Can My Bellevue Chiropractor Help With Fibromyalgia?
Posted on February 26, 2012 by Dr. Michael Weir
Do you wake up feeling tired, washed out, and dragged down? Do you have generalized pain throughout your body that doesn’t seem to respond to anything you’ve tried? Do you wake up multiple times a night and fight getting back to sleep? These are classic symptoms of fibromyalgia (FM). However, when caught early and treated appropriately, FM can resolve or at least be controlled. As a Bellevue chiropractor I have found that chiropractic care and management of fibromyalgia is very effective and is becoming increasingly popular among FM sufferers. The goal of managing FM is to return you to a productive, enjoyable lifestyle allowing you to function and perform all of your desired activities.
Did you know that chiropractic is one of the most popular forms of alternative care, and 20% of American men and women utilize chiropractic at one point or another in their lives. Did you also know that chiropractic has been found to have an 80% satisfaction rate with people reporting significant pain relief, their function and overall increased sense of well-being. With all this being said I like to share with you some of the science behind chiropractic, and what it is exactly that chiropractors do.
As a chiropractor my main is to bring balance to the musculoskeletal system and reduce stress on the nervous system. This balance helps the body achieve a pain-free environment and may also help with many of your other symptoms. I achieve balance within each of my patients by the use of the pro-adjuster system, and it’s computerized technology to allow me to diagnose and treat the specific problems that my patients come to my office with. I also retrain each my patients muscle system through exercises rehabilitation and soft tissue work including massage. Some of my patients may also need nutritional and diet counseling.
Many of my patients who come to see me with fibromyalgia have pain or tender spots that travel throughout their entire body many times in their back in their neck, or arms and legs. They may also have headaches as a result of these tender spots. Chiropractic is a great way to reduce the pain that many fibromyalgia sufferers have by bringing alignment back to their spines, bringing relaxation to their muscles, and restoring normal posture. Many fibromyalgia sufferers also find that diet and nutritional counseling are also very beneficial. Research shows that chiropractic care for patients suffering from fibromyalgia is very supportive.
At Back in Action Chiropractic we know the importance of including chiropractic into your treatment plan and realize you have a choice of providers here in Bellevue. If you suffer from fibromyalgia, or have a friend or family member that requires care we appreciate the trust and confidence shown by choosing our services and look forward to serving you and your family presently and, in the future.
Dr. Weir is a local bellevue chiropractor. You can contact his chiropractic chiropractic clinic at 425-635-0495.
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
how to heal
I like this doctor's approach - refreshing ...
" encourage patients to list and build upon the good influences on their lives and their personal strengths, focus on their major concern, relax with closed eyes and receive internal suggestions of the most promising next step to take, select the best one, take that step, discover real life consequences, and 90% get better. The other 10% soon sensed they were heading in the wrong direction, suddenly knew what step they should have taken, took it, and could hardly believe the good outcome. Could not wait to take the next step -- whether pleasant or not. Could enjoy the pleasant, and the unpleasant taught them a valuable lesson that immediatly brought such great good it seemed too good to be true, but time told it was true."
Dr Richard W Biek, MD, MPH,
" encourage patients to list and build upon the good influences on their lives and their personal strengths, focus on their major concern, relax with closed eyes and receive internal suggestions of the most promising next step to take, select the best one, take that step, discover real life consequences, and 90% get better. The other 10% soon sensed they were heading in the wrong direction, suddenly knew what step they should have taken, took it, and could hardly believe the good outcome. Could not wait to take the next step -- whether pleasant or not. Could enjoy the pleasant, and the unpleasant taught them a valuable lesson that immediatly brought such great good it seemed too good to be true, but time told it was true."
Dr Richard W Biek, MD, MPH,
The real reason you have back pain...?
Found this in an interesting article from Jonah Lehrer (jonahlehrer.com):
"Back pain is an epidemic. The numbers are sobering: There’s an 80 percent chance that, at some point in your life, you’ll suffer from it. At any given time, about 10 percent of Americans are completely incapacitated by their lumbar regions, which is why back pain is the second most frequent reason people seek medical care, after general checkups. And all this treatment is expensive: According to a recent study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Americans spend nearly $90 billion every year treating back pain, which is roughly equivalent to what we spend on cancer.
When doctors began encountering a surge in patients with lower back pain in the mid-20th century, they had few explanations. The lower back is an exquisitely complicated area of the body, full of small bones, ligaments, spinal discs, and minor muscles. Then there’s the spinal cord itself, a thick cable of nerves that can be easily disturbed. There are so many moving parts in the back that doctors had difficulty figuring out what, exactly, was causing a person’s pain. As a result, patients were typically sent home with a prescription for bed rest.
This treatment plan, though simple, was still extremely effective. Even when nothing was done to the lower back, about 90 percent of people with back pain got better within six weeks. The body healed itself, the inflammation subsided, the nerve relaxed.
Over the next few decades, this hands-off approach to back pain remained the standard medical treatment. That all changed, however, with the introduction of magnetic resonance imaging in the late 1970s. These diagnostic machines use powerful magnets to generate stunningly detailed images of the body’s interior. Within a few years, the MRI machine became a crucial diagnostic tool.
The view afforded by MRI led to a new causal story: Back pain was the result of abnormalities in the spinal discs, those supple buffers between the vertebrae. The MRIs certainly supplied bleak evidence: Back pain was strongly correlated with seriously degenerated discs, which were in turn thought to cause inflammation of the local nerves. Consequently, doctors began administering epidurals to quiet the pain, and if it persisted they would surgically remove the damaged disc tissue.
But the vivid images were misleading. It turns out that disc abnormalities are typically not the cause of chronic back pain. The presence of such abnormalities is just as likely to be correlated with the absence of back problems, as a 1994 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed. The researchers imaged the spinal regions of 98 people with no back pain. The results were shocking: Two-thirds of normal patients exhibited “serious problems” like bulging or protruding tissue. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs. Nevertheless, none of these people were in pain. The study concluded that, in most cases, “the discovery of a bulge or protrusion on an MRI scan in a patient with low back pain may frequently be coincidental.”
Similar patterns appear in a new study by James Andrews, a sports medicine orthopedist. He scanned the shoulders of 31 professional baseball pitchers. Their MRIs showed that 90 percent of them had abnormal cartilage, a sign of damage that would typically lead to surgery. Yet they were all in perfect health.
This is not the way things are supposed to work. We assume that more information will make it easier to find the cause, that seeing the soft tissue of the back will reveal the source of the pain, or at least some useful correlations. Unfortunately, that often doesn’t happen. Our habits of visual conclusion-jumping take over. All those extra details end up confusing us; the more we know, the less we seem to understand.
The only solution for this mental flaw is to deliberately ignore a wealth of facts, even when the facts seem relevant. This is what’s happening with the treatment of back pain: Doctors are now encouraged to not order MRIs when making diagnoses. The latest clinical guidelines issued by the American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society strongly recommended that doctors “not routinely obtain imaging or other diagnostic tests in patients with nonspecific low back pain.”
(However, most GPs and even specialists in the UK dont seem to know this!)
Chronic back pain remains a mystery. While doctors have long assumed that there’s a valid correlation between pain and physical artifacts—a herniated disc, a sheared muscle, a pinched nerve—there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting the role of seemingly unrelated factors. For instance, a recent study published in the journal Spine concluded that minor physical trauma had virtually no relationship with disabling pain. Instead, the researchers found that a small subset of “nonspinal factors,” such as depression and smoking, were most closely associated with episodes of serious pain. We keep trying to fix the back, but perhaps the back isn’t what needs fixing. Perhaps we’re searching for causes in the wrong place.
The same confusion afflicts so many of our most advanced causal stories. Hormone replacement therapy was supposed to reduce the risk of heart attack in postmenopausal women—estrogen prevents inflammation in blood vessels—but a series of recent clinical trials found that it did the opposite, at least among older women. (Estrogen therapy was also supposed to ward off Alzheimer’s, but that doesn’t seem to work, either.) We were told that vitamin D supplements prevented bone loss in people with multiple sclerosis and that vitamin E supplements reduced cardiovascular disease—neither turns out to be true."
Contributing editor Jonah Lehrer (jonahlehrer.com) is the author of the forthcoming book Imagine: How Creativity Works.
"Back pain is an epidemic. The numbers are sobering: There’s an 80 percent chance that, at some point in your life, you’ll suffer from it. At any given time, about 10 percent of Americans are completely incapacitated by their lumbar regions, which is why back pain is the second most frequent reason people seek medical care, after general checkups. And all this treatment is expensive: According to a recent study in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Americans spend nearly $90 billion every year treating back pain, which is roughly equivalent to what we spend on cancer.
When doctors began encountering a surge in patients with lower back pain in the mid-20th century, they had few explanations. The lower back is an exquisitely complicated area of the body, full of small bones, ligaments, spinal discs, and minor muscles. Then there’s the spinal cord itself, a thick cable of nerves that can be easily disturbed. There are so many moving parts in the back that doctors had difficulty figuring out what, exactly, was causing a person’s pain. As a result, patients were typically sent home with a prescription for bed rest.
This treatment plan, though simple, was still extremely effective. Even when nothing was done to the lower back, about 90 percent of people with back pain got better within six weeks. The body healed itself, the inflammation subsided, the nerve relaxed.
Over the next few decades, this hands-off approach to back pain remained the standard medical treatment. That all changed, however, with the introduction of magnetic resonance imaging in the late 1970s. These diagnostic machines use powerful magnets to generate stunningly detailed images of the body’s interior. Within a few years, the MRI machine became a crucial diagnostic tool.
The view afforded by MRI led to a new causal story: Back pain was the result of abnormalities in the spinal discs, those supple buffers between the vertebrae. The MRIs certainly supplied bleak evidence: Back pain was strongly correlated with seriously degenerated discs, which were in turn thought to cause inflammation of the local nerves. Consequently, doctors began administering epidurals to quiet the pain, and if it persisted they would surgically remove the damaged disc tissue.
But the vivid images were misleading. It turns out that disc abnormalities are typically not the cause of chronic back pain. The presence of such abnormalities is just as likely to be correlated with the absence of back problems, as a 1994 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed. The researchers imaged the spinal regions of 98 people with no back pain. The results were shocking: Two-thirds of normal patients exhibited “serious problems” like bulging or protruding tissue. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs. Nevertheless, none of these people were in pain. The study concluded that, in most cases, “the discovery of a bulge or protrusion on an MRI scan in a patient with low back pain may frequently be coincidental.”
Similar patterns appear in a new study by James Andrews, a sports medicine orthopedist. He scanned the shoulders of 31 professional baseball pitchers. Their MRIs showed that 90 percent of them had abnormal cartilage, a sign of damage that would typically lead to surgery. Yet they were all in perfect health.
This is not the way things are supposed to work. We assume that more information will make it easier to find the cause, that seeing the soft tissue of the back will reveal the source of the pain, or at least some useful correlations. Unfortunately, that often doesn’t happen. Our habits of visual conclusion-jumping take over. All those extra details end up confusing us; the more we know, the less we seem to understand.
The only solution for this mental flaw is to deliberately ignore a wealth of facts, even when the facts seem relevant. This is what’s happening with the treatment of back pain: Doctors are now encouraged to not order MRIs when making diagnoses. The latest clinical guidelines issued by the American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society strongly recommended that doctors “not routinely obtain imaging or other diagnostic tests in patients with nonspecific low back pain.”
(However, most GPs and even specialists in the UK dont seem to know this!)
Chronic back pain remains a mystery. While doctors have long assumed that there’s a valid correlation between pain and physical artifacts—a herniated disc, a sheared muscle, a pinched nerve—there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting the role of seemingly unrelated factors. For instance, a recent study published in the journal Spine concluded that minor physical trauma had virtually no relationship with disabling pain. Instead, the researchers found that a small subset of “nonspinal factors,” such as depression and smoking, were most closely associated with episodes of serious pain. We keep trying to fix the back, but perhaps the back isn’t what needs fixing. Perhaps we’re searching for causes in the wrong place.
The same confusion afflicts so many of our most advanced causal stories. Hormone replacement therapy was supposed to reduce the risk of heart attack in postmenopausal women—estrogen prevents inflammation in blood vessels—but a series of recent clinical trials found that it did the opposite, at least among older women. (Estrogen therapy was also supposed to ward off Alzheimer’s, but that doesn’t seem to work, either.) We were told that vitamin D supplements prevented bone loss in people with multiple sclerosis and that vitamin E supplements reduced cardiovascular disease—neither turns out to be true."
Contributing editor Jonah Lehrer (jonahlehrer.com) is the author of the forthcoming book Imagine: How Creativity Works.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
India Chiropractic Mission
Bangalore Chiropractic was launched on the 25th August and, within 10 days, it’s at 90% capacity!
This is a combination of patients returning to care (since Dr. Sonya’s last visit), and online new patient marketing (the practice website and Choose Natural) which are producing incredible results.
Dr. Nick Beckwith recently relocated from the US to India and started at the clinic earlier this week.
Dr. Sonya and Dr. Nick are seeing a very wide cross-section of patients. Interestingly, traditional back pain and headaches admitting complaints are in the minority! Complaints like ADHD, colic, bed-wetting, breathing problems, dizziness, extremities pain, etc. are more popular.
Alongside paying patients (essential so that the ministry is financially sustainable) the doctors are seeing economically disadvantaged patients… India’s poor surviving on less than $2 per day.
This is a combination of patients returning to care (since Dr. Sonya’s last visit), and online new patient marketing (the practice website and Choose Natural) which are producing incredible results.
Dr. Nick Beckwith recently relocated from the US to India and started at the clinic earlier this week.
Dr. Sonya and Dr. Nick are seeing a very wide cross-section of patients. Interestingly, traditional back pain and headaches admitting complaints are in the minority! Complaints like ADHD, colic, bed-wetting, breathing problems, dizziness, extremities pain, etc. are more popular.
Alongside paying patients (essential so that the ministry is financially sustainable) the doctors are seeing economically disadvantaged patients… India’s poor surviving on less than $2 per day.
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