| Home | Dr. Mha Atma's Health Newsletter | Ideas for Good Health | Patient of the
week |
| >About |
| >Meet The Doctor |
| >Meet The Team |
| >Testimonials |
| >Hall of Fame |
| >Upcoming Schedules |
| >Contact Us |
| >New Patient Forms |
| >Exercises |
| >Links To Better Health |
| >Videos |
| >What is Chiropractic? |
| >Why go to Chiropractor? |
Healthy Life Newsletter October 2015
The following research reports are taken from The Wellness Report By Donald M. Petersen, Jr. at http://blog.toyourhealth.com/wrblog/
Forgetting in the Next Room
Ever walk from one room to another and forget why you went in there? If you have, you are just like everyone else. While you may think it happens to you because you are “getting old”, that’s just not the case.
A group of researchers tested both older adults and young people to measure the effect walking through a doorway has on their ability to remember. They found that “in general, both younger and older adults had memory disrupted after walking through a doorway. Importantly, the magnitude of this disruption was similar in the 2 age groups.
---------------------------
Low Back Pain in Female Athletes
Young female athletes (average age 23 years) endure a considerable amount of low back pain (LBP). According to a recent study, “the 12-month prevalence of LBP was 39.0 %; in addition, lifetime and point prevalence (people who have pain right now) of LBP were 59.7 and 17.8 %, respectively.” When broken down by sport, basketball (47.9 %), karate (44.0 %) and badminton (42.4 %) had the highest 12-month prevalence of LBP.
Make sure your young athletes have regular visits to their doctor of chiropractic. Remember, chiropractic is more than just back pain, it’s all about wellness and total health.
---------------------------
Finding Out When Things Go Wrong
Sadly, adverse events continue to be all too common in medicine. The U.S. Office of the Inspector General estimates that “13.5 percent of hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries experienced adverse events during their hospital stays.” In 2014, one news source noted that “Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. – third only to heart disease and cancer – claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year.” Typical medical errors involved being prescribed the wrong, drug/dose, surgery on the wrong body part, etc. This is why you should be extra careful whenever you receive any kind of medical care to insure it is the proper care.
Almost as sad is the inability of hospitals and medical staff to appropriately inform patients when these adverse events (AE) take place. A recent study found that only 27.9% of medical staff and 35.9% of medical professionals “considered that patients were correctly informed after an AE.”
If you think you have been the victim of an adverse medical event, preventable or otherwise, start asking questions and get the answers you deserve. Medical errors happen all the time with occurrence rate as high as one out of eight. The sooner you are informed, the better your chance to protect your health.
---------------------------
Seniors Improve Balance with Exercise
A group of elderly women “participated in an elastic band exercise program lasting for 8 weeks, exercising for 40 minutes, four days a week with resting terms of 60 sec.” Leg muscle strength and leg muscle endurance both increased significantly as did balance measure by one-leg standing. Researchers concluded that “balance ability and muscle function significantly improved in the exercise group and showing that the intervention is effective at improving balance, muscle strength, and muscle endurance of elderly women.”
---------------------------
From To Your Health http://www.toyourhealth.com/mpacms/tyh/article.php?id=2169
Chiropractic Is Good for Your Heart
By Editorial Staff
High blood pressure can be life-threatening, pure and simple. In fact, high BP (known clinically as hypertension) is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke – two of the major causes of death. Aerobic exercise, a healthy diet and not smoking are three natural ways to lower your risk of high blood pressure, but unfortunately, too many people with high BP turn to medication instead.
What about chiropractic care? A recent study serves as the latest evidence that chiropractic adjustments may improve blood pressure in the short term, finding that specific instrument-assisted adjustments to the thoracic spine positively affected blood pressure, pulse rate and classification of high blood pressure compared to placebo manipulation or no intervention.
Researchers randomly assigned 290 adults with and without hypertension to one of three groups for comparison: an active group, a placebo group and a control group. The active group received instrument-assisted manipulation to T1-T5, while the placebo group received the identical manipulative procedure, except the adjusting instrument was set not to deliver any force. The control group received no intervention (manipulation) whatsoever. Both patients and clinicians were blinded as to whether they were receiving / delivering active or placebo adjustments.
The primary finding following instrument-assisted manipulation to T1-T5 was a reduction in blood pressure (both systolic and diastolic BP) of approximately 7 percent compared to baseline measurements. Neither of the other subject groups achieved this reduction. Active intervention also improved blood pressure classification in many cases. (All subjects were classified at baseline as normotensive, prehypertensive, stage 1 hypertensive or stage 2 hypertensive.) The study authors described the impact of active intervention on these classifications as follows:
"Systolic and diastolic BP, pulse rate, and BP classification decreased significantly only in the active treatment group. No significant changes occurred in the placebo treatment and control groups. ... By category, 46% of [active treatment] subjects improved in early hypertensive or prehypertensive classification – about 4 times more than placebo and 2.65 times better than the controls. Similarly, 51% of Stage I and 57% of Stage II hypertensive patients improved, also better than placebo and control subjects."
Back pain, neck pain, headaches - chiropractic care has been proven effective for a variety of musculoskeletal conditions. But the story goes much deeper than that, and research continues to reveal it. So try chiropractic: It's good for your heart.
---------------------------
Exercise as Medicine
Written by: Michael Greger M.D.
Click here to read this online
Longer life within walking distance
Physical inactivity has been called the biggest public health problem of the 21st century. Of course just because someone calls it that doesn’t mean it’s true, in fact physical inactivity ranks down at #5 in terms of risk factors for death, and #6 in terms of risk factors for disability. Diet is by far our greatest killer, followed by smoking.
But, there is irrefutable evidence of the “effectiveness of regular physical activity in the prevention of several chronic diseases—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, obesity, depression, osteoporosis, and premature death”—helping to add years to our life, and above all, “life to our years.” It truly may be survival of the fittest.
How much exercise do we need? In general, the answer is the more the better. Currently, “most health and fitness organizations advocate a minimum of a thousand calories of exercise a week,” which is equivalent to walking an hour a day five days a week. Seven days a week, though, may be even better in terms of extending one’s lifespan.
Exercise is so important that not walking an hour a day is considered a high risk behavior, alongside smoking, excess drinking, and being obese. Having any one of these effectively ages us three to five years in terms of risk of dying prematurely, though interestingly those who ate green vegetables on a daily basis did not appear to have that same bump in risk. Even if broccoli-eating couch potatoes live as long as walkers, there are a multitude of ancillary health benefits to physical activity that doctors are encouraged to prescribe it, to signal to the patient that “exercise is medicine.”
Researchers at the London School, Harvard, and Stanford compared exercise to drug interventions in study highlighted in my video, Longer Life Within Walking Distance, and found that exercise often worked just as well as drugs for the treatment of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. There’s not a lot of money to fund exercise studies, so one option would be to require drug companies to compare any new drug to exercise. In cases where drug options provide only modest benefit, patients deserve to understand the relative impact that physical activity might have on their condition.
---------------------------
http://lifecarechiropractic.com/blog/antibiotics-childhood-obesity/
Is Your Pediatrician Making Your Child Fat?
By James Bogash
Childhood obesity and antibiotics
There are many causes of adult and childhood obesity, but some rise to the top.
Today’s poor quality diets consisting of liquid calories (regardless of whether it’s milk, soda or Gatorade, we should NEVER drink our calories) and phytonutrient-poor food choices combined with the culling out of physical activity at home and school.
Digging a little deeper you can find that chemical exposures like BPA in plastics, phthalates in vinyl, Teflon in cooking pans and flame retardants in mattresses, furniture and clothing all contribute to weight gain, obesity and diabetes.
Pulling out the shovel to dig even further and you will find that childhood neglect also contributes to childhood obesity. This can be nutritional, emotional or physical abuse.
If you happen to have any excavating equipment, you will find that exposures in the womb can prime the as-yet-unborn child for chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease and diabetes. High levels of maternal stress, chemical exposures and poor dietary choices by mom have all linked to later chronic diseases.
Which brings us to this particular study. In it, researchers looked at the links between antibiotic use in childhood and later obesity. The relationship between the bacteria in our gut and obesity has been in the spotlight for the past few years.
Rather than any single bacteria that plays a role in protecting or producing obesity, it has more to do with the patterns of bacteria present within the gut. Following this concept, it would make sense that antibiotics, which completely decimate the bacteria in the gut, will have some of role to play in obesity.
Broad spectrum antibiotics, which indiscriminately destroy the good bacteria in the gut, would have stronger effects.
Here’s the surprising details:
· Despite the uproar over antibiotic overuse, an astounding 69% of infants were given antibiotics before age 24 months.
· Not only did the bulk of kids have antibiotics, but on average they had 2.3 antibiotic prescriptions each.
· In children who had been exposed to antibiotics, there was an 11% higher risk of being obese.
· If broad-spectrum antibiotics were used, the risk was higher at 16%.
Someone’s going to have a really hard time convincing me that 69% of infants in this study needed to be on antibiotics (the study included 64,580 infants, so that makes 44,560 infants exposed to antibiotics overall). This is an astounding number. I have said time and time again that I consider the wanton destruction of the normal bacterial flora in an infant one of the worst things that can be done to that child’s immune system. Until the culture of medicine wakes up and stops worrying about the stupid concern of antibiotic resistance (OK…not stupid, but pales in comparison to destruction of the normal flora…) and truly begins to understand the devastation that antibiotics play we will never see this trend reverse. Part of the onus is also on the parent for not questioning the prescription in today’s day and age of the Internet.
The bottom line? Think really, really, really hard when your infant is given a prescription for antibiotics. Question the pediatrician about the long-term side effects. If he or she seems unaware besides antibiotic resistance, this is your first sign that your doctor hasn’t cracked a medical journal in QUITE a while. Time to run.
Personally, I usually steer my patients towards family practice. In general, providers in a family practice seem far more in tune with the research and less inclined to follow dogma and write a prescription for every stuffy nose.
