Ouch Take A Painkiller

by: Daryl Berman, DC

Embrace Your Inner Wisdom

Health is a game of spirals.  Meaning that once your health starts moving in a direction, it is much easier to spiral up or down in that same direction. No matter which direction, once you start going one direction it is easier to keep going – either getting healthier or getting sick.

When you are laid up with an illness or injury, how much harder is it to focus on good choices when we already don’t feel good?  Or are stuck in the house, with junk food and the television calling?  Unfortunately, this is the story for millions of people.  Once problems begin to snowball, the amount of work needed to get on the other side of them gets larger and larger as the results of lost health make getting healthier even harder.  People’s health problems become their obstacle to getting healthier.

Fortunately, the other side of the coin is the same way.  When you feel good, you make good choices.  You want to take care of yourself.  You can enjoy going out and being active.  You can feel proud of where you are at, and stimulated to continue making more good decisions.

The fact is that while we all go up and down from week to week, the big picture of our health is also moving in a bigger, broader direction.  And whatever that direction is, it gets easier to keep going over time.  This is something that every chiropractor understands about health, and wants to help you.  Because they know whichever direction it is going, it can easily pick up steam.

“Don’t Make Your Chiropractor Say ‘Yikes!’”

The way that we walk is something that most of us don’t think of often, if ever.  Chiropractors, on the other hand, can’t stop from watching for patterns.  Patterns like how people move, their posture, and even patterns of how we walk.  The funny part is that most of us are not ever taught the basics of how to stand, move and walk, the simplest things we do every day.  To figure out if you are causing yourself trouble or not, here’s a basic outline of what to look for.

Proper alignment in standing or walking involves having both feet pointing forward, while they are placed approximately underneath the hip joints – which you can approximate finding by putting your hands on the bony spots on the front of your waistline just under the belt.  The farther outside of this pattern you spend in day-to-day life, the more stress is on the hips, the knees and other joints, such as the pelvis and lower back, stressing these joint structures.

This mistake can end up looking like feet that point way inwards towards each other, or one or both feet pointing way out to the side.  Or it could also look like both feet very close to each other.   When in doubt, think of your feet making the number 11 when you look down, with a natural space between the feet.  Use these keys to help avoid problems in the future, and next time you are out people watching, you will start to see some scary patterns of movement yourself.