Health - Advanced Chiropractic of South Carolina

Oct 23 2019

The Dangers of Vitamin A Deficiency

As one of the wealthiest nations in the world, it seems odd to worry about vitamin deficiencies in America. And yet, because we eat a diet so filled with processed foods, Americans often don’t ingest enough of the right kinds of vitamins and minerals.
Vitamin A is important for proper growth and development of our bodies. Vitamin A serves us in the manufacturing and activity of adrenal and thyroid hormones, nerve cell maintenance, immune function, cell growth, and maintaining skin health. In addition, Vitamin A is vital to our ocular health. There are four types of Vitamin A compounds in the human retina, and a deficiency can be one reason behind night blindness.
In addition to problems like night blindness and dry eyes, a vitamin A deficiency can also lead to dry hair, skin, and nails. We could have a problem with mucous membranes in our GI and respiratory tracts. Insomnia, fatigue, and the ability to get pregnant are all related to vitamin A deficiency.
There are two ways for us to get adequate vitamin A in our diet. By eating foods high in vitamin A like liver, kidneys, butter, and whole milk. Or, we can eat foods high in pro-vitamin A that our bodies then turn into vitamin A, like kale, spinach, collards, carrots, yams, squash and sweet potatoes.

Omega 3 by Charles Rondeau

Oct 23 2019

Discriminating Doctors – Not a Happy Thought

If you are a woman, overweight, and have to go to the doctor, prepare yourself. There is a very serious problem with our doctors in this country and that is they discriminate against obese women.

They claim that they do not.

But as awareness to this problem rises, more and more women are speaking up about the problem. And the problem is more than just shaming women about the weight they carry, but doctors are misdiagnosing because they tend to focus too much on a woman’s weight than listening to her symptoms.

One woman went to the doctor after twisting her ankle. Her doctor said it was just swollen because she was carrying extra weight. A cursory look at the x-ray confirmed his diagnosis and she went home to ice and elevate her foot. She felt ashamed and humiliated at the experience.

After a week of enduring continuing pain in her foot, she sought a second opinion and another doctor who viewed the original x-ray saw that she had indeed fractured her ankle.

If the first doctor hadn’t determined that her swollen ankle was due to her weight, he probably wouldn’t have missed the fracture in the x-ray. In all ways, we tend to see what we expect to see.

Weight stigma is getting worse in America and health care providers, surprisingly, are the worst critics. Many studies confirm this as an overarching problem among doctors, medical students, nurses, nutritionists, dietitians, and other health care professionals.

If you work in the health care industry, pay attention because you might be unconsciously judging a woman based on her weight and not on her symptomatology. A research study in 2003 surveyed nearly a thousand primary care physicians and more than half of them used derogatory terms for their overweight female patients. They used terms such as “ugly,” “unattractive,” “noncompliant,” weak-willed,” “sloppy,” and “lazy” among other terms.

Further studies have determined that women don’t even have to be obese to suffer from this characterization. Women who are only fifteen pounds over their ideal weight also suffer from that same stigma.

Men, on the other hand, can be up to seventy-five pounds overweight before doctors demonstrate the same type of judgment. That is a significant gender difference.

But the real problem is that women who suffer from the stigma of being overweight when they seek medical attention are often shamed to the point that they don’t return to their doctor for followup. They miss basic health screening exams because they find it far too painful to pay a health care professional to disrespect them by judging them based on how much they weigh.

What doctors seem to miss is that most obese women don’t want to be obese. Yet they are judged as being weak-willed and lazy when the very thin patient sitting next to them doesn’t exercise, doesn’t eat a healthy diet and consumes gallons of sugar-laden drinks.

Most women feel that no matter what they go to the doctor for, they are told that if they lose weight it would improve their symptoms. If practicing medicine were really that simple, why then do health care practitioners spend all those years going to school?

One would think that as educated as they are, physicians and other health care professionals would be able to rise about a social prejudice that is not only unfair, but consigns overweight women to substandard health care.

Doctor and Stethoscope by George Hodan

Oct 23 2019

Benefits of Yoga for Seniors

Can yoga actually benefit seniors?

Isn’t yoga all about an intensive physical practice where you writhe around on the floor and put your body into a series of contorted positions?

From the perspective of an outsider, perhaps yoga may look that way. However, the yoga instructors at the studio I attend often provide classes for seniors at senior centers as well as community centers. They do it because they have seen first-hand the great benefits of yoga on our elderly population.

Yoga can help seniors stay active, improve their flexibility and the suppleness of their muscles. It also helps them with their proprioception, their ability to know where their body is in terms of the space around them. Loss of proprioception is the leading cause of falls in seniors today. Perhaps a yoga class for grandma would be a superb idea.

It might even be better if you joined her!

Yoga can help promote healthy bones, improve flexibility, and provide a certain amount of stress relief which translates into a more positive attitude and better sleeping habits.

Yoga is safe for all ages. But especially seniors. It helps them to keep their minds and bodies in good health.

As a senior, you want to make sure the yoga instructor for your class knows you are a senior. They will then take the time to come and chat briefly with you to see if you have any issues they need to know about. Then, during the class, they will observe carefully, and the best ones know how to come over to you, gently reposition an arm, a knee, provide a prop or suggest a modification that makes that particular pose available to you.

No yoga instructor wants you to feel that you are out of your league. Most well-trained yoga instructors know that they will be working with a variety of limited abilities. When you find a good instructor, hang onto them! A good yoga instructor will make the difference between loving or hating yoga.

I once participated in a chair yoga class, designed to assist those recovering from cardiac events like heart attack or open heart surgery. Most of the participants were not able to get up and down from the floor. The yoga instructor then prepared a series of yoga movements to be done from a seated position in a chair. The benefits at the end of the class were remarkable. A couple of people left as soon as the class was over, but the rest stayed to ask more questions about how they could continue a regular yoga practice on their own.

Seniors come in all shapes, sizes, and physical abilities. Whether you are a senior, or you love a senior, look into an appropriate yoga class/practice that will help them achieve a greater quality of life.

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Oct 23 2019

Yoga Nidra – The Science Behind It

Most people know yoga for the excellent physical exercise that it is, and for those who regularly practice yoga, they understand the mind-body connection.

Yoga Nidra is different.

Nidra is a term for “yogic sleep” and while you don’t exactly fall asleep, you do go into a combined alert awareness and deep relaxation state. Practitioners of nidra experience both alpha brain waves and eventually theta brain waves.

It is in this state that your brain is able to tap into your own intuition, creativity, and health.

Yoga Nidra is practiced in a prone position, sometimes with a bolster under the knees to alleviate any lower back stress you may experience as you can expect to be in this position anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour depending on the class you’re taking.

The first time I left my Yin/Nidra class I wondered if I had just paid $15 to take a nap at the yoga studio. Because that is almost what it felt like. And yet I felt lighter, more energetic, and much more inspired than I had felt in a very long time.

My instructor took us through a series of breathing exercises to get us to focus on our breathing in a meditative way. Then she took us through a couple of simple instructions before going into a visual guided imagery of my body. This helped me to stay focused on my body and kept me from wondering what my kids were doing, whether my client was going to be happy with my last draft, and what we were going to have for dinner.

That kind of mind-chatter is what keeps us in our usual beta brain wave state. Beta brain waves are where we live during the majority of our waking hours. Beta waves indicate a strongly engaged mind. When we’re awake and talking and interacting with others, we’re experiencing beta brain waves.

As we begin to relax into our yoga nidra, we move from beta brain waves to alpha. These represent non-arousal. These brainwaves are slower, higher in amplitude. We experience this after a job well done. After we have completed a difficult task, taking time to pause and reflect on that task often takes us into the alpha state. That person walking in the garden after their presentation is often in an alpha state. This state is linked to reduced stress hormone production, lower blood pressure and decreased heart rates.

If you only get into the alpha brain wave state during yoga nidra, you are working to counteract the daily effects of stress in your life. This is an excellent reason to practice nidra.

Yoga nidra will then progress to a state of deeper relaxation, to the theta brain wave state. In this state, your brain waves have an even greater amplitude, but a slower frequency. When we daydream, we are frequently in the theta state. Even experiencing driving hypnosis where you don’t remember how you drove from one place to the next is often done in the theta state.

In yoga nidra, the theta state is closest to sleeping without sleeping you can get. It produces deep relaxation and is the surest way to connect with the subconscious. In this state, it is possible to have the logical left brain connect to the intuitive right brain.

One of the purposes of yoga nidra is to balance the left and right brain activity. The very least you can expect to achieve from reaching the theta state in nidra is a sense of very deep relaxation.

By repeating the practice, you can connect to your inner self for healing, for transformation, for inspiration. It is in this state that you can often find your hidden inner potential.

For anyone who has never tried yoga nidra, give it a chance. Don’t concentrate on anyone else in the room. All yoga practice is individual even while done in a studio with other people in the class. You will get out of it what you put into it.

For me, I have found my creativity has increased many times over since I have begun a regular nidra practice.

Garden Buddha by Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc

Oct 23 2019

False Memories and All Nighters

Do you remember the last time you stayed awake all night? Most of my memories of this activity were during college, and not surprisingly, during my freshman year when I was not a very good keeper of my time. I excelled in procrastination and failed at planning.

My grades were good, and fortunately during that final physics lecture after I had successfully completed two all-nighters in a row I managed to take notes that regularly trailed off on the paper into a single line ending when my hand fell into my lap, waking me up.

Since that time I’ve learned that staying up all night hurts the body is oh so many ways. And there is not enough coffee in the world to bring the relief to the body that a good night’s sleep does.

Since those stellar days as a freshman in college, I’ve discovered that I am an insomniac. My father was one. My brothers and sisters share the trait. I don’t know about blessings or curses, but I do know that when I am able to sleep for six straight hours I consider myself to be very blessed.

I guess I wasn’t terribly surprised, then, to discover that there is a study that demonstrates that not only is staying up all night detrimental to our physical body, our mental health suffers too. We can damage our memory by this activity.

Sleep-deprived people can say they saw something happen that never happened. According to the article published in Psychological Science, sleep deprivation can cause us to think things happened when they actually didn’t. This gives rise to all kinds of ideas for horror movies and books. But the sad fact is that it is true.

In the study they divided a group of people into three. Group one slept four hours a night. Group 2 slept six hours a night. And Group 3 slept eight hours a night.

Obviously, the group who got a full eight hours of sleep suffered no cognitive problems. The group that slept six hours a night performed their tests as if they had a blood alcohol of 0.1 percent (drunk!) and the group that got only four hours of sleep a night fell asleep during the testing.

According to Steven Frenda from the University of California in Irvine, he was surprised to learn that few studies looked at the connection of sleep deprivation and memory distortion. He said, “Most studies only look at a sleep deprived person’s ability to remember lists of words, not real people, places and events.”

During Frenda’s test, they kept college students awake for 24 hours. Then they tested them to see if they were likely to mix up events. The test included a series of photos showing a crime taking place, that of a man stealing a wallet. One group of students went to bed after viewing the photos. The other group remained awake.

Phase two of the experiment had the groups review a written narrative of the event containing statements that did not support the photographs that were initially shown. As an example, a photo might show the man putting the wallet in his jacket pocket, while the narrative said the man put it in his pants pocket.

Students who were most sleep deprived reported more false details.

This is hardly a surprise. Sleep deprivation is responsible for automobile accidents, medical malpractice, industrial mishaps, as well as physical ailments. If you are even remotely sleep deprived, you might not want to be a key witness to a crime. You may misremember something vital.

Asleep by Vera Kratochvil

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