In the previous post we discussed what an intervertebral disc is and how injuries occur. We also discussed what symptoms you can get if you do have a disc injury. In part 2 of this series, I will look at the diagnosis and treatment options for a disc injury and will also give some ways to help at home. So how is a disc injury diagnosed? Continue reading to find out.
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A disc injury is often called lots of things; a slipped disc, a herniated disc, a disc prolapse, a disc protrusion, a disc bulge, degenerative disc etc. Whatever you call it, a disc injury is very common these days. In fact, a large portion of the population actually have disc bulges, but they go unnoticed, as not all disc injuries cause pain. My aim with this 2 part blog series is to firstly describe what a disc injury is and how it occurs. The second post will be how disc injuries can be treated and what you can do at home to help. I have found that the more you know about a problem, the more informed your decision making process can be. This is extremely important with disc injuries as there are a few different treatment options with some of them being quite invasive. Whether you have an injury or not, I hope it makes things a lot clearer for you and gives you some ways to improve your function and hopefully prevent an injury in the future. So what is a disc injury and why do they occur? Continue reading to find out.
Simply walking for half an hour a day, 6 days a week could reduce the risk of death in elderly men by a massive 40%, according to a study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Men who did regular exercise also lived for 5 years longer on average than sedentary men. The study was done in Oslo, Norway, and I think the results are fascinating. Who wouldn’t want to live an extra 5 years? Continue reading to see what they did.
We all know that exercise is good for your body and I have written several posts in the past on this topic. Some new research, published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise in March this year, involving identical twins suggests that it can have a big impact on your brain. The study showed that a twin who worked out regularly had significantly more gray matter in their brains than the twin that did not exercise as much. This increase was prevalent in the area of the brain involved in motor control. The exciting part about using identical twins in this type of research is that they have the same genetic makeup and usually have grown up in a similar environment. This means that the differences in the brains were more likely due to the exercise habits than other genetic factors. Continue reading to find out what they did.
There are 4 main causes of preventable ill-health: Smoking, poor nutrition, lack of physical activity, and excess alcohol. These could be easy to remedy, but what effect do they, and in particular exercise, really have? A new report from the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has revealed the full extent exercise could have on preventing disease and treating many conditions. The report was based on analyzing over 200 separate pieces of research and took 2 years to complete. The report shows some pretty amazing findings. Although based in the UK, the results would be similar the world over. It is amazing what a bit of exercise can do to help prevent numerous health problems. I think you will be surprised by what they found. Continue reading to find out.
I started my last blog post with the line “movement is life”. I also talked about how a lack of mobility and activity can have negative effects on your health. Check out this research that shows how important walking can be. After looking at 9 studies and 34,485 seniors, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh found that gait speed (how fast you walk) was an effective predictor of life expectancy. Simply put, the faster you normally walk, the longer you live. Want to know more? Continue reading to see what they found.
Did you know that the position of your tongue can affect strength in the neck and the body? I have been doing some study and came across this idea, it intrigued me so I wanted to learn more about it. It is fascinating how the body works and how a simple thing, like where your tongue is in your mouth, can affect neck strength and even strength in the legs, yes the legs. Knowing the correct position of your tongue when doing certain exercises can make a big difference. It can even help with your breathing. Continue reading to find out what the ideal tongue position is and some simple experiments to try out.
I have had a few people comment on my last blog post about the Beighton Hypermobilty Score and ask, what does a low score mean? Well I thought I would answer this in my next blog post, so here it goes.
The test was a test for hypermobility, If you scored low on the test, it means that you are unlikely to be hypermobile. The test simply checks the motion of certain joints but not all joints. It doesn’t look at the shoulders, the cervical spine, the jaw etc. You can have some joints that are more mobile than others. The test is simply an indication of hypermobile joints. If you scored a '0' with the little fingers, thumbs, elbows and knees that is fine, it means those joints are not hypermobile. It is the last test that interests me the most. Hypermobility is where your joints move more than ‘normal’ or have a bigger ‘range of motion’ than normal. People that are hypermobile can often get into postions that others find impossible. Think of a gymnast, generally speaking, they are hypermobile. Hypermobility is often hereditary and can occur in some joints and not others, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. You can be hypermbile and have no problems or it can cause you issues. There is a simple test you can do to see if you have hypermobile joints. It is called the Beighton Hypermobility Score. Continue reading to try the simple test and see what you score.
I was doing my CPD (Continuing Professional Development) training this week and came across an interesting quote, “your body gets good at what it needs to get good at”. The program I was studying was a mobility program and this quote was based on mobility, but I think it can apply to other areas as well. What does it mean you may ask? From a mobility perspective, your body will adapt to what it needs to. In previous posts I have talked about how exercise can help creativity, memory and how important it is as you age. These effects are over and above the usual benefits of exercise. I came across some interesting research that suggests exercise may even be able to help your eyesight. Yes, you read that right, your eyesight! The research suggests that exercise may reduce the risk of Macular degeneration. This is where neurons in the central part of the retina deteriorate. So what did they do in the research? Continue reading to find out.
In my previous post I talked about ways to get the most out of your exercise based New Year’s resolution. There is one thing I forgot to add to the list in the last post, and that is accountability. If you are accountable for your actions you are more likely to succeed. Accountability can be with a personal trainer, a training partner or having a friend or partner help keep you on track.
I have always said that I practice what I preach. By this I mean doing appropriate stretches, exercises, eating well and so on, to maintain function and hopefully good health. I am like most people and made a few resolutions this year. My main resolution is to improve my fitness, strength and stability. To help me succeed in this resolution I am writing about it here to make sure I have accountability and succeed. Continue reading to find out what I am doing. In part 1 of this series I explained how technology can put you in poor positions that often lead to pain and dysfunction and can even increase your risk of injuries. Simply looking down at your phone can lead to 27kg of extra pressure being put on your neck and spine. We can’t get away from technology and less than ideal postures all the time, so how can we minimise the effects? Here are 5 ways to help counteract the problems stemming from the use of technology.
Most people think of chiropractic care as an effective way of helping back and neck pain. I have seen firsthand that chiropractic is a lot more than this. It is great to see that research has come out that supports what we see in practice. Research published in 2007 in the Journal of Human Hypertension showed that chiropractic care can lower blood pressure. The findings and conclusion by the researchers was great. Continue reading to see their results.
If you are unfortunate enough to develop acute back pain, what do you do first to help ease the discomfort? Do you grab some pain relief? Do you ice it? Do you do some stretches? Or do you go to your chiropractor for an assessment? There are lots of options!
If you are a person who regularly takes paracetamol for back pain, you may not be getting the results you want according to some new research that was published recently in The Lancet. This research was the first large randomised trial to compare the effectiveness of paracetamol with placebo for low back pain, they found that paracetamol is no better than placebo at speeding recovery from acute episodes of lower back pain or improving pain levels, function, sleep or quality of life. The findings question the universal endorsement of paracetamol as the first choice painkiller for low-back pain, say the authors. Continue reading to find out more about the research and a different, natural approach to back pain. It is often said that muscle and strength decline as a function of aging alone. Put simply, this means that as you get older you are naturally going to lose strength and muscle mass and there is not much you can do about it.
A new study by Dr Vonda Wright and her colleagues that can be found at the The Physician and Sports medicine, may counteract this belief. They took detailed measurements of 40 masters athletes between the ages of 40 and 81, and found a surprising lack of age related muscle loss. They suggested that these declines that are usually seen, may signal the effect of chronic disuse rather than muscle aging. Continue reading to see a sample image of their results. It is very interesting. A big emphasis of my work is stability, especially in people with lower back pain or a history of recurring lower back pain. The first step when someone comes to my chiropractic practice, is to assess the area, restore optimal
function and reduce the initial complaint through chiropractic care. Once things are functioning better, the emphasis moves onto why the problem was there in the first place and how we can stop it from coming back. This invariably will include some sort of stability exercises and stretches. There are hundreds of different exercises and workouts out there and what is best for an individual will depend on numerous factors. A good question to ask is, what is the difference between an exercise done seated and standing? I came across some interesting research that I thought I should share. People often think that any pain in the leg, whether it is in the front, back or side, is called 'sciatica'. However, this is not the case. Sciatica is defined as pain or discomfort associated with the sciatic nerve which runs from the lower back, down the back of the legs to the feet. It is estimated that up to 40% of the New Zealand population will experience sciatica at some point in their lives.
To fully understand Sciatica, you first need to know what the sciatic nerve is. The sciatic nerve is the longest nerve in the body and is actually composed of two nerves, the common fibular (or peroneal) nerve and the Tibial nerve. These nerves are originally formed from 5 different nerve roots in the lower lumbar spine and pelvis. These nerves join together then run down the back of the thigh to knee level where they split and one travels down the front of the lower leg and one travels down the back of the lower leg. Lets look a bit deeper and see how sciatica occurs, how you diagnose it and most importantly, how to fix it. Repeated cycles of lumbar hinging (flexing of the lower back) has been shown to be the quickest way to herniate a disc in the lower back. The research shows that the injury to the disc occurs from the inside out. So how does this occur? In order to understand this you first need to know how the intervertebral discs are structured.
A study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine and funded by the National Institute of Health suggests that medication is not the best option when dealing with neck pain.
In the study, they tracked 272 patients for 12 weeks. What they found was that those who used a chiropractor, or those that used exercise, were more than twice as likely to be pain free than those who took medication. Can simply thinking about a task make you better at it? and 5 ways to improve your brain fitness13/7/2014 Some interesting new research has shown that you can actually “change” your brain through thought itself and that mental effort can actually result in physical changes to your mind and body.
When imagining an action, it requires the same motor and sensory programs in the brain that would be used if you were actually doing it. New research has shown that those who mentally practiced playing the piano achieved the same accuracy level as those who physically did it. On the same note, people who imagined doing strength-training exercises increased their muscle strength by 22%, compared to 30% among those who physically did the exercises. Taking this a bit further, the research showed that when you focus your mind on a specific muscle during a workout, you work that muscle 22% harder. So by focusing on what you are doing at the gym can enable you to get a better workout. In fact, just believing that your daily activities are exercise has also been shown to improve physical fitness. Harvard researchers informed one group of hotel housekeepers that their daily work qualified as exercise, whereas a control group did not receive this information. Four weeks later, those who believed their work was a form of exercise had a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index, even though their behaviors hadn’t actually changed at all. So how can you improve your brain function? |
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Dr Craig BuscombBringing you news, research and advice on health, wellness, exercise and chiropractic care to help take your health to the next level
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