Well­ness Blog

Explore the Sci­ence and Ben­e­fits Asso­ci­ated with Exer­cise in the Sand

By Dr Deed Harrison

Our mod­ern dig­i­tal age has brought us many con­ve­niences. Black­Berry devices, iPhones, tablets and e-​readers allow us to com­mu­ni­cate and be enter­tained with the push of a but­ton. Tech­nol­ogy can improve our qual­ity of life, but it comes with a price: being hud­dled over devices for long period of times can do more harm than good.

A senior who’s suf­fered an injury from a fall knows the dra­matic impact it can have not just phys­i­cally, but psy­cho­log­i­cally. Falls can swiftly take away the sense of inde­pen­dence and con­fi­dence that allows a senior to fully enjoy their life.

Unfor­tu­nately, falls are all too com­mon in our aging pop­u­la­tion, 1 in every 3 Cana­di­ans over the age of 65 will expe­ri­ence a fall, with hips, wrists and pelvic frac­tures being the most com­mon injuries.

By David Suzuki with con­tri­bu­tions from David Suzuki Foundation’s Senior Edi­tor Ian Hanington

We’re sur­rounded by life, but Earth’s most plen­ti­ful liv­ing things are invis­i­ble to the naked eye. Microbes are not only around us, they live on and in us. Although some cause mal­adies rang­ing from food poi­son­ing to small­pox, there are many we couldn’t live without.

The term “well­ness” is becom­ing com­mon and being used by many holis­tic care groups to describe the type of care they are offer­ing. Mer­riam Web­ster defines well­ness as “the qual­ity or state of being in good health, espe­cially as an actively sought goal.” From Wikipedia, the free ency­clo­pe­dia, “Well­ness is gen­er­ally used to mean a healthy bal­ance of the mind-​body and spirit that results in an over­all feel­ing of well-​being. In other words, well­ness is a view of health that empha­sizes the state of the entire being and its ongo­ing development.

ICPA sent out a sur­vey to its mem­bers ask­ing for the rea­sons why par­ents bring their chil­dren in for chi­ro­prac­tic care. The num­ber one rea­son reported was “well­ness.” Par­ents are rec­og­niz­ing the impor­tance of chi­ro­prac­tic care and the sig­nif­i­cant role it plays in the fam­ily well­ness lifestyle.

Many par­ents can relate to what it’s like to have an infant with sleep prob­lems. They’re no fun for the infant, and a dis­turbed sleep pat­tern usu­ally means exces­sive cry­ing, which can add a great amount of stress to new parents.

While most babies will sleep through the night from three months on, some infants will have dif­fi­culty falling or stay­ing asleep for longer than a few hours at a time.

Gov­ern­ment Admits Mis­guided War on Cholesterol

There has been a con­certed effort by phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies to pre­scribe toxic antipsy­chotic drugs to chil­dren. Now the “suc­cess” of this cam­paign has been doc­u­mented in the Archives of Gen­eral Psy­chi­a­try. In a com­par­i­son between the years 1993 – 1998 and 2005 – 2009, pre­scrip­tions of antipsy­chotic drugs per 100 chil­dren (ages 13 and under) rose from 0.24 to 1.83. That’s more than a sev­en­fold increase. Given that most of pre­scrip­tions are for the older chil­dren in this age range, the rate would be sub­stan­tially higher among pre­teens and 13-​year-​olds. For ado­les­cents (14 – 20 years old) the increase in pre­scrip­tion rates was nearly fivefold.

This report comes out at a poignant time for me. Right now one of my patients, a 7-​year-​old boy I will call “Joey,” has just returned from being psy­chi­atri­cally hos­pi­tal­ized because he could not be with­drawn from the antipsy­chotic drug Risperdal as an out­pa­tient. The fam­ily came to me for help in get­ting this child off the psy­chi­atric drugs he’d been pre­scribed by another psy­chi­a­trist. A basi­cally sweet and lov­able boy, the with­drawal was such an agony for him that he became uncon­trol­lably vio­lent. Mean­while, he already suf­fers from tar­dive dysk­i­ne­sia, a per­sis­tent and com­monly per­ma­nent move­ment dis­or­der from antipsy­chotic drug expo­sure that causes abnor­mal move­ments, includ­ing deform­ing facial gri­maces and dis­abling invol­un­tary move­ments of the torso and limbs.

Despite the fact that we may try to eat healthy, we still absorb a lot of junk from our envi­ron­ment. Our bod­ies are exposed to a wide vari­ety of chem­i­cals on a daily basis – includ­ing pes­ti­cides, food addi­tives, cos­metic and hygiene prod­ucts, clean­ing prod­ucts, med­ica­tions, envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion, and even neg­a­tive thoughts.

Remov­ing this con­stant influx of tox­ins from your body is a com­plex process per­formed by your kid­neys, lungs, skin, lymph sys­tem and most impor­tantly your liver. While our body’s nat­ural detox­i­fi­ca­tion process is noth­ing short of amaz­ing, it is often dif­fi­cult to keep up with the bar­rage of chem­i­cals. Over time, this toxic bur­den can impair your body’s abil­ity to work the way it was designed to and can lead to a decline in your over­all health.
Here are some of the ben­e­fits you can expect from a good qual­ity, well-​organized detox pro­gram.
WHY TO DETOX CLEANSE…

We are born to move.

It sounds so sim­ple, but yet all too often our lifestyles become more and more seden­tary. Sir Isaac Newton’s three phys­i­cal laws of motion were first pub­lished in 1687, yet their core prin­ci­pals hold true. An object that is at rest stays at rest unless an exter­nal force acts upon it. For­tu­nately, we are human beings and not inan­i­mate objects! If you set a rock down, it will never move itself. As human beings, we have the abil­ity to move our­selves. Artic­u­lat­ing joints and mus­cles, coor­di­nated by a cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem, which is con­trolled by a brain that com­puter and robotic man­u­fac­tur­ers are still striv­ing to repli­cate — and still fail­ing to. So, it’s time to real­ize we aren’t rocks and find rea­sons to move on a reg­u­lar basis.

This year we cel­e­brated our 15^th year anniver­sary since we opened Vaughan Chiropractic!…and we give sin­cere thanks to you and your fam­i­lies for con­tin­u­ing to put your trust, con­fi­dence and faith in us. We also thank you for your refer­rals which help us grow our mis­sion to help as many fam­i­lies as pos­si­ble to expe­ri­ence life, feel­ing fully alive, and at their best through­out their lives!

As you move along your path towards opti­mal health, food sen­si­tiv­i­ties and food intol­er­ances usu­ally come up. It is often a part of the process of get­ting to know your body well.

Food sen­si­tiv­i­ties or intol­er­ances involve a set of immune sys­tem anti­bod­ies in the body called IgG anti­bod­ies. The sen­si­tiv­ity is a reac­tion in your body to a food, drink, or sub­stance found in food. The reac­tion causes symp­toms in the body such as the diges­tive sys­tem, the skin, mental/​emotional and gen­eral symp­toms through­out the body.

Research is cur­rently being con­ducted in the pos­i­tive role that chi­ro­prac­tic plays in assist­ing those who have poor pro­pri­o­cep­tive func­tion. Pro­pri­o­cep­tion is the abil­ity of the brain to sense the rel­a­tive posi­tion of the body parts in space, and the abil­ity to move with­out look­ing at your mov­ing body parts. For exam­ple, when you close your eyes, you still have a sense of body position.

When this sense is impaired, you are more likely to be clumsy and acci­dent prone. We know that chi­ro­prac­tic care improves the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the brain and body, and the body and brain, improv­ing pro­pri­o­cep­tion input and out­put, as well as neural con­nec­tions in the brain for proprioception.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished Sep­tem­ber 2012, Path­ways to Fam­ily Well­ness Magazine

When moms and dads bring their kids to see me, they bring their chil­dren for a vari­ety of health rea­sons and con­cerns. Fre­quently their son or daugh­ter is suf­fer­ing from joint pain, for exam­ple in their shoul­der, knee or back, that keeps nag­ging them and is not going away.

Why do some peo­ple over­flow with energy, and oth­ers feel over­whelm­ing fatigue?

A grow­ing body of research shows how an individual’s atti­tude towards health can deter­mine whether they expe­ri­ence vibrant well-​being or con­stant suffering.

Are you eat­ing like an ath­lete? How can you improve your nutri­tion with healthy, high energy, high nutri­ent food? Rox­anne Fisher of BBC Good Food inter­viewed 21 olympic ath­letes from the last sum­mer games on their daily diets. The fol­low­ing nutri­tional choices sum­ma­rizes what is shared among most of the athletes.

For break­fast most of the ath­letes chose a nutri­ent rich, low glycemic break­fast to pro­vide slow releas­ing energy for the rest of the day. Many ate hot cereal with nuts or seeds, such as ground lin­seed or flax seed with honey. Some had muesli and yogurt. And most of the ath­letes com­bined it with a fresh fruit smoothie with pro­tein or fresh juiced fuits, veg­eta­bles and antiox­i­dant herbs com­bined, such as beet, car­rot and gin­ger juice.

When our older son Max was 3 years old, he faced health chal­lenges with his breath­ing at night. He was not sleep­ing well. He was breath­ing through his mouth, not his nose, snor­ing loudly, and would reg­u­larly stop breath­ing, wake up with a start, then inhale a deep breath and fall asleep again.

This pat­tern in the med­ical world is labeled “obstruc­tive sleep apnea.” It is char­ac­ter­ized by repet­i­tive episodes of upper air­way obstruc­tion that occur dur­ing sleep. The med­ical route of car­ing for it would have been to have his ton­sils and ade­noids removed, and/​or use a machine with a nose mask that he would need to attach each night.