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Reduce Back Pain & Increase DiscSpace with Chiropractic
 

A study of children’s eating habits found that “31.9% of 6-year-old children consumed fruit less than once daily and 19.0% consumed vegetables less than once daily.” Upon further examination, researchers found that “children who consumed fruits and vegetables less than once daily during late infancy had increased odds (more than twice as likely) of eating fruits and vegetables less than once daily at age 6 years.”
 

Mothers are encouraged to train their infants to eat healthy meals so that it will become a pattern in later life.

Read the Abstract

Golfing great Tiger Woods withdrew from another tournament still suffering with his bad back despite having spine surgery last year. Hundreds of thousands have back surgery for “bad discs” and like Tiger many are never the same. This poses the question: If bad discs are the cause of pain, why do many still hurt after disc surgery?
 

Conversely, research at the Mayo Clinic recently found there are people with bad discs who have no pain at all, a concept that began 25 years ago with MRI research by Scott Boden, M.D., director of the Spine Center at Emory University. He found bad discs in pain-free people confirming early suspicions that herniated, bulging or degenerated discs were “coincidental” and not the holy grail of back pain causation.
 

Since nearly $100 billion is spent annually on treatments for bad backs, health-care reformists are looking closely at this huge expense to reduce costs and improve outcomes. For example, spinal fusion begins around $75,000 and can range closer to $100,000 with the extra costs of the operating room time, anesthesia bill, specialist fees and especially if there is instrumentation involved that may cost half as much as the surgery itself.
 

At the Mayo Clinic, Waleed Brinjikji, M.D., and his colleagues performed a systematic review of all studies that reported on the prevalence of lumbar degenerative findings on MRI scans among individuals with no history of low back pain. The researchers found 33 studies of 3,110 individuals published through April 2014 and found the vast prevalence of bad discs in pain-free people and no more significant than “gray hair or crow’s feet around their eyes.”
 

The reviewers concluded: “Our study suggests that imaging findings of degenerative changes such as disc degeneration, disc signal loss, disc height loss, disc protrusion, and facet arthropathy are generally part of the normal aging process rather than pathologic processes requiring intervention.”
 

Obviously debunking the bad disc diagnosis is huge, but a revelation that remains unknown to the public. For example, medical reporter Dr. Sanjay Gupta at CNN is also a neurosurgeon at Emory alongside Dr. Boden who has never told his viewers that the bad disc diagnosis is dead, perhaps illustrating his conflict of interest as a reporter who will never blow the whistle on his fellow spine surgeons who continue to sell bad discs fusions to unsuspecting patients.
 

The best advice for anyone diagnosed with a bad disc is to follow the evidence-based guidelines that call for conservative (non-drug, non-surgical) chiropractic spinal manipulation first. This includes nearly 90 percent of cases where spinal mechanics, principally joint dysfunction, is the main cause of back pain.
 

According to the guidelines, the only people who need spine surgery are those who suffer from cancer, fractures, serious infection like TB or staph, cauda equina, or the one in 100 disc case that don’t respond to chiropractic care.
 

So, the next time you hear someone way, “I have a slipped disc and need surgery,” tell them the truth that you don’t slip discs, but you can slip joints, and encourage them to seek other care before drugs, shots, or surgery as the guidelines recommend.
 

Despite all the less-than-stellar research on cholesterol lowering drugs, the powers-that-be want us to take even more of it.
 

The latest “cholesterol guidelines” released late in 2013 have drastically increased the number of patients who would potentially be given a statin.  They have finally dropped the fallacy that total cholesterol has any value (you know–total cholesterol–that lab value that you were taught to pay attention to so doctors would know when to put you on a cholesterol lowering medication..) and basically state that you should be given a statin if your doctor THINKS you might be at risk for a heart attack.
 

I have certainly been a vocal opponent of the statin class of drugs because the numbers just don’t make any sense.  Treat 1,000 people for 5 years to prevent 11 heart attacks (instead of 22 people who would’ve had heart attackes without the drugs), while at the same time causing diabetes in 8 more.  A net gain of 3.  Out of a thousand.  In 5 years.
 

That just sucks in my book.
 

And “they” think we should use it more on more patients.  None of this takes into account the very long list of side effects  from this class of drugs (other then the already mentioned increased risk of diabetes).
 

And, as we treat more and more patients with cholesterol lowering drugs, the amount of people experiencing side effects is just going to skyrocket.  But at least they are not going to have a heart attack because of the statin drugs.
 

Right?
 

This particular study looks at one of those little-known secrets about drugs to lower cholesterol.  While they all lower cholesterol levels (for whatever that is worth), in some individuals the drugs also lower HDL (the “good”) cholesterol.  This is generally not a good thing.  Specifically, researchers looked at 724 patients who had just started treatment with statins after having a heart attack and followed for 6 to 9 months.
 

Eighty-six percent (620) of these patients had his or her HDL-C level increase during the course of the study, while 14% (104) of patients had his or her HDL cholesterol go down.  Here’s what the researchers found when they looked closer at the group that had HDL levels drop:
 

Both groups had their LDL cholesterol levels drop below 100 mg/dl. Adverse cardiovascular events (including death from all causes, heart attacks and stroke) happened more frequently in the decreased HDL group.

 

To be precise, this lower HDL group had these events at over TWICE the rate (15.4% vs 7.1%). Overall, those who had lowered HDL as a result of the statin drugs (to protect the heart, I might add) were 95% more likely to have a cardiac event.
 

Let’s get this straight.  A drug given to lower cholesterol levels actually lowered good cholesterol levels in 14% of those patients taking them.  In this 14%, they were 95% MORE likely to have a cardiac event??
 

THIS is the wonder drug that seemingly all of medicine is hanging their hats on to save the world from heart disease?  I‘ll take lifestyle changes, thank you.

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The famous surgeon Denis Burkitt is better known for his discovery of a childhood cancer now known as Burkitt’s lymphoma than for his 1979 international bestseller, Don’t Forget the Fibre in Your Diet.
 

Anyone asked to list the twenty or more most important advances in health made in the last few decades would be likely to include none of what Dr. Burkitt considered to be among the most significant. What was the number one most important advance in health according to one of the most famous medical figures of the 20th century? The discovery that “Many of the major and commonest diseases in modern Western culture are universally rare in third-world communities, were uncommon even in the United States until after World War l” yet are now common in anyone following the Western lifestyle. So it’s not genetics—they’re lifestyle diseases  This means they must potentially be preventable.
 

Those eating the standard American diet have very high levels of a long list of diseases—such as heart disease and colon cancer—that were similar to the rates of disease in the ruling white class in apartheid Africa. Conversely, the rates in the Bantu population were very low. These native Africans ate the same three sister diets of many Native Americans, a plant-based diet centered around corn, beans, and squash. In fact, it was reported that cancer was so seldom seen in American Indians a century ago they were considered practically immune to cancer—and heart disease. What are “very low” rates? 1300 Bantus were autopsied over five years in a Bantu hospital and less than ten cases of ischemic heart disease, the West’s number one killer.

 

The Bantu’s rates of heart and intestinal disease is similar to poor Indians, whereas wealthier Indians who ate more animal and refined foods were closer to those in Japan—unless they moved to the U.S. and started living like us. You find similar trends for the other so-called Western diseases, which Burkitt thought were related to the major dietary changes that followed the lndustrial Revolution: a reduction in healthy whole plant foods—the source of starch and fiber–and a great increase in consumption of animal fats, salt, and sugar. His theory was that it was the fiber. He believed all of these major diseases may be caused by a diet deficient in whole plant foods, the only natural source of fiber.
 

Fiber? In a survey of 2,000 Americans, over 95% of graduate school educated participants and health care providers weren’t even aware of the daily recommended fiber intake. Doctors don’t even know. How much fiber should we shoot for? The Institute of Medicine recommends 38 grams for men 50 years and younger and 30 grams for men over 50 years. Women 50 years and younger should get 25 and those older than 50 should get 21 grams. But these levels are just the minimum. I recommend we look to our evolutionary past for more clues on fiber intake.
 

One analogy Dr. Burkitt used is this: “If a floor is flooded as a result of a dripping tap, it is of little use to mop up the floor unless the tap is turned off. The water from the tap represents the cause of disease, the flooded floor the diseases filling our hospital beds. Medical students learn far more about methods of floor mopping than about turning off taps, and doctors who are specialists in mops and brushes can earn infinitely more than those dedicated to shutting off taps.” And the drug companies are more than happy to sell us rolls of paper towels, so patients can buy a new roll every day for the rest of their lives. To paraphrase Ogden Nash: modern medicine is making great progress, but just headed in the wrong direction.
 

How do we know that diet was the critical factor? Because when we place people stricken with these diseases on plant-based diets, their disease can be reversed.
 

Go to the link below to read this article on-line and see links for more background info....