It Takes a Toll..
Hi Folks, I’m Dr. Ethan Peterson, founder and chiropractor at Central Division Chiropractic located in the great Midwestern city of Kansas City. My office in Westport treats people from all walks of life in ways that best fit that individual. I create custom care plans to focus on decreasing pain and increasing function. I’m starting this blog to help you – yes, the person reading this – find ways to manage your pain. From headaches, to neck pain, to low back pain, chiropractors help so many people take control of their lives. So let’s talk about how you spend about 30% of your life…work.
We usually think of dangerous jobs as ones that put us immediately in harm’s way; working for the fire department, working in security or law enforcement, or one I often hear is underwater welding. But at the end of the day, we’re all putting our health on the line to work whatever job we need to. With long hours of sitting and near ceaseless full-body vibration, nearly all workers in the transportation industry deal with low back pain that can be traced directly back to their work. Sustained posture and repetitive motions can overwork specific muscles and joints that will eventually cause some sort of pain.
This doesn’t just apply to physically intensive careers either! Any multitude of jobs that keep us at a desk for all or most of our day can have a negative impact on our health. The nature of our bodies is to adapt to the stressors we put it under; our bodies want to get really good at the actions we do most often and in return ignore the actions we don’t do regularly.
Check in with Yourself
So what’s the solution? I think there’s multiple steps to it, and the first step is mindfulness. Taking some time each day, multiple times if you can, to check in with your body to truly understand how it’s feeling can make a big difference. One of the things I often hear when people try chiropractic for the first time is that for the first few weeks, they almost felt a little bit MORE sore or uncomfortable. There’s great neurophysiological, research, academic explanations for this feeling that depends on how you see the ultimate mechanism for the chiropractic adjustment, but I don’t think any of you want to hear about that. No, the major impact of this mindfulness is the sheer fact that you are paying more attention to what your body is telling you.
So many times, our body is trying to tell us what we need. In many situations, we are driven by self-preservation to obey its wishes; when we’re feeling hungry or dehydrated, we try to find sources that will fulfill that need. But for a lot of people, when they are feeling that headache or low back pain coming on, they do their best to simply ignore it instead of changing the variables. To be intentionally mindful about our bodies, I try to have my very active patients take a scheduled break a few times per hour. A break as short as one or two minutes can give you the time and space to check in with yourself. For my patients who are a bit more sedentary at work, we use that time to be a bit more active. Getting up from your seated position three times per hour can make a huge difference in how you feel. By moving around, you’re reminding your body that you will be asking it to do actions like that in the future too.
Once we’ve begun to be mindful, we can identify those pain points a bit better. We can see that we feel worse in the morning but start feeling better around lunch, or that after lunch we’re feeling more stiff and sore. Every body is different, but through mindfulness we can see the actions that are causing that pain to present itself. Again, usually these issues come from too much or not enough movement in joints and muscles that depend on the requirements of our work. That’s where the physical work of chiropractic comes in.
How does chiropractic help?
Chiropractic is a noninvasive, conservative alternative to medical treatment. As a chiropractor, I use my hands, a table, and maybe a few basic tools to help induce the motion in the areas that need it. Our bodies are set up with alternating joints of stability and mobility – our ankles are very mobile, but not so stable. Our knees are stable, but not so mobile – you can go through each joint in the body and usually a mobile joint is sandwiched by two stable joints, and vice-versa. This is true of the spine as well in regards to the major regions of the spine, but also on a joint-by-joint basis spanning the entire length of the spine. Remember, our bodies adapt to what we ask of it. So if you’re moving your neck in a way that puts some vertebrae in a lot of motion, others surrounding it will tend to be less mobile and will emphasize stability instead.
When we try to ignore those pain signals, we begin to adapt to them and other parts of the body “take the load off” so to speak. I’ll get to this concept of altering the kinetic chain in a future blog post, but what I’m getting at here is that we need to express our full range of motion as often as possible to keep our muscles and joints healthy. When you’re unable to move your neck a certain way because of pain, or a spot in your low back just won’t bend the way you want, a chiropractor like myself can help put the necessary, healthy motion into those joints. Most of the time, this results in a decrease in pain in those areas.
All chiropractic work, mobility work, or even just stretching or massage, needs to be followed up by some self-expression of that increased mobility. If we only come in to get adjusted and go back to our old habits, we’ll need that outside help forever. I want my patients to get well enough that they can handle their own pain. I know, that’s kind of refreshing, right? I don’t want you to be a patient forever, I don’t want you to be in pain forever. To prevent that from happening, we need to follow up the chiropractic adjustment with some sort of exercise to emphasize that range of motion and help you control it yourself.
Listen to Yourself
But remember, if we ignore our bodies’ needs for too long, the quiet dysfunction turns to loud pain. Learn more about how chiropractic can help people with neck pain, low back pain, headaches, and other conditions by visiting my website www.centraldivchirokc.com, or schedule an appointment for a free consultation!
- Ethan Peterson, DC
8/29/2024
