A recent study featured in several North Carolina papers states that 70 percent of people with back pain are overweight. 70 PERCENT! That is a staggering number! Here’s another interesting piece of info: At Dynamic Health Center, we find that your body is carrying an additional 5% to 20% of unnecessary weight JUST due to chronic inflammation within the body. What if there was an easy way to eliminate it and/or keep it under control? The initial phase of care at Dynamic Health Center is designed to reduce that chronic inflammation.  By doing this, a person moves better, feels better, and can more easily and efficiently lose weight.  Once the patient is feeling better, the next phase of care is to reeducate and strengthen the area of concern, both through physical therapy and a proper meal plan.

As an Olympic athlete, I have followed many successful eating plans and diets through the years. They were all good to a certain point while training, but now that I’m in the real world and am subjected to various choices of foods, I’m not always presented with the healthiest options. I’m sure you can identify with this. Convenience and health just don’t seem to mix when it comes to proper eating! Because of that, I plan ahead with my daily and weekly meal plans. I will prepare several meals for my lunch during the week so I am ready with a healthy choice for lunch during my busy day. This is an absolute MUST to avoid the fast food options that are so detrimental to my health, and it’s a MUST for you as well. It all comes down to being prepared and having a plan, short-term and long-term, to be your ideal self.

In my next post, I will be discussing alkaline versus acidic eating.  In short, alkaline is THE way to go. Educating yourself and following simple guidelines to eating a more alkaline diet will decrease chronic and acute inflammation. This will make you feel better in general, increase energy, and lead to weight loss.

Call our office for a complementary nutritional stress analysis and find out how to get on to a healthier path of smart eating choices and activity, which ultimately leads to a better quality of life.

MORNING: When you have pain in the morning, it is due to a ligament or joint issue.  When a person lies down to go to sleep, his or her muscles are supposed to relax to recover from being used all day. The ligaments, which attached bones to one another are designed to restrict each bone’s movements by slightly contracting. If the proper function of the ligament contracture does not occur, you will find yourself tossing and turning through the evening trying to find a comfortable position. This is because the muscles have to do the ligaments’ job, and they become more fatigued.

AFTERNOON or EVENING: When you have pain in the afternoon or evening, that is typically from a muscle weakness, injury, or overuse. It takes a bit longer for the discomfort to appear through the day, and if it does not go away, the overused tissue does not recover in a proper amount of time.

When your ligament and muscular functions breakdown and fail, your body will wake you up at night through the use of pain. By this time, you have gone through the other stages of degeneration, and are now also sleep deprived. Always fun, right? But this is why the body then creates a protective mechanism of shortening the ligaments even more and/or adding a chronic inflammatory process to a joint or area in order to help to restrict movement, which can then compound your pain and stiffness issues.

This is why in our initial phase of care, when we remove the acute and/or chronic inflammatory process and provide the muscles with a level of recovery, you will feel better and actually achieve an improved range of motion. In the next phase of care, once a person’s pain has begun to decrease, we begin to focus our care to the joint and specifically to the ligaments.  This is what will give the patient the most lasting relief, and this allows our team to tackle some of the most difficult, degenerative, and disabling conditions.

Just remember, whether it’s occurring morning, midday or in the evening, pain is an indicator of some problem in the body, and that problem needs to be addressed.

Does this new information shed some light on the pain you’re experiencing? Let us know in the comments section below.

So what is pain? Pain is the body’s indicator that something is not as it should be. For instance, when a patient and I are discussing pain in the joints of the body, something we treat quite a bit here at Dynamic Health Center, it is almost always caused by an increase in pressure, which can result from a variety of occurrences. As I said, pain is a normal function of the body, and as such should not be covered up or “masked” with topical creams or painkillers when coming from a joint.  Pain is the body telling the nervous system what is going on and the brain then reacts appropriately. If the wrong information is sent to the brain the response may be incomplete or incorrect. That being said, the body cannot properly heal until the inflammation is under control.

Pain is an indicator or a problem that is either “acute” or “chronic”.

Acute: Your problem should heal on its own.  If it doesn’t, it will become chronic. An example of an acute pain issue would be a sprained ankle.

Chronic: Your problem will not heal on its’ own and will progress to a degenerative and eventually disabling problem. An example of chronic pain issue would be a torn ACL or separated shoulder.

Another way of looking at acute verses chronic is the following:

Acute MUST have ALL of the following: 1) redness, 2) heat, 3) pain, and 4) swelling. Chronic is when at least ONE of the four is no longer present.

How do you know what you have? If pain persists constantly or in a recurring fashion for longer than two weeks, or if heat makes a recurring condition feel better, you could be advancing toward a chronic condition. I hope to be able to evaluate and diagnose joint conditions in their acute and chronic stages for people before they become degenerative to the point that people begin to lose hope in recovery. We do this on a daily basis to educate and avoid future problems for those who are ready.

Watch out for a new pain topic coming soon! Do you have a particular topic you would like me to expand on? Let me know your comments, suggestions and thoughts using the comment system below!

To begin with a story, some people don’t know my reasoning for starting Dynamic Health Center in the first place. Before I became a primary care chiropractic physician, I traveled the world competing in fencing. I was excited to make the 1996 U.S. Olympic Team, but while training for the Olympics, I injured my back. This led to a major turning point for me.

In my search for a viable, permanent solution to my back injury, I was fortunate to find a chiropractor who not only corrected my back issues, he helped me avoid surgery and allowed me to continue training and competing for the U.S. Olympic Fencing Team.

This experience opened my eyes to the value of treatment modalities outside traditional medicine. I was treated by numerous healthcare providers around the world, and I experienced firsthand the value of looking at illness and injury from several complementary perspectives. This is the whole idea behind Dynamic Health Center, to review our patients objectively from many points of view to determine the best course of treatment for any given injury.

This is how I created the Dynamic Health Center model. I benefited firsthand from the individual treatments of rehabilitative medicine, acupuncture, physical therapy and rehabilitative care. I then combined all the teachings and techniques used around the world into the protocols we offer today. We combine this cross-platform approach with a multitude of different pieces of equipment and technology, with the mission to CORRECT whatever is causing the pain and eliminate it.

You must know how to recognize the problem, then utilize the proper tools to deal with all the aspects of that problem. In short, if you are in pain, we want to find out why and correct it. That’s really the main goal at Dynamic Health Center, and it has worked wonderfully thus far. It is more complex than it sounds, only because the human body is such a miraculous and intricate system.

There are two ways to deal with pain, and they are the same ways you deal with a leak in your roof: Put a bucket under the leak to catch the water, or get on the roof, locate the leak and repair it. We prefer the latter, and that is what we drive toward. What is the root CAUSE of your pain? And this is where it gets interesting because sometimes what is CAUSING the pain and what is actually HURTING are two completely different things. Think about it, if you have a KNEE pain, would you think that could be directly related to a BACK issue? Most people wouldn’t, understandably so. It’s not logical. But we see patients like this every day. Find the SOURCE of the pain, eliminate it, and restore balance and comfort to your life. That’s what my team is here to do. How does the old song go? “The HIP bone’s connected to the THIGH bone…” and so forth!

The goal of this blog is to share, from a personal perspective, more information about our daily practices and our numerous success stories here at Dynamic Health Center. I want to provide my unique experiences with patients, information on new technologies and treatments as well as any general insights that may arise.