Jones Pain Relief Blog

How did I hurt my back doc?

I was asked this question by a new patient the other day. The funny thing about this question was that he was a new patient for me but he had been going to different chiropractors for nearly 40 years. Neck pain, back pain and headaches that occurred after various falls, work injuries and car accidents were what created his need for a life time of chiropractic treatment.

Certain types of injuries can cause chronic symptoms. Various physical issues that never fully return to their pre-accident state cause chronic symptoms.

For instance, whiplash type injuries leave about 25% of the patients with chronic ongoing neck pain. In these cases, the muscles that move and support the neck have been stretched and sometimes torn. When muscles tear they heal with scar tissue. Scar tissue does not move, stretch or contract like healthy muscle tissue.

Because of the different properties of scar tissue that has formed within the healthy muscle, the joint that is moved by that muscle becomes dysfunctional. As the joints movement alters, it has the potential to become irritated and inflamed. These irritated and inflamed joints then become painful, restricted in their movements and the muscles that move that joint tighten and spasm as a protective mechanism.

Chiropractic care is the perfect solution for painful joints and spasmed muscles. Through manipulation or adjustments of the affected joints, the muscle spasms are calmed and the pain is relieved. For some patients, ongoing chiropractic care helps prevent the onset of pain and stiffness that is associated with chronic injuries.

This example above is just one of the reasons that some chiropractic patients come in for treatment on a regular basis.

As for the patient above, he said he has been coming in for chiropractic for neck pain and back pain for years. He receives treatment for both health maintenance reasons as well as for control of specific symptoms that come up from time to time.

Your’s In Good Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

I am often asked the question “how do you think I hurt my back?” Believe it or not, in the absence of some recent significant injury, this question isn’t so easy to answer.

My chiropractic practice in San Diego helps people recover from back pain, neck pain and all types of work and auto injuries. Work and auto injuries often have a single, identifiable explanation for pain.

Many patients simply wake up with back pain that wasn’t there when they went to bed, or they throw their backs out while reaching for a cup of coffee or picking a sock up off the floor. These scenarios are typical.

The truth is that our backs are very strong. Some of the ligaments in our backs are capable of withstanding over 700 pounds of tension. That is a lot of force.

Yet somehow we manage to injure ourselves with mundane events.

The answer to many of these injuries involves postural stress. Postural stress is dangerous to the health of our spines. It can result in lost days of work, disability and worst of all - loss of recreation and fun.

Postural stress results from poor posture, awkward bending and lifting, too much sitting, poor eyesight (makes us lean forward to see what we are doing) and many other activities of daily living.

These stresses that we endure are compensated for in other areas of our spines. However, with time and enough exposure to the stress previously mentioned, the joints in our backs become irritated and inflamed leading to muscle spasms and pain.

I like to use the analogy of stacking the straws on the camels back with injuries like this. In other words, these instances of stress are nothing by themselves but the effects of the stress is cumulative. As the stresses build, the body’s’ chance of a breakdown increases. Eventually you suffer a breakdown.

Chiropractic care can help you control the effects of postural stress. When our backs hurt, that is a clear indication that inflammation is present. Inflammation always stimulates scar tissue formation which limits your spines’ flexibility and causes pain. Chiropractic adjustments breakdown the inflammation caused scar tissue and improve your spines flexibility. Improved flexibility keeps your spine healthier and much less likely to be aggravated by your activities of daily living.

If your job requires sitting for more than four hours per day, monthly chiropractic adjustments are very important in controlling the accumulating stress in your back.

There are other obvious steps that you can take toward improving the health of your spine and preventing episodes of back pain. Eating a healthy diet and exercise are very important in reducing the chances of suffering a back injury.

Being careful when lifting and carrying heavy objects and making sure that you don’t sit in one position for longer than twenty minutes is also helpful.

More Coming Soon

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

Hip Pain means different things to different people. I treat many people for hip pain in my San Diego Chiropractic center.

In my first paragraph I wrote that hip pain means different things to different people. What I meant by that is that usually the patients who complain of hip pain would point to their lower backs when I ask them to point to the pain. When I ask them at that point if it is actually lower back pain that they are feeling they will usually think for a moment and then say, “Yes, I guess it is low back pain.”

When patients complain of hip pain they are usually referring to pain in the area of the sacroiliac joint. The sacroiliac joints are two large joints that are positioned just to the sides of the bottom vertebra in the back right at the level of the beltline. I believe that people refer to this as hip pain because it is typically at its worst when walking.

True hip pain found in the joint where the femur joins with the socket found in the pelvic bones. The typical patient will identify hip pain by pointing to the front of the body, below the beltline and off to either side of the midline of the body.

Sacroiliac joint pain is often brought on or aggravated by prolonged sitting, bad lifting habits and direct injuries such as those that occur with sports or auto accidents. The sacroiliac joints are the largest joints in the spine and can heal slowly after an injury.

Chiropractic care supported by ice pack applications, light stretching and avoidance of know aggravating activities (if it hurts don’t do it) will usually eliminate the pain.

Chiropractic care is also effective for true hip pain but the approach is somewhat different. Since hips are joints, chiropractic care is also quite effective in relieving hip pain as well.

Your’s In Good Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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I don’t know about you, but I am a headache wimp. I hardly ever get headaches, when I do I don’t handle them very well. I get moody and I tend to “snap” at people that really mean me no harm.

In addition to my San Diego chiropractic office treating patients with neck pain and low back pain, we see many people with headaches. Headaches have many causes and there are many different types of headaches as well.

The most common types of headache that we provide treatment for are migraine and muscle tension headaches.

Muscle tension headaches typically begin in the muscles of the neck and upper back. When these muscle become tense, they pull on the muscles that cover your head. This tension results in a headache.

Muscle tension headaches can result from postural stresses such as long hours of computer work, they can develop as a result of car accident injuries, or just plain old work and home stresses.

One common reason for chronic, on going tension in the muscle is miss-aligned vertebra. When the vertebra become miss-aligned due to postural stress, awkward sleeping positions, accidents, etc., the muscles around that vertebra tighten up as a protective mechanism. The tight muscles are commonly the root cause of the muscle tension headache.

Chiropractic care re-aligns the joints of the spine causing a relaxation of the surrounding muscles. When the joints in the neck are re-aligned, the muscles that move and support that particular vertebra relax and return to their normal functions.

When the muscles are relaxed, the muscle tension subsides and the headache goes away. Treatment for muscle tension headaches usually requires a series of treatments but you should notice a decrease in the frequency and the severity of your headache with subsequent treatment.

Your’s In Good Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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In my San Diego chiropractic office, I try to encourage health betterment beyond the obvious treatment that we provide for neck pain, back pain and headaches that represent the bulk of my patients’ concerns.

As that old saying goes; “Simply not being sick does not equate to being well.”

I always explain to my patients that in the absence of some catastrophic injury, most cases of neck pain and back pain begin as a slight irritation that we are totally unaware of. With time and additional stresses, these slight irritations can become magnified to the point where they become symptomatic.

Our diets act the same way. A few poor meal choices won’t destroy your health by themselves, but frequent poor meal choices over longer periods of time can have a significant negative impact on your health. You only have to look at a McDonalds or Burger King drive-through to see the long lines of people making poor food choices. These people who make frequent poor food choices (fast foods in this example) probably won’t suffer anything more than a little indigestion as a result of each meal. However, the accumulation of the effects of all of these poor food choices will do damage down the road.

Unfortunately, this all becomes more apparent as we age. We pay for our poor eating habits as we age for a couple of reasons. First of all, poor eating choices become habitual. Like any bad habit, changing poor eating habits is difficult. Secondly, with normal aging, our metabolism slows making our poor eating habits more detrimental than they were when we were younger and more active.

Regaining your health takes work on several fronts. Some of these things you can accomplish yourself and other things you need help with.

Patients that come to my chiropractic office for treatment for their neck pain or back pain often find this task one of the easy parts of getting healthy. In order to get help with pain, all the patients have to do is come to the office for their treatment.

The difficult part of restoring health is dealing with the bad habits that result in unhealthy diets, smoking, drinking and the like. Overcoming bad habits takes an exceptionally motivated person. Focus and you can overcome them and have a healthier body to show for it.

Your’s In Good Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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In our Chiropractic office in San Diego California, we like to stress the importance of natural holistic healthcare. Although our office is delivering chiropractic care for neck pain, back pain and the like, we also encourage our patients to use natural remedies at home as well. There are many benefits of using cinnamon in our diets. There are also many different forms of cinnamon. I recently came across this article and thought I would share it with you.

A new report suggests that the equivalent of a spoonful of cinnamon a day can significantly lower blood sugar, cholesterol and lipid levels. This could be good news for people with diabetes.

Sixty people with type 2 diabetes were divided into six groups; three groups received daily doses of cinnamon (1, 3 or 6 grams, respectively), while the other groups received placebo capsules containing wheat flour. The cinnamon was consumed for 40 days, followed by a 20-day washout period. Blood glucose, triglyceride, LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol levels were all significantly lower in patients receiving cinnamon compared to those given a placebo.

While adding cinnamon to the diet won’t cure a person with diabetes, it may help protect diabetic patients from some of the worst complications that arise from the condition, such as blurred vision, heart disease and kidney failure.

Here are a variety of ways that cinnamon can be incorporated into a person’s diet, try adding it to your morning coffee or try eating oatmeal (which is very good for cholesterol) with a teaspoon of cinnamon, or making a tea out of boiling water and cinnamon stick.”

Reference:

Khan A, Safdar M, Muzaffar Ali Khan M, et al. Cinnamon improves glucose and lipids of people with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Care December 2003;26, pp3215-3218.

Your’s In Good Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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Chiropractic care is often thought of as treatment just for the back. While chiropractic care is extremely effective for neck pain, back pain, headaches, etc., chiropractors are also concerned with the overall health of our patients.

Nutritional concerns play a very important role in our general health. One of the common suppliments that our patients take is fish oil.

We always stress the importance of fish oil for the heart and the digestive tract, but you probably haven’t heard that people who eat the most fish have the fewest eye problems.

The impact of fish oil on vision was a topic at this week’s meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. They reviewed evidense that showed that fish oil consumption extended to two very serious eye problems.

The first of these problems helped by fish oil is age-related macular degeneration. Macular degeneration is the disruption of the center of the retina where the fine nerve complex at the back of the eye essential for all fine visual tasks rests. Macular degereration is the leading cause of age-related blindness.

Fish oil protects the eyes from age-related macular degeneration because of a component of fish oil called docosahexaenoic acid also known as DHA. DHA is one of the omega-3 fatty acids linked to other health benefits. DHA helps vision by building up in the eye near light-sensing nerve cells.

“National Eye Institute researcher John Paul SanGiovanni, ScD, and colleagues analyzed dietary data from 4,513 60- to 80-year-old participants in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study. Those who ate fish more than twice a week were half as likely to get macular degeneration as those who ate no fish at all. More than one weekly portion of broiled/baked fish or tuna lowered the risk by a third.

“The risk for [age-related macular degeneration] was significantly decreased for the highest versus the lowest quintiles of total [omega-3 fatty acids] intake,” SanGiovanni and colleagues write in their abstract.”

In another study, fish oil was found to protect the eyes from dry eye syndrome. Dry eye syndrome is a condition in which a person’s eyes don’t make enough tears. Dry eyes can lead to scarring of the cornea and vision loss.

A study of 32,470 female health professionals found that women whose diets had the most omega-3 fatty acids were far less likely to have dry eye syndrome.

Women who ate two to four servings of tuna a week had an 18% lower risk of dry eye syndrome than those who ate less tuna. Eating five or six four-ounce servings of tuna every week lowered this risk by 66%.

Your’s In Good Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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When was the last time that you felt pain?

I treat people with back pain, neck pain and various other pains on a daily basis.

Pain is a very complex sensation. The body’s interpretation of pain involves both nerve and chemical processes that are relayed to the brain for interpretation. In my San Diego Chiropractic office, I hear my patients complain of neck pain, back pain, headaches, sciatic pain etc. Some of these patients suffer from acute pain while others who are less fortunate complain of chronic long lasting pain.

A study completed recently in Chicago revealed some very interesting things about brain activity in people suffering with chronic pain.

Brain scans taken of people in chronic pain show a constant activity in areas of the brain that are at rest in those who don’t suffer with chronic pain. Researchers said that this finding could help explain why chronic pain patients have higher rates of depression, anxiety and other disorders.

Apparently they found that chronic pain seems to alter the way people process information that is unrelated to pain. They found that enduring long periods of pain affects brain function even with tasks that demand minimal attention.

Studies have shown that in healthy people, certain regions of the brain take over during a resting state, something known as a default mode network. “It takes care of your brain when your brain is at rest,” Dr. Chialvo said.

When a person performs a task, this default mode network quiets down, but not in people with chronic pain.
Instead of quieting down, a front region of the cortex of the brain associated with emotion is constantly active. This constant activity disrupts the brains’ normal equilibrium.
To study this specific brain activity, Dr. Chialvo did a type of brain scan on 15 people with chronic back pain and on 15 healthy people.

In this study, volunteers were given a simple attention task — tracking a moving bar on a computer screen - in order to observe the brain shifting out of default mode to handle the task.

Both groups performed the task well but when they measured areas of the brain that were activated, the differences emerged.
“Where we were surprised is the difference in how much brain they used to do the task compared with the healthy group. It was 50 times larger,” Chialvo said.

They said disruptions in this brain activity could explain why pain patients have problems with attention, sleep disturbances and even depression.

So there you have it. If you feel a little off or if someone you work with or care about has trouble focusing or staying on task because of pain, your observations are correct. Give yourself and others a break.

Here’s To Your Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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As a chiropractor, I am always asked “Does chiropractic really work?” This is an unfair and a loaded question. Chiropractic care is a very effective form of treatment for some things and not for others.

Being a Chiropractor in San Diego, I see sports related injuries all year round. Running injuries, falls from bicycles or rollerblades, golf injuries, basketball injuries - you name it and most likely we have seen it. More often than not these injuries result in typical sprain / strains that result in neck pain, back pain, sciatica etc.

The types of injuries that I just listed are a few of many joint injuries / symptoms that chiropractic care is very effective in treating. You might say that chiropractic care was made for such injuries. The reason that I say this is because of the nature of these types of injuries.

The typical sprain / strain injury usually results when a fall or an accident forces a joint through an excessive or abnormal range of motion. This type of injury stretches the ligaments and muscles that move and support the spine. The result of this type of injury is irritation and inflammation of the joint and scar tissue formation.

Without chiropractic treatment, the scar tissue from sprain / strain injuries restricts and or alters normal joint motion which can cause pain and stiffness. Chiropractic manipulations help to restore full, normal joint motion by breaking down scar tissue that would otherwise cause stiffness and pain.

Chiropractic care is an excellent form of therapy for reducing the effects of postural stress from sitting at a computer, poor lifting habits, poor posture and a variety of other stresses that we expose ourselves to on a daily basis.

So, does chiropractic work? The only way to know is go visit one and see. Chiropractors want their treatment to work and are reluctant to take on cases that may not properly respond to their therapy. No doctor that I know wants to have unsuccessful treatment sessions during the course of their work day. A good chiropractor can look at your history, perform an examination and make a sound determination on how well you will respond to care.

Here’s To Your Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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Chiropractic Care in San Diego is utilized for both crisis care and for wellness care / preventive care.

Our population has a passion for fitness and exercise. Chiropractic treatment helps keep neck pain, back pain and other body aches from slowing us down.

Neck pain and back pain typically respond very well to chiropractic treatment. Chiropractic care helps restore normal joint motion which is vital to a healthy neck and back.

One of the wonderful benefits of chiropractic treatment is its ability to help active people avoid neck pain, back pain and other spinal injuries.

Getting chiropractic adjustments in a regular basis helps your spine maintain its full range of motion and flexibility. Typically, it is a loss of normal range of motion and flexibility that exposes us to injuries. Chiropractic care that is delivered prior to an aggravation, in other words “when the patient is not in pain” is a perfect example of preventative healthcare.

Chiropractic adjustments gently push the joint through its entire range of motion. When your joints are moved through their full range of motion by a trained chiropractor, tight muscles associated with that joint are stretched out and scar tissue that has formed in and around those joints is broken down.

Usually, having your spine adjusted is not a painful procedure. Most of the time, the patients in my San Diego chiropractic clinic feel a sense of pressure relief and relaxation in their backs when they are adjusted.

This feeling of pressure release and relaxation is due to a number events that occur during an adjustment.

When the spine is adjusted, there is a reflexive relaxation of tight muscles that occurs. Relaxed muscles are much more comfortable than tight, spasmed muscles.

Another event that takes place with an adjustment involves the “pain gate”. Adjustments trigger the “pain gate” in the nervous system which, as it implies, decreases our sensations of pain.

On a mechanical level, chiropractic care stretches tight muscle and ligaments and helps breakdown restrictive scar tissue. This effect improves our spines’ range of motion resulting is feeling of increased flexibility.

As a chiropractor in San Diego, I notice that a healthy percentage of my treatments revolve around spinal maintenance and improving athletic performance.

Chiropractic treatment is a vital part of maintaining your health.

Here’s To Your Health

Dr. Jones

www.JonesPainRelief.com

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