Medicrit – Medicare

Archive for March, 2009

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHS) have delivered us the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) guide to promote basic nutritional intake. Most of us recognize it as the food pyramid. These recommendations were based on the lowest levels of nutrition needed to prevent such deficiencies as scurvy, rickets, and beriberi. They accomplished their delivery of education because these diseases are all but non-existent since WWII. This leaves to question that if we were to supplement with very high or optimal levels of nutrition could we experience even more physical benefits?

The evidence is strong in support of optimal nutritional supplementation and the number of health care professionals is growing daily in their knowledge of prevention through nutrition. The USDA surveyed 16,000 Americans and found that not one of us acquired a 100% of the daily essential nutrients needed, and our children did not get enough essential nutrients such as folate, vitamin C, and calcium. These nutrients are critical to Fortify Your Health!

We have become undernourished yet overfed. This is due to our poor eating habits, food preparation and preservation, fast foods, etc. This is sadly supported by the obesity epidemic in our country. Unfortunately, what used to be called Adult Onset Diabetes or Type 2 Diabetes in now common in our countries youth. In America today 33% of our children are expected to develop Type 2 Diabetes and for Afro-American and Hispanic children the number is expected to elevate to 50%! How sad is that? Just by cleaning up our diet alone the numbers could be dramatically altered, but if we additionally supplement our diet with optimal levels of vitamins and minerals it would allow us a defense against the free radicals creating degenerative diseases.

An example of free radicals and oxidative stress would be to take a cut apple and watch it turn brown once exposed to air. Oxygen in turn can cause negative effects on our body too. The positive side of oxygen is that we cannot live without it, but the process of aging itself is called ‘oxidation’, or rusting. Ageing is somewhat predetermined by genetics, but pollution, smoke, drinking alcohol, eating high fat, fried foods, etc. can also contribute to the production of free radicals and oxidative stress.

I do not know about you but I would like to maintain long term health so I can hopefully lead a life free from pain and suffering. The leading degenerative diseases in our country are cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, stroke and respiratory disease to name a few. Some professionals state that up to 70% of these diseases are preventable! If not for yourself, do it for your children and create a household that supports common sense food intake rich in fruits and vegetables, regular-moderate exercise, and supplement with a pharmaceutical grade nutritional.

The best help you can get from a friend or your spouse during smoking is to have them help you quit. There are many ways to quitting smoking and some of them involve having someone that can provide you support. The support you need when you smoke needs to be someone that can be there for you at most hours of the day, which means a spouse, such as your wife or husband. Help to quit smoking is very easy to get, as long as you have someone to count on.

The first thing to tell your smoking friend is that smoking can ruin your life. They might tell you that it’s okay it might not happen to them, but we all know the outcome of a smoking patient. Smoking can take you to a quick grave or leave you using oxygen when you get older. You don’t want to haul an oxygen tank around, do you?

When you decide to help your friend quit the nasty habit you will need to support them and tell them the full outcome. Also, it helps to tell them you care for their well being, that’s if they’re depressed over the situation. How does depression come into the scenario? Well, when someone is kicking the habit, they get depressed over it.

The nicotine in cigarettes can be addicting and will make the smoker want to find more, but when it comes to that you need to tell them no. There are thousands that don’t have support while they quit and they end up trying but failing. There are those that can quit in no time at all, but there are those that can’t quit without help.

Help to quit smoking can be easy for you, but to your partner it’s going to be a tragic time. Smoking can have people irritable when they’re used to smoking cigarette packs every day getting their fix

In this day and age, it is pretty obvious that people have a lot of problems falling asleep. Half of the generation seems to be suffering from insomnia in one way or another and to be honest that is terrible. Our bodies need to sleep and while we all may be under a lot of stress, there are a lot of natural sleep remedies that might be able to work for you.

One thing that you may need to change in order to sleep is your diet. A diet of fresh fruit and veggies paired with exercising is a fantastic way to release some of those tensions that you are probably experiencing and holding in. This can also really help you get healthy and stay healthy.

While sleeping pills are not always going to be the answer, there are so many different natural sleeping pills out there that can really help you in the long run and just release some of that stress that you may be feeling and thinking about at night.

One of the biggest problems that people usually have whenever they try to fall asleep is the fact that they are thinking too much and have no idea how to turn their brain off. Well ladies and gentlemen, you simply need to flip the switch on your brain, let it clear out and you will find yourself asleep in no time at all.

Another treatment that works is having a cup of hot water with some lemon or even a cup of hot milk. This treatment is a great one because you are simply drinking yourself to sleep and you do not have to take anything.

As you can tell, there are tons of treatments and natural remedies out there, you really just have to find one that that suits and fits you. After you do that, you will be able to fall asleep with no problems at all.

Today I am going to talk about Plantar Fasciitis. I just had this discussion with somebody at a health event the other day. The gentleman was a physical health educator and he explained how in his experience that the occurrence of plantar fasciitis amongst the athletically active health education teacher was an issue of “when” they would get and not “if” they would get it. He went on to explain that he had discovered the most efficient treatment for it that he knew of and was eager to share it with everybody, and essentially it involved wrapping his foot in ice packs for hours at a time.

I would like to talk about this topic a little bit more because we do see plantar fasciitis fairly often in practice. We see patients from other medical offices where they have had treatment already and they may have had some partial relief and these individuals are still distressed with pain and quite relieved to come somewhere where they find that the problem can be dealt with directly and forth-rightly without drugs or surgery.

Plantar fasciitis is a condition where there is essentially a tightening of the muscular-like tissue at the bottom of the foot that runs back and forth from the front to the back of the foot, predominantly in the arch area of the foot and usually what we find is very tight bands of spasm that may have progressed to a worse form of spasm, called fibrotic spasm or fibrotic degenerative spasm, as well as a form of tendinitis where the plantar fascia fibers, the muscular-like fibers, are pulled from their origins and insertions from their front and back attachments to where they insert into the bones of the feet. We call this pulling “micro-avulsion”.

This literally is a “yanking out of place” and involves micro-tears of the insertions of the plantar muscular fibers. They are actually often torn out of their attachments into the bony areas of the foot and this is often the beginning of spur formation in those areas, resulting in pinpoint pain, usually back toward the heel area. Invariably the person with plantar fasciitis does describe pain along the bottom of the foot, often worse when they try to stretch that foot and curiously, from my perspective, one of the common treatments for plantar fasciitis is stretching, which usually is torturous and aggravating to the condition. I guess I have seen this mostly from the podiatrists and physical therapists.

The stretching of that musculature can bring people some temporary relief. Overall, I have not seen it be highly effective. The thought is apparently that since the musculature is tight, it should be stretched. It is my experience that this tightening, in most cases, is beyond stretching and that the stretching tends to cause a reactive defensive posturing of that musculature, tightening it up even more, and sometimes aggravating by increasing the pulling of the tendonous-like insertions and perhaps even bringing on greater propensity to ultimate spur formation. At worst, it just doesn’t seem to get the kind of result that people would expect.

Instead, we generally recommend an approach that would involve loosening those muscular fibers and there are several different approaches that could be taken and one of them is called “spindle cell therapy” which is a highly specific kind of myofascial release technique that causes the muscular-like fibers of the plantar fascia to let go and relax down and loosen up in length and take some of the pull off of their insertions and allow for more flexibility without stretching therapy, so that when the individual does perform activities that lead to the natural stretching of the arch in order to function and move about, the stretching is well tolerated and not irritating.

Often orthotics are recommended for these individuals and again sometimes there is relief and this is highly variable. My thought about this is that the condition should undergo at least a certain amount of fundamental correction. It is not often that I find a foot/ankle complex free of other distortions when somebody has plantar fasciitis. We believe one of the causes of plantar fasciitis has to do with partial trapping of the nerve that feeds the plantar fascia through the ankle at what is called the tarsal tunnel, a tunnel-like opening like the carpal tunnel, at the ankle.

There is a major nerve that runs through there and when it is pressed upon by misalignment of the ankle, it will cause tightening of the plantar fascia at one point and ultimately can lead to abnormal relaxation but nevertheless, abnormalities of responsiveness of the plantar fascia due to compromised nerve control. So one of the first things we look for is misalignment in the ankle and the heel and get these corrected and then take the approach of going toward the plantar fascia, relaxing it appropriately through specialized myofascial release techniques, and then we can teach the patient some home vibrational massage techniques and then it would be appropriate to move forward with orthotics for the rehabilitated foot so that they could be supported in their healthier position.

These problems are often left unhandled, and, often people don’t know of the choices that might be available in a chiropractic biomechanical setting and instead elect for procedures involving injections and sometimes, even surgery. If you are somebody who has had plantar fasciitis and would like to avoid injections and surgery and have not had a course of conservative care like I have described, I would certainly recommend that you find a chiropractor who is trained in this type of care and who can evaluate you and see if you are an appropriate candidate for that type of care and start you on a road to getting you better.