Creation Chiropractic - Eden Prairie, MN
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Eden Prairie, MN 55344
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Creation Chiropractic Blog - Eden Prairie MN

Chiropractic And Plantar Fasciitis

Posted: August 28, 2017
By: Written by Dr. Matthew Alvord,

 

Things are sometimes not what they seem.  For example, plantar fascia is the normal tissue covering the arch of your feet.  When it inflames, the medical field puts an “itis” at the end of the name and calls it “plantar fasciitis”.  The problem is that the new name doesn’t address at all why the old name all of a sudden needed a new one.

It should seem that if a body part has a diagnosis, that part of the body would be the problem itself but this is often not the case.  Just because someone has plantar fasciitis doesn’t mean the problem is with the plantar fascia itself. In reality, that inflamed tissue is doing exactly what it needs to do to protect and heal itself from the demands required of it.

The burning question about burning in your feet should be WHY.  Why that body part?  Why is it inflamed? If the body is always intelligent and it takes more energy to inflame than to not, why would the body be forced to defend and heal itself, especially if there wasn’t an obvious injury.

As it turns out, no body part is an island unto itself.  Every     part of the body is connected with every other part physically,     chemically and neurologically.  That last part means the nervous system connects your entire body together, from your brain to your big toes and back again.  Well, guess what is between your brain and big toes?  Everything is affected, including your spine and legs, all the way down to the plantar fascia on the bottom of your feet.

Ultimately, that area of your body is connected with the function of everything else up to the top of your head and it means the cause of plantar fasciitis is really somewhere other than the foot. From experience, those symptoms are often a problem with the great connector between the brain and the body:  Your spine.

This is true for many conditions and symptoms.  Interference in your spine will cause all kinds of dysfunction throughout your entire body, often resulting in plantar fasciitis.

Here is a common scenario:  The spine misaligns, usually with common demands and forces pushing it around. The bones that normally protect the delicate spinal nerves now can actually work against it by causing interference to your brain.  In turn, your brain must intelligently deal with the situation by specifically twisting your body so it can compensate for the interference.  If it didn’t, you would most likely fall over on your next step or have even worse dysfunction than you already have.

As your spine twists, so go your legs.  Your lower extremities have to contort to compensate for your twisted spine higher up.  One hip typically shifts higher on one side, causing your weight distribution to shift abnormally more to one side as well. This also forces one leg to turn out and the other leg to turn in, and it happens all the way down to your feet. It affects your heels, the balls of your feet and the tissue holding them together:  Your Plantar Fascia.

You can now see how easy it is to have a misaligned spine actually cause or complicate what would otherwise look like just a foot problem.  The real misleading thing is that often people with plantar fasciitis will have only foot pain and the rest of them will feel fine. 

Just remember that many people with a heart problem only have arm pain yet their chest feels fine.  Since you cant feel the actual spinal nerve interference and only chiropractors are specifically trained to find it, it is vitally important to get your spine checked to make sure the foot pain below you isn’t coming from your spine behind you. 


Neuritis, Neuralgia and Neuropathy...Oh My!

Posted: August 14, 2017
By: Written by Dr. Matthew Alvord,

 

People get overwhelmed with everything they are told they’ve “got”. Whether they actually have a condition or not, the one thing they’ve definitely got is fear.  What do I mean?  When you walk into a doctor’s office, you can get scared to death just from the diagnosis alone! They sound intimidating, awful and just plain foreign. Many diagnoses are not nearly as serious as they sound and do not represent the actual cause of the problem. Many other diagnoses are so general and non-specific that they seem like a desperate attempt to just put a label on anything they can find.

Take something like a nerve condition.  If a nerve is inflamed, they just add an “itis” on the end and voila!  You have neur-itis: nerve inflammation.  “Algia” means pain, so neuralgia means “nerve pain”.  Neuropathy?  Well, “pathy” means suffering or disease so that diagnosis just means “nerve disease”.  

What does it all mean?  Much of the time when you are diagnosed with something, it sounds like a death sentence when it is really just describing a certain thing they suspect is going on.  So, if you have nerve pain or inflammation and they don’t find anything else, you will be diagnosed with neuralgia or neuritis.  Neuropathy is such a general term that it could mean anything going on with the nerves, serious or subtle.

All these names are used to describe a kind of condition, but none of them actually says what is causing them.  And isn’t that the real issue at hand?  They can treat the effects of what they observe but none of it will get to the cause of why you have what you have.  In other words, a pain reliever or anti-inflammatory medication can effectively treat the effects of pain and inflammation and make your neuralgia and neuritis go away, but if the true cause of these conditions is not addressed, your health will go away too!

It’s time to spend more time looking at the “whys” in our body.  Why it is in pain, why it is inflamed or why it has any condition for that matter.  There are very good reasons why our body does any and all of the things it must do to survive.  If we just ignore this fact, we are treading on thin ice.  This is the main reason why people end up with more and more medications and treatments where the actual cause is not addressed.

As a Chiropractor, we are experts at working with your nervous system.  However, we don’t diagnosis or treat anything in your body.  We simply allow your body to function at a higher level when we remove interference to your nerves and the Innate Intelligence that controls your nerves. When this happens, many conditions go away just because your body does not need them anymore to survive at a lower level of function.

Chiropractic doesn’t treat neuralgia, neuritis or neuropathy because treatments cannot address the cause of why your nerves are not functioning properly in the first place.  Chiropractic is ultimately about the cause of your dysfunction.  Yet, these conditions and many more often go away by asking the simple question “Why”. And since Chiropractors are the only doctors trained to remove a specific interference to your nervous system called spinal subluxation, there are many people who suffer unnecessarily because they are only told what and where, but not how or why.

The questions you ask in your life are more important than the answers because you will never get the right answers with the wrong questions.  Start asking yourself, “Why do I even have this diagnosis they want to treat?” Only then can you begin to move forward towards a better, healthier version of yourself.  See a Chiropractor to make sure a major cause of all those scary sounding nerve conditions is not keeping you in fear.  Replace your fears with function and get checked today.


The Concussion In Your Spine

Posted: August 7, 2017
By: Written by Dr. Matthew Alvord,

 

If you’ve ever swung a golf club and either hit the ball wrong or hit the ground, you know how it feels as the force travels up the shaft to your hands.  The concussion actually happens at the club head, but you feel it all the way up your arms.  A similar dynamic happens when we experience a concussion with the head on our shoulders.  As our head hits another object or the ground, we might have the illusion that only our head suffers the damage but as the force moves down our spine, our entire body suffers from a blow to our head.  

Your spine absorbs the shock of a head concussion like the golf club absorbs the shock of swing.  What’s worse, the shock to your spine often cause misalignments of your neck bones which in turn causes interference to the nerves feeding back to your head, worsening the head injury. As time goes by with the problem unresolved, the damage eventually shows up in the brain but the damage in the spine continues to go undetected. 

Raymond Damadian, the inventor of the MRI machine, recently observed that spinal trauma occurs about 11 years prior to the diagnosis of common brain conditions.  This is how impactful the spine is to the brain and brain function!  Without treating anything, Chiropractors can assess your spine and nervous system to remove interference in the spine but even more importantly, remove interference to your brain when you are desperately trying to recover from an injury such as a concussion:  All without even touching your brain.

When spinal interference is removed with a Chiropractic adjustment, your potential returns to normal and allows you to heal as well as possible. Dr. Damadian has also documented significant recovery from what were otherwise considered difficult medical cases when someone received Chiropractic care for the first time. In his words, he was “astonished” to see the affect that Chiropractic had on chronic, concussion related injuries that were not improving with medical care.

It is essential to realize that a head concussion is also a spinal concussion.  When someone gets treated for a concussion, it is very important to have his or her spine checked as well because if your spine isn’t working properly, your brain can’t possibly heal properly.  And since you can’t feel this interference until it gets worse, the only way to know for sure is to have a Chiropractic evaluation.  

Another concern with concussions is preventing them. Although there are more advancements being made, such as sports equipment and rules to try and decrease the blows outside your body, Chiropractic can improve your chances of withstanding concussion blows from within your body.

Because your nervous system controls everything in your body, Chiropractic adjustments remove interference to this system, allowing your body to function optimally in any environment like a field, a car or a sidewalk.  Chiropractic improves strength, flexibility and balance, which are all important in a situation that can produce a concussion and improve the ability to receive a concussive force.  The stronger and less compromised your body is before and during a blow, the better you are able to withstand an injury that could produce a concussion. If you can get checked by a Chiropractor before an injury even occurs, your body will be at its best to withstand any kind of blow, concussion or not. 

Medical experts are just now realizing the vital connection between the spine and the brain related to concussions, but they are not trained to check your spine for the specific interference as only a Chiropractor can.  There are 3.8 million concussions reported each year and in a day and age where concussion injuries are being recognized as happening more often than anyone ever knew, it is essential to understand what exactly a concussion really is and what it takes to get better again.  See a Chiropractor to make sure concussions don’t deal you a lower blow than they already are.

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