THE SPINAL COLUMN                 

             

                                        

EXPLORE CHIROPRACTIC

223 Third Street NW                                                                                                        

Bemidji, MN  56601 

218-333-8811                                                                                             

www.explorechiropractic.com

Welcome to our office's Chiropractic newsletter. We'd like to entertain you, inform you and even inspire you a little.  We’d love to hear from you; feel free to write to us with any questions or comments.

      Happy Thanksgiving

May you enjoy abundance, prosperity, gratitude, health, healing, happiness, long life, love, security, joy and peace.

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. - Thomas Pain

What Exactly Do Chiropractors Do?

We chiropractors are specially trained to locate and correct a severe form of stress called a vertebral subluxation. Subluxations can damage your health weeks, month or years before you notice symptoms. What does a subluxation do to your body?

A vertebral subluxation causes:

1. Joint problems - Your spinal vertebrae are jammed, or “noisy”. You can’t turn, bend or twist your neck, hips or back equally in every direction.

2. Nerve damage - The impulses traveling through the nerves are altered and important chemicals that flow over your nerves may be blocked. Pain may or may not be felt.

3. Muscle damage - Your muscles may be tight, weak, overly sensitive and/or sore.

4. Tissue damage - You may have swelling, tenderness, “trigger points,” and painful spots.

5. Dis-ease - Your muscles, joints, ligaments and organs show signs of wear and tear and premature aging. There is fatigue, lowered resistance to disease, and symptoms of disease or organ malfunction.

A healthy spine is as important for your overall healing as proper nutrition. No matter what disease or condition you have, you can benefit from a healthy spine. Are you and your family carrying the vertebral subluxation complex in your spines? Only a chiropractic spinal checkup can tell.

Childhood Diseases Are Good For You?

"Contracting and overcoming [childhood] diseases are part of a developmental process that actually helps develop a healthy, robust, adult immune system able to meet the challenges that inevitable encounters with viruses and bacteria will present later on."

(Coulter H. Vaccination, social violence and criminality. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 1990.)  Many parents notice that after a fever children experience a physical and/or emotional growth spurt. Fevers and various symptoms have long been considered a part of normal development and how the body cleanses, purifies and heals itself in young and old alike. Make sure you and your children are “healthy” sick so they can quickly recover and benefit from their symptoms in a constructive manner by keeping their spines healthy through chiropractic care. There is no need to fear fevers as they are almost always benign. According to Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., “Unless there are additional symptoms [accompanying a fever] such as extreme listlessness, abnormal behavior, respiratory difficulty, and others that could indicate the presence of serious diseases such as diphtheria and meningitis, your doctor should tell you there is nothing to worry about and send you and your child home.”

Words of Wisdom

The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunization. – Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein

All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast. - John Gunther

Ultrasound Can Cause Brain Damage?

Routine ultrasound during pregnancy is becoming more controversial. New research reveals that ultrasound may cause nerve and DNA damage. Information can be found at http://www.aimsusa.org/ultrasnd.htm or http://www.alternamoms.com/ultrasound.html.   Do an internet search on "ultrasound+cavitation" or "ultrasound+Ellisman" and look for yourself.

Laughter Is Good For You

Not into exercise? Well then at least have a good laugh. Half of a group of 48 heart attack survivors watched a comedy of their choice for 30 minutes a day for one year. The other half did not watch anything funny.

Only two of the comedy watchers had repeat heart attacks within 12 months, compared with 10 who did not watch comedy.

Possible reason: Laughter lowers levels of stress hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine and may help restore the brain chemicals that help with stress.

(Stanley Tan, MD, Ph.D, director of clinical research, Center for Neuroimmunology, Loma Linda University, School of Medicine, California. In Bottom Line Personal Nov. 15, 2000).

Humor

One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is. - Erma Bombeck

Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children. - Sam Levinson

Children are the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat. - Fran Lebowitz

What is more enchanting than the voices of young people when you can’t hear what they say? - Logan Pearsall Smith

By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces. - Christopher Morley

Why Should I Return If I’m Feeling Fine?

Delays have dangerous ends. - William Shakespeare

You entered our office feeling terrible and now you are experiencing the wonders of what happens when your spine and nervous system are subluxation free. You'd be happy to return if your health deteriorates to the point where you feel terrible again but we suggest you return even if you feel fine. "Why should I return if I’m feeling fine?" you may ask.

Of course you can wait until you’re miserable again, but should you? You may be making a big mistake if you wait until you have symptoms to do something about your health. Lack of pain is a poor way of determining how healthy you are.

We've all seen people looking like death warmed over who "feel fine." They are walking targets, waiting for disease to strike before they decide to do anything about their health. They "feel fine" but have no energy; they "feel fine" but sleep poorly; they "feel fine" but are tired, have aches and pains, headaches or backaches. Too many people who "feel fine" one day have a sudden heart attack, stroke, debilitating pain or are diagnosed with a serious disease such as cancer the next day. Surely "feeling fine" is no indicator of your health status.

Baby walkers delay development?

A recent paper in the British Medical Journal says that baby walkers delay normal developmental milestones. Children who used the devices took three to four weeks longer to crawl and walk on their own. The study involved 190 babies. Because of this and injuries associated with the walkers, researchers discourage their use. (BMJ, June 22, 2002.)

Chiropractic and Spinal Research

Did you know there are thousands of papers on the wonders of chiropractic? Is there any disease or condition you’d like to know about? Ask us.

Osteoarthritis (spinal degeneration). Just about everyone gets “wear and tear” of the joints, including the spine. Medically, osteoarthritis is regarded as an unavoidable and irreversible consequence of aging, like the graying of hair. However chiropractors have been able to do something considered impossible by medical standards: to slow, stop and even reverse osteoarthritis. OJ Ressel, DC of Canada has written a landmark paper showing that chiropractic care can halt and reverse spinal degeneraton. Disc regeneration: reversibility is possible in spinal osteoarthritis.  Ressel, OJ. ICA Review March/April 1989 pp. 39 -61.

Another research paper discussed chiropractic and nutritional care contributing to the amelioration and reversal of osteoarthritis (OA). The author writes that the chiropractic adjustment realigns and restores motion to joints causing healthy regrowth of tissue. Osteoarthritis, chiropractic, and nutrition: osteoarthritis considered as a natural part of a three stage subluxation complex: its reversibility: its relevance and treatability by chiropractic and nutritional correlates. Berkson DL Med Hypotheses 1991 Dec; 36(4):356-67

Asthma. 47 asthma sufferers, aged 7 to 42, improved dramatically under chiropractic care and maintained that improvement for a two year follow-up period. The patients were seen between 14 and 44 times with most beginning care at 3 visits per week for the first 4 to 8 weeks. Improvement was based on the patient's subjective and objective symptoms as well as their use of asthma medication. Improvements ranged from 87 to 100%. (Amalu WC. Chiropractic management of 47 asthma cases. Today’s Chiropractic, 29(6) Nov/Dec 2000.)

Things the Movies Teach You (Part 1)Large, loft-style apartments in New York City are well within the price range of most people - whether they are employed or not.

At least one of every pair of identical twins is born evil.

Should you decide to defuse a bomb, don't worry which wire to cut. You will always choose the right one.

Most laptop computers are powerful enough to override the communications system of any invading alien society.

It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts; your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessors.

Honest and hardworking policemen are traditionally gunned down three days before their retirement.

Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their arch enemies using complicated machinery involving fuses, pulley systems, deadly gasses, lasers, and man eating sharks, which will allow their captives at least 20 minutes to escape.

Digestion in the Stomach

Digestion begins in the mouth When you chew your food it is mixed with saliva, which not only supplies moisture but also the carbohydrate-digesting enzyme, amylase. When you eat raw food, its enzymes work with the salivary amylase to begin digestion.

Swallowing prevents food from remaining in the mouth long enough for any significant amount of digestion to occur. However, the food and salivary enzymes continue the digestion process until the secretion of stomach acid causes the pH to drop below 3.0, which is the activity range of plant enzymes. Before food arrives, the stomach normally has a pH between 5.0 and 6.0. In young and healthy adults it takes about 45 minutes before enough acid is generated to drop the pH to 3.0. This is because stomach acid is secreted into the stomach in response to the expansion of the stomach wall. During this time a considerable amount of digestive work can be accomplished if plant enzymes, either indigenous to the raw food ingested or from a supplemental source, are present. Unfortunately, the amount of time necessary to make stomach acid increases with age. Studies have proven that older adults often suffer from inadequate stomach acid levels.

There is a common misconception that enzymes are destroyed by stomach acid. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stomach acid does not digest protein. Rather, it activates an enzyme called pepsinogen which then becomes pepsin that is secreted by the stomach wall. This enzyme is only active within the pH range of 3.0 to 5.0 and requires the acid to maintain that pH. Pepsin is very specific in its action and is simply incapable of digesting food enzymes, which are very large molecules and are more than just protein.

More than seventy years ago, Olaf Bergeim conducted a series of experiments on salivary digestion at the Laboratory of Physiological Chemistry in the University of Illinois, College of Medicine in Chicago. He found that an average of 59-76% of ingested carbohydrates is digested within 15-30 minutes after a meal. He concluded that a very considerable degree of starch digestion may be brought about by saliva if food is chewed properly.

The pH within the stomach rarely, if ever, drops below 3.0. Pure stomach acid has a pH of 1.8 when it first enters the stomach, but is quickly diluted in the presence of food. Regardless, plant enzymes are not destroyed by the highly acidic environment of the stomach. They simply become dormant until reaching the higher pH levels in the small intestine, where they again become active and continue the digestive process. Once their digestive function in the gastrointestinal tract is completed, a large number of enzymes are absorbed through the gut wall into the bloodstream.

A lot of research remains to be done to determine the exact fate of these enzymes after they pass through the gut wall into blood. However, it is known that plant enzymes will pass from the body into the urine after they have completely lost their usefulness.

What Do Plant Enzymes Do?

Along with vitamins and minerals, enzymes occur in food that is in a natural state. All raw food contains the proper types and proportion of enzymes necessary to digest itself. This occurs in our stomach when the food is eaten or in nature as the food ripens.

The type (protein, sugar, starch, fat) and amount (caloric value) of the major components present in the food determine the type and amount of the various enzymes found in the food. For example, olives and bananas are higher in fat and lipase, while peaches are higher in carbohydrate and amylase.

Protein, carbohydrates, fat, and fiber are building blocks but they do not possess the energy (capacity to do work) necessary for biochemical reactions. Only enzymes can furnish this energy. When raw food is eaten, chewing ruptures the cell membrane and releases the indigenous food enzymes. Once liberated the enzymes begin to digest food, but their action is very limited in the foods they can work on.

Four plant enzyme groups exist:

1.       Proteases - break long protein chains into smaller amino acid chains and eventually into single amino acids

2.       Amylases - reduce polysaccharides to disaccharides: lactose, maltose, and sucrose

3.       Lipases - break triglycerides into individual fatty acids and glycerol

4.       Cellulases - digest specific carbohydrate bonds found in fiber

Besides needing a substrate to "work" on, enzymes require heat, proper pH and moisture in order to activate.

Heat: All enzymes work within limited temperature ranges. The optimal temperature range for most plant enzymes is 92˚F to 104˚F, which means that these enzymes work best at body temperature. However, enzymes cannot tolerate the high temperatures used in cooking, baking, microwaving, canning, and pasteurizing. These methods all produce heat of 118˚F or higher which destroys the enzymes.

Proper pH: Plant enzymes work in a very broad pH range, 3.0 to 9.0, which coincides very nicely with the human gastrointestinal tract. This is an important factor to remember when comparing plant enzymes with the body's own digestive enzymes or with supplemental animal enzymes, such as pancreatin. Plant enzymes work in both the stomach and intestines. Pancreatic enzymes, whether produced by the body or provided as a dietary supplement, only work in the small intestine.

Moisture: Plant enzymes must have moisture in order to perform their digestive function. Quite simply, digestion is the process of breaking molecules apart with the addition of water hydrolysis. The body satisfies this need with saliva. Conversely, plant and animal cells use the process of condensation—the removal of water—to form the long molecular chains that foods are composed of.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT SPASMODIC HEALING IS?

Question:
What is Spasmodic Healing?
Answer:
It's the lack of continuous healing from one correction to the next.
          
 
If the patient needs an alignment correction on every visit,
they are experiencing Spasmodic Healing.

The body’s natural self-healing process is interrupted when the patient
fails to maintain their alignment between corrections.

So when did they need another correction? ... Later that day ... the next day ... the next week?
Spasmodic Healing happens when the healing process is not continuous.

Obviously, if a patient requires a correction on each visit,
It's time to re-evaluate:
Are you applying your corrective procedure effectively?
New x-rays ... The correction formula may have changed.
Question the patient ... they may be causing the frequent misalingment to occur.

Restricted brain to body communication leads to the development
of acute and chronic health problems.

Continuous healing is the ultimate in Total Wellness and the Key to Optimal Health.
Holding your alignment correction -- is-- Healing!
Maintaining it -- is -- health maintenance at its Best!

A correction on every visit -- is -- akin to manipulation!

Why Food Enzymes are Important

Plant enzymes are important because they are capable of digesting food before the body’s own digestive process begins. In other words, plant enzymes can enhance the digestion of food and the delivery of nutrients to the blood even if you have a compromised digestive system. The same cannot be said of animal enzymes such as pancreatin.

Everyone agrees that proper nutrition is crucial to the maintenance of a healthy body. However, most health care practitioners overlook the true cause of many nutritional disorders. It is assumed, quite mistakenly, that digestion occurs automatically and the correction of a nutritional disorder simply requires matching the right nutritional supplement to the condition. For example, vitamin C for colds, vitamin A for viruses and herbal laxatives for constipation. While this treatment may relieve patient symptoms, the relief is only temporary because the underlying problem of faulty digestion is ignored. Health care practitioners who want to effectively manage health problems that are related to nutritional imbalances must consider each person’s ability to digest food. Unfortunately, most clinicians give little or no thought to the role of enzymes in digestion, despite overwhelming evidence of their importance.

Enzymes are present in all living animal and plant cells. They are the primary motivators of all natural biochemical processes. Life cannot exist without enzymes because they are essential components of every chemical reaction in the body. For example, they are the only substance that can digest food and make it small enough to pass through the gastrointestinal mucosa into the bloodstream. Three very broad classifications of enzymes are:

1.       Food enzymes - occur in raw food and, when present in the diet, begin the process of digestion

2.       Digestive enzymes - produced by the body to break food into particles small enough to be carried across the gut wall

3.       Metabolic enzymes - produced by the body to perform various complex biochemical reactions

In the 1930s, Edward Howell, MD, the food enzyme pioneer, found that there is a difference between plant enzymes and those that are produced by the body. He was convinced that plant enzymes in food and supplements have a different function in human digestion than that of the body’s own digestive enzymes. With this theory, he began isolating and concentrating plant enzymes from their sources. He found the difference is that food enzymes begin digesting food in the stomach and will work for at least one hour before the body’s digestive system begins to work. For this reason, enzymes should be considered essential nutrients. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and food manufacturers are removing them from food to gain shelf-life.

Dr. Howell was particularly impressed by the way the ingestion of raw food slowed the progress of chronic degenerative diseases and spent his professional life postulating and then validating his theories.

Indigestion

Indigestion is perhaps the most common ailment affecting people today. A multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry has emerged to provide over-the-counter remedies to sufferers. Why do so many people suffer from indigestion and why don’t traditional remedies for indigestion correct the problem rather than merely provide temporary relief from its symptoms? The reason is that digestion is a very complex process.

It is very difficult to know exactly which step in the digestive process is at fault. The symptoms of indigestion and other digestive problems such as heartburn, gas, bloating, nausea, and cramps are vague and there are no lab tests to define the exact problem.

Indigestion has many causes. One of the most common causes is a deficiency in stomach acid (HCl). This inability to produce adequate stomach acid is common in people over 50 years of age who are free of gastric disease. Some studies even report as high as 25-35% of the elderly have this condition.

The lack of acid (HCl) secretion in the stomach was found in 14-20% of patients in the hospital for conditions other than gastric disease or pernicious anemia. This condition is diagnosed when the pH of the gastric contents fails to drop below 6.5 following maximal stimulation. The “resting pH” of the stomach, when empty, is normally 5.0 to 6.0.

HCl is critical for proper protein digestion in the stomach because it adjusts the pH of the stomach to allow protein digestion to occur. HCl changes pepsinogen to the active proteolytic enzyme, pepsin, and maintains the highly acidic pH needed for pepsin’s activity. Stomach acid activates this enzyme, it does not destroy it.

The secretion of HCl and pepsinogen are governed by separate mechanisms. This is the reason that the pepsinogen concentration in the gastric juices of those who are lacking stomach acid is very close to normal in many cases.

Physiologists have confirmed that HCl is produced from one cell and pepsinogen is produced from another. This means that the body may be producing enough pepsinogen but it is still unable to properly digest protein because of an insufficient amount of HCl.

So, what can be done to improve digestion and relieve the symptoms that result when the body cannot produce adequate amounts of stomach acid? The answer is enzymes. Protein digestion can be improved with food enzymes that “predigest” food in the stomach. Plant enzymes are capable of digesting food before your own digestive process begins. In other words, plant enzymes can enhance the digestion of food and the delivery of nutrients to the blood even when the patient has a compromised digestive system.

We Make A Difference If We Choose

One day a man was walking along the beach when he noted a figure in the distance.  As he got closer, he realized the figure was that of a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean.  Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?”

The youth replied “throwing starfish in the ocean.  The sun is up and the tide is going out.  If I don’t throw them back they will die.”

“Son” the man said, “don’t you know there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish?  You can’t possibly make a difference.”

After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it into the surf.  Then smiling at the man he said, “I made a difference for that one.”

Do you know anyone who could benefit from chiropractic care?  Help someone change their life and health by referring them to Chiropractic.  Just let us know who you would like to refer, and we will prepare a certificate and some information for them.  If you are not certain how to tell someone about Chiropractic, there are many ways that they can receive the information.  We have regularly scheduled talks, which is an excellent way to introduce someone to Chiropractic.  We also have literature, and DVD’s available.  The doctor is even available to speak with anyone that may be interested in sharing Chiropractic care.

Healthier people make a healthier world.  Change someone’s life today, tell him or her about Chiropractic!