The Cannon Falls, MN Library is hosting a “How to” series and here at the office we have been helping with a few of them. Our most recent YouTube video is How to: Run. In this video you can find some basic tips to begin running.
Keep up to date with our YouTube videos by subscribing! We will continue to release additional video for at home activity use!
The Cannon Falls, MN Library is hosting a “How to” series and here at the office we have been helping with a few of them. Our most recent YouTube video is How to: Breathe. In this video you can find some at home activities you can participate in to make the most of your breathing.
Keep up to date with our YouTube videos by subscribing! We will continue to release additional video for at home activity use!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320306138_Heart_Rate_Variability_to_Assess_the_Changes_in_Autonomic_Nervous_System_Function_Associated_With_Vertebral_Subluxation
The last part in the “beyond pain” series is about the correlation of spinal functional lesions and their impact on the regulation of your autonomic nervous system (referred to as ANS).
When I received my education 25 + years ago, autonomic dysfunction was thought to be a relatively rare disorder and there were few, much less non-invasive testing for it. Much has changed since then, and ANS dysfunction of various severity is recognized as prevalent, even leading to the current terminology DYSAUTONOMIA.
The ANS regulates automatic, unconscious vital functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, digestive enzyme production, heat/cold thermostat and many, many more. The ANS is on a constant feedback loop gathering information from the periphery, analyzing in the lower brain centers and sending signals down the spinal cord for appropriate response: elevating your heart rate for exercise, moving your bowels when full, increasing sweating when hot etc… So dysautonomia can be very confusing to diagnose or define, since it can involve very different symptoms that may be vague.
Chiropractors from many decades ago may never have heard of the term dysautonomia, however their work back then and our work today continues to powerfully help regulate the ANS by eliminating unnecessary breakdown in the feedback loop, both sensory as well as the ANS motor system. I have found that to be especially true in children, and more recently infants dealing with physically challenging births. I believe that many of the cases of unexplained colic, fussy babies, is actually a manifestation of autonomic dysfunction especially to the delicate digestion of newborns.
The “diagnosis” of dysautonomia is a broad and complex topic that cannot be addressed in this blog, but hopefully soon. There are simply physical tests that can be a clue (asymetrical blood pressure and SPO2 for example), advanced medical testing (table tilt, sweat test), and some newer non-invasive and inexpensive in office diagnostics such as heart rate variability.
The following blog is the second part of the shoulder blog from July 11,2020.
If your shoulder is creating issues for you, please be sure to check in with your local provider. Not all of these following exercises or at home activities are appropriate for everyone. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to the office at (507) 263-2393 and schedule at appointment or email me at bwclinic.kaila@gmail.com
First-
Wall Ball Circles. I really like this activity because it makes the shoulder work together and if you are doing it correctly, it really fires shoulder depressor muscles which I have found more and more underactive ones in our recent patient population.
What you will need:
A ball- tennis ball, deflated basketball or volleyball will work too. You could use a small exercise ball, but those tend to be a bit heavier and more difficult.
A wall- any wall that is at least shoulder height.
How:
Standing with your shoulders and hips parallel to the wall.
Stand far enough away from the wall that you can hold the ball between your hand and the wall comfortable without compromising the parallel position of your shoulders and hips.
With a tall, shoulder down and slightly back, start with some small clockwise circles.
After about 10 small clockwise circles, try about 10 counterclockwise circles.
Progression to larger clockwise and counterclockwise circles can be made.
When to stop:
If you are experiencing any shooting pain that radiates or causes any numbness or tingling.
If you are experiencing pain greater than 6/10.
If you are unsure you are doing it correctly.
Follow the following link for a short YouTube video!
Second-
Elbow Press Downs. I like this exercise for firing the shoulder depressors as well as creating a stretching sensation on the top of the shoulder into the neck.
What you will need:
Chair with a back for starters, without a back as you progress
1 elbow 1 shoulder- connected usually works best :)
How:
While sitting in a tall upright positing, imagine a squishy ball beneath your elbow
Press your elbow straight down into that squishy ball
Hold for about 3 seconds
Repeat
When to stop:
If you are experiencing any shooting pain that radiates or causes any numbness or tingling.
If you are experiencing pain greater than 6/10.
If you are unsure you are doing it correctly.
Follow the following link for a short YouTube video!
These are just two exercises/ daily at home activities that I really like for some shoulder care. Again, these don’t work for everyone and if you are in pain or dysfunction, please do not hesitate to visit a provider.
Visit our YouTube Channel for some additional at home activities!
Bruggers- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH3FV3f7lBY
Neck Retractions- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bzqsoWABtg
Enjoy!
Reminder Due to the statewide mandate being put into place Saturday, July 25th, masks will be required for each appointment. Please plan accordingly. We will have additional masks available at the front desk if you forget one.
This blog entry should really have been written by Dr. Alvarez, but apparently I have dumped one too many administrative duties on her desk this week, so I will try to do it a wee bit of justice.
In the “beyond pain” series, I have discussed two aspect of spinal functional lesions (AKA subluxation in our technical jargon), that are not manifested as pain: loss of normal sensory perception and loss of normal energy expenditure resulting in fatigue. There are two more on the list and the next one is dyskinesia: the impairment of normal voluntary motor function.
Dyskinesia can be difficult to explain. People often think that we are talking about loss of strength, or loss of movement, but neither fully captures it. Dyskinesia is what happens when you want to accomplish a movement but the movement does not come out the way you want it: the range is not correct, the aim is not correct, the amount of force is too little or too much, or the movement itself is choppy instead of smooth.
Athletes instinctively know what dyskinesia is, even if they have never heard the word: when your pitching arm doesn’t release at the right time, when you overshoot your jump for example. Your brain circuitry has perfectly issued the command but the execution is distorted. You do not have to be an athlete to experience dyskinesia. Musicians are acutely aware of that problem when hitting the right key or the right string as well, and the “athletes of daily life” will see that manifestation when your intended muscle movement is rachety and inefficient, for example when typing or writing by hand.
One of my mentors in my last year of school was educating his patients about how to detect non-pain manifestation of their recurring spinal issues with an old fashioned fridge magnet (good marketing tool, he made some magnets with the office logo). He would have patients stand in front of the fridge, reach out with their index finger to touch the center of the magnet and repeat with their eyes closed. When they started to hit the outside of the magnet, it was time to schedule an appointment. I am pretty sure they had never heard of that word either, but they understood the correlation between spinal functional lesions and loss or motor efficiency.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320306138_Heart_Rate_Variability_to_Assess_the_Changes_in_Autonomic_Nervous_System_Function_Associated_With_Vertebral_Subluxation
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The shoulder is made up of four joints. 1. Acromial-clavicular (AC), 2. Sternoclavicular (SC), 3. Glenohumeral (GH), 4. Scapulothoracic. The traditional main muscles of the shoulder include the SITS muscles or Supraspinatous, Infraspinatous, Teres Minor and Subscapularis. You can see where these muscles attach and their function based on the included image:
Poor posture usually due to poor working mechanics with desk jobs as well as this not so new world of looking down at cell phones can lead to what we call forward head carriage and then upper cross syndrome. The following image shows how upper cross syndrome can affect you.
Shoulder injuries are incredibly common in sport. Some include, but are certainly not limited to: Softball/Baseball (tendonitis, rotator cuff, SLAP tears), Hockey (shoulder separation & dislocation, clavicle fracture), Tennis (shoulder impingement, rotator cuff tendonitis, shoulder bursitis, sprains and/or strains), Volleyball (shoulder impingement and labral tears).
If shoulder injuries are so common in sport, how and what should we do to protect ourselves or our athletes and keep them performing at their best. First we need to begin with understanding the mobility stability continuum. Basically this is that every other joint is either needed for mobility or stability. Yes, there are specific areas throughout your body that you DO NOT want to be “mobile” but rather you want them to be stable in order to support the mobile areas.
After discussing the implication of spinal functional lesions on sensory mapping (dysaffenrentiation), Dr. Kent addresses a much lesser known aspect of nerve regulation called dysponesis. Dysponesis means abnormal management of energy expenditure, either not enough energy assigned for a task or wasted energy on another.
For most people thinking about energy expenditure, the idea of burning up too many calories AKA energy on a task sounds like a good deal, but from an evolutionary perspective, the production of energy uses up a lot of precious resources (food, digestive, and metabolic work), and your nervous system is supposed to evaluate energy needs and expand as little as possible for a particular task in order to preserve resources for other needs. To some extent, the reason that there are over 8 billions of us on the planet is because our nervous system get a high Energy Star rating. Conversely, the body also knows when to assign enough energy to a crucial task that will keep you alive (pregnancy, flight response).
The challenge in connecting the dots between spinal functional lesions we see in our day to day chiropractic practice and dysponesis is that the latter can be difficult to measure. Chiropractors of past generations had some rather interesting, albeit rudimentary tools: surface heat measurement devices for example. In the early 2000, surface EMG device were quite popular in many chiropractic practices because they were non-invasive, quick, and easy to use. The surface EMG device measure electrical activity of superficial muscles, mostly on either side of the spine in the intrinsic muscle groups, but sometime also along the extremity where you could see a lot of abnormal muscle tone and random contractions from a pinched sciatic nerve for example. There is good research of what a normal paraspinal muscle activity graph should look like at rest, and the difference from an EMG reading on the side of a hot cervical spinal misalignment is striking. Spinal muscles burn up a lot of fuel, so some of these areas of high activity of the EMG indicate some poor energy usage. It also means that the muscle group could fire excessively when it is not supposed to (spasm, tightness), or that it could fail to fully contract and protect your neck when jarred (instability, susceptibility to injury).
Even more fascinating to me, after 26 years in practice, is the correlation between fatigue and chiropractic lesions. There is local fatigue, such as patients reporting that their head feels suddenly too heavy to hold, or that a leg “ feels like lead “. Those symptoms have no good orthopedic explanation until you look at it as a manifestation of dysponesis. They often spontaneously resolve after a few adjustments. There is also more general fatigue. Patients with acute spine injuries often report feeling totally wiped out even through they are adequately resting. I used to think that the pain was the source of the fatigue, but I have seen enough patients who had pretty modest pain from a new injury with comparatively high fatigue symptoms to now recognize that the neurological dysregulation of energy expenditure probably plays a bigger role than recognized.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320306138_Heart_Rate_Variability_to_Assess_the_Changes_in_Autonomic_Nervous_System_Function_Associated_With_Vertebral_Subluxation
