do it naturally. The first suggestion would be to try to eliminate everything in the body that would cause inflammation and remove it from the diet. Well, how do I do that? This is the easy part, a food sensitive test which test up to three hundred different substrates will tell you what foods are pro-inflammatory so you can remove the food in question from your diet. Once those foods are eliminated you could have a reduction of the abnormal immune response.

Recent research also suggest from a systematic review of the literature at 9th Chiropractic, Osteopathy, and Physiotherapy Annual Conference in the UK in which Jack Neil of the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic showed that chiropractic adjusting could show a decrease of pro-inflammatory chemicals and an increase in antibodies (good reaction) involved in the immune reaction. Also noted is that chiropractic adjustments may increase the production of leukocytes which support the white blood cells in fighting off a threat  These immunological changes could show why chiropractic can decrease inflammation and pain while supporting overall wellness. In essence the two options touched upon could help in making your immune system function better. If you're interested in both chiropractic treatment and food sensitivity testing we can do both at Twisted Spine and Joint Center, visit our website at http://twistedspineandjoint.com if you have any questions or would like to schedule an appointment.         

Should I Be Eating Seafood?

The simple answer should be yes in regard to you of course liking it. Seafood has a plethora of vitamins and minerals that are important in everyday body functions. Seafood is very high in protein and low in fat which makes it an excellent entrée for dinner. It is high in virtually every mineral and vitamin, most importantly iodine which is used to make thyroid hormones. The iodine mineral is somewhat lacking in land creatures and greens, with the exception of seaweed which is extremely high in iodine. Seafood sometimes gets a bad rap in the media in regard to sensationalism, but I assure you if you listen to a couple of rules to can get great seafood.

The rules are smaller the fish the better, when the fish are smaller they have less expose to mercury and other trace elements. Very young children should stay away from fish due to mercury levels could interfere with developmental processes. Adults have virtually no problems with mercury when eating fish at reasonable rate, although if you are worried smaller fish have less mercury.

The next rule is you want to be eating fresh caught fish, fresh fish is healthier due to them being in their natural habitat. If they are farm raised you don't know what they are eating and you don't know the amount of fish in a pin. They could be swimming in large pools of bacteria and excrement laden pools or ponds, not a pleasant picture. So the two rules in recap fresh caught and smaller the fish the better.

If you like fish but have problems eating fish because how it makes you feel you could have a food sensitivity to certain fish. Certain food sensitivity tests like the ALCAT test between a large range of different type of fish, depending on the test you may have to omit one fish and switch for another in your diet. The test can help you substitute other fish to eat to still gain all the nutrients and help you on your wellness path.          

What are we eating?

In our country food is readily available and many people think see food eat food, this is a large problem. A large amount of people may have sensitivities to these foods without even knowing it. Patients may misinterpret food sensitivity issues with other symptoms such as muscle pain, fatigue, headaches, and weight gain. A lot of people believe that the above mentioned symptoms are just them getting old, they don't even understanding it is from what they ingest. We are raised to not pay any detail to food sensitive and only food allergies. The problem is food allergies can mostly be seen and related to the food you ingest food while food sensitive is mostly hidden and hard to pinpoint a certain food, meaning sometimes symptoms are not correlated.  Although, the damage from food allergies and sensitivity can be the same.

It’s important to get food sensitivity testing to find out what foods could be a causing a problem, getting rid of them and eating foods you’re tolerable to. Decreasing the foods you have a sensitivity to will decrease overall inflammation and allow your body to function to peak performance. Having decreased inflammation will decrease muscle aches, fatigue, and weight gain. All of those symptoms that have been making you feel old are actually not because you’re old or you’re overeating, it’s from what you’re eating.