Wellness Solution Centers

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Maintaining proper alignment is very important for your health. Get checked, get adjusted, and get back to life.

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Happy Wednesday! The 3 Core Essentials to Good Health After I meet with a new patient for the first time and discuss what brought them into my office, I do a t...horough review of their problem, their past medical history, their lifestyle, and their overall health goals. I want my patients to understand that health is not given, it's earned. Their problems are not my problems. Their problem is THEIR problem and my job is to help fix their problem. However, make no mistake about it, I can't do it without them participating in the process. Although genetics and luck can play a factor in health, the overwhelming majority of your health is determined by HOW you live your life and the choices you make. My goal with everyone when they become a patient is to give them what they want, which is usually symptomatic relief, but show them what they COULD have, which is a much better quality of life when they are functioning well. One requires more work than the other. Once I'm done with their consultation, I bring them over to a poster that I have framed on my exam room wall. It's pictured below and it's called "The 3 Core Essentials to Good Spinal Health". Here is why these 3 core essentials are so important to living a life without pain, and a life with the ability to move well without limitations. If you want to live a long, high-quality life, there is one thing you MUST do well, move well! Alignment- Nature craves symmetry. Anything structural that bears weight such as a building, bridge, or automobile needs proper alignment. If things are not in alignment, then the weight is distributed differently through that object, and the parts that bear more weight wear out quicker. Think of a car that is out of alignment because you hit a big pothole a few months ago. How do the tires wear eventually? Unevenly correct? This is because the alignment is off and the weight of the car is now being distributed unevenly. The part of the tire tread that is now bearing more weight wears quicker. We as humans don't have tires but we do have weight-bearing parts such as the joints in our spine. Our hips and knees are major weight-bearing joints as well. We have discs made of cartilage in our spine and cartilage in our hips, knees, and shoulders that wear out. These are how people get "herniated discs" or a "torn meniscus in the knee". We have muscles and tendons that rub and create friction when joints are out of alignment. This can wear out tendons and cause tears, like rotator cuff tears in the shoulder. Misalignments in the spine, called Subluxations, are something that I see way too often in people's spine. This is particularly bad because these misalignments can cause irritation to spinal nerves that exit out through the spine and go to other areas of the body. Subluxations cause changes in the tone of the nerves and nerves fire differently when their tone changes. We can see when our teeth are out of alignment and we know how to fix them, braces. However, how do we know when our spine, pelvis, hips, knees, feet, shoulders are out of alignment? The best way to find out is to get checked by a competent Chiropractor who can evaluate you for these changes in alignment using things like postural screening, range of motion testing, and X-ray analysis. Core Stability- To have good alignment you must have good stability. One of my favorite saying when it comes to good stability in the body is "you can't fire a cannon from a rowboat". Think about it? A cannon is big and has a lot of power, the rowboat doesn't have good stability so the cannon will destroy the rowboat if it's fired. This is no different in the human body. Most people have a rowboat for a core, not a battleship, which is what you want to fire a cannon from. We have weak and tight cores because we sit too much, don't do enough core strengthening and mobility exercises. We don't value core stability so we don't put time into improving it. One of the best books I ever read 20 years ago was "Core Performance" by Mark Verstegen. It totally changed my perspective on how important our core stability is. If you want to live a long life, have good posture, and move well. If you want to have good posture and move well, have good alignment and core stability. They say that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" and this may be true but as far as I'm concerned, "working on your core every day keeps the grim reaper away". Spinal Compression- It's not just spinal compression, it's all joint compression. The parts of our body that take the biggest beating from too much weight and compression are the joints of the spine, hip and knee. Think about how many hips and knees are being replaced these days because they are just plain worn out, bone on bone. How many spinal surgeries are taking place to remove or repair discs or remove arthritis that is causing pressure on nerves? Our joints were never designed to carry 20, 30, 40, 50+ more pounds. We are overloading our spines and our joints because we are overweight as a society. 50 years ago, 10% of the American population was obese and now it's well over 35% who are obese. If you want your son or daughter to go into a good career, have them become an orthopedic surgeon because as our population gets bigger and older, more people will need joint replacement surgery. Do you want to do your health and your joints a favor? Give them a break and lose some weight. Your BMI should never be above 30 which puts you into the "obese" category. We may all carry a little extra weight from time to time but the alarms and red flags should go off once your BMI goes above 30. I hope this information helps you to feel better, function better and live life better! The greatest revenge in life is a life well-lived. To live well, we must MOVE well, and to move well, we must have good alignment, a good core, and take the stress off our spine and weight-bearing joints! The 3 core essentials. Please share this if you think it could help somebody! Yours in Health, Dr. Dane

Health and healing begin at the spine.

The choices you make about what you eat and drink matter.

Happy Wednesday, Happy Holidays, and Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate Christmas! "A Year of Sacrifice and Struggle" Wow, what... a year it's been. I think we'll all look back in years to come and remember 2020 as a year that was extremely different from all other years in our lives. But will it be a year of learning and growth, or a year of sacrifice and struggle without purpose? I don't know about you, but 2020 made me re-evaluate my life, my priorities, my calendar, my work, and even my direction in life. I've seen so many businesses hurt, so many people affected by the shut-downs and quarantines. I've seen loved ones lost by families, and I've seen children who aren't allowed to be children because they can't play and spend more time with a screen than they do with people. If you ask any generation; your mom or dad, or your grandmother or grandfather, or read historical literature, you will find out that all generations of human beings had "their" struggle, had their cross to bear. Struggle either crush us physically and emotionally, or it causes us to focus and figure out how to do life better. Which one is it for you? There is a term that I learned a long time ago that has really helped me realize that the situation that you are in is hardly ever a product of other people or bad luck. It's almost always the culture or environment that you are either conscious of, or more often than not, unconscious of. The term is called "fundamental attribution error" and it means the tendency we have to ascribe blame to a person, instead of that person's environment. Change a person's environment and you change their behavior. So what type of environment have you been creating for yourself and living in? I feel a little guilty because this year has actually been one of the best years for me personally in a long time. I feel guilty because others are struggling and I don't want anyone to feel that I'm insensitive or not empathetic to their struggle. However, I keep asking myself, why has this been such a good year for me? My business is doing well, my finances are doing well, my marriage and the relationships that mean the most to me have flourished, my health has been amazing, I haven't had a sniffle or ache all year, I wake up with a feeling of happiness and optimism for the future. What the hell is wrong with me?? Should I go see a doctor and get rid of this optimism and happiness I'm suffering with? Here is the point and for me, it's been a point very well taken this year. When I struggle in life it's usually self-inflicted wounds. I'm not doing it on purpose but it doesn't matter because even if it's happening to me unconsciously, it's HAPPENING to me. Until I wake up and change my life, I'm going to keep struggling. No matter what your situation, there is always hope through choice. Even in the darkest days, the sun will still rise again. If through your struggle, you became someone different, someone better, the struggle was a gift. Stephen Covey has taught us that most of us manage our life by the clock and not the compass. We focus more on climbing the ladder of success without regard to where that ladder is taking us. We fill our time with "things to do" with very little thought as to whether those things are serving our sense of purpose and happiness. Happiness, as opposed to struggling, comes from doing what you LOVE. Now, here is the point. You are not always going to LOVE to do it. Sometimes doing what you love is hard work. I love being a Chiropractor and helping people feel better and function better, but I don't always love doing it. It's hard sometimes like when I have a patient in pain who is blaming me for not giving them the right adjustment to magically fix them in one visit. As I tell them, "my name is Dane, not Jesus". It's hard when I have a 350 lb man on the table and he wants me to "adjust" his lower back and I feel myself adjusting more than he does? My job is hard sometimes but I LOVE it. I love how it makes me feel. I feel like I'm doing what I was genetically programmed to do, to help people lay a foundation of physical and mental health on which to build their lives. Also, my wife drives me crazy sometimes, and I KNOW I drive her crazy, too, but we LOVE each other, not because it's easy, but because we've struggled, and through the struggle, we've created a beautiful marriage. Your struggle may be real but I encourage you to wrap your arms around it and embrace it. What is it trying to teach you? If you learn the "lesson" from your struggle, it was SO worth it. If you don't, you will most likely continue to struggle and then it goes from struggling to suffering. We all struggle but suffering is optional. What did this year teach you? Do you need to get healthy? Stop traveling so much and get to know your family again? Do you need a new career doing something you love instead of something you thought your parents or life wanted you to do? Do you need to move to another state or another country? Do you need to read more or read less? Do you need to stop watching so much TV, turn off the computer and turn life back on? Do you need to tell somebody how much you love them because they may not be here next week, next month, or tomorrow? I don't know what you need to do, but you will if you wake up, get conscious, look around, and listen to that little voice in your head. Call it God speaking to you, or the universe. God or the infinite wisdom of the universe doesn't want you to struggle all time. I look around and I don't see nature struggling all the time. Climbing the mountain called life may be difficult, but stop and enjoy the view along the way. Appreciate the difficult parts BECAUSE they were difficult. Also, I can assure you that the view at the top is the best part of the journey. So, struggle to get to the top, enjoy the view, and send me a postcard. Yours in Health, Dr. Dane

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