Posts by Scorca
From Stress to Muscle Ache and Back Again
The horrible cycle of stress
Say you had a particularly stressful day at work. You may find on the commute home that you all of a sudden become aware that your entire body is wracked by stiffness. From your neck through your shoulders and down into your lower back, almost all of the muscles that support your spine have tightened as a natural response to mental stress. This increase in tension begins to pull your spine out of alignment, causing nerve impingement and muscle spasm. What you do next defines the stress cycle.
An Effective At-Home Response for Back Spasms
When back spasms strike…
An unexpected episode of back spasming can be as crippling as it is shocking. Muscle spasms are an emergency response by your body- as it perceives imminent injury, the muscles suddenly and involuntarily contract. This is the first clue to solving back spasms and the underlying condition: your body has perceived the injury, meaning that this problem has been slowly building up over time. Muscle spasms are therefore a natural response to a set of conditions that are threatening your spine. But in the heat of the moment, it doesn’t help to worry about the underlying conditions. You need to respond to the pain!
Golf: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly for Spinal Health
When it comes to spinal health, you can find golf on both ends of the spectrum
For some, it promotes relaxation; for others, a single round can cause extreme frustration. And the sport is just as polarizing for our spinal health. To begin with, it is a good way to get active; it gets us moving, promotes better circulation, and gently tones the muscles. But the golf swing requires you to generate an enormous amount of power through torsion of the hips and force from the shoulders. You spend a lot of time bending down to tee up, retrieve your ball or pick up your bag. All of these motions are potentially hazardous for the spine. They leave you vulnerable to muscle strains and sprains, repetitive stress syndrome and spinal injuries.
Posture Sets the Tone For a Healthier Life
A PSA: your poor posture is killing you!
From a chiropractor’s perspective, this is not hyperbole. Clinical studies are linking poor posture with a growing host of health maladies. Let’s start with the ones we’ve been telling people for decades here at our office in Fremont:
- Poor posture= poor mobility of spinal joints
- Poor mobility of spinal joints= degeneration and pain
- Poor posture= muscle tension
- Systemic tension pulls your body out of alignment
- Poor posture increases the amount of downward pressure on your spine, causing nerve compression
- It reduces lung capacity
In summation, poor posture can lead to long term health problems that will drag down your well-being and leave you at the mercy of degenerative conditions.
Hypermobility Causes Pain Too
The dominant trend is lack of mobility
With sedentary lifestyles becoming more and more common, the corresponding lessening of mobility in the populace is not surprising. But about 10% of the population suffer from the exact opposite problem- hypermobility, also known as double-jointedness. People with this condition have ligamentous laxity which can be useful for someone whose job requires a greater degree of flexibility, like a dancer or a baseball pitcher. But there are significant drawbacks to hypermobility in that your joints are essentially less stable. When this lack of stability contributes to pain, we call it hypermobility syndrome. And this pain can become chronic. So what is our solution for hypermobility syndrome?
Relief from Sciatica with Pregnancy Chiropractic
Why do pregnancy and sciatica go hand in hand?
The formula is quite simple really. A pregnant woman’s body is a mosaic of growing and shifting weight, which in turn moves her center of gravity forward. By decentralizing the weight of the body, forces are not evenly distributed on the spine. As her abdominal muscles become stretched in the front, core stabilizing muscles are often weak and unable to cope with the added weight bearing down on the spine. As pregnancy hormones conspire to loosen ligaments in the pelvis, you then have to contend with imbalance in the pelvis which further destabilizes the spine at its very base. In such an environment, sciatica is an easy conclusion- an unbalanced, unsupported spine is liable to put pressure on the surrounding nerves. When the pressurized nerve happens to be the sciatica nerve (the largest in the body), you may experience the classic symptoms of sciatica which can add a lot of anxiety into the mix.
Chiropractic Toolset: The Activator Method
What is the Activator Method?
The activator method is the only instrument-assisted adjusting technique whose efficacy is proven by clinical trials. It is an invaluable member of our chiropractic toolkit, and it has helped us help hundreds of patients resolve long-standing muscular pain and dysfunction. The main benefits of the Activator Method are as follows:
- Identify and resolve musculoskeletal imbalance
- Identify and resolve spinal joint dysfunction
- Alleviate pain in the neck and back
- Aid in relieving the cause of headaches
The Activator Method is the only tool for which we deviate from manual manipulation. Find out why by reading more below.
Making Old Age More Comfortable With Chiropractic
Chiropractic is effective care for seniors
Age is the great wrecker of spines. You are lucky if you reach retirement without ever having felt a twinge- most of us will have become aware of the process of aging some time before that. However, as we hit 60 and beyond, the process of bone and muscle loss ramps up, and we feel the effects of aging more keenly. Nowhere more keenly, in fact, than in the joints, which begin to show the years of wear and tear. As your joints ache, you tend to lose mobility, a slippery slope which can lead toward further debilitating pain or outright incapacitation. At Scorca Chiropractic, our goal is to prevent this from becoming your reality. And there is no better time than now to start! Read on to find out how chiropractic helps make old age more comfortable.
How Can Chiropractic Make the Penultimate Phase of Pregnancy More Comfortable
The third trimester is a pre-labor peak of discomfort
There is so much going on- you feel mentally drained, emotionally exhausted and physically short of sleep. Your body is strained from the baby’s near-full grown weight. Many women in the third trimester report symptoms of:
- Frequent urination
- Heartburn
- Fatigue and anxiety
- Back pain and associated discomfort
As contractions begin, the discomfort can reach a breaking point; at Scorca Chiropractic Center, our job is to keep you from reaching that point! We want to help strengthen your body against the physical and emotional challenges of the third trimester. Read on to find out how we can help.
Why Hip Mobility Matters for Spinal Health
Tight hips make trouble for your spine
Hips are a less-recognized member of your spine’s support network. This is a shame because hip health has a direct impact on spinal health- a tight set of hips can actually destabilize your spine at its base, allowing for pain and dysfunction; hips with full mobility are able to stabilize the spine, transfer forces effectively and prevent injury. The fact is, modern lifestyles lend themselves to tight hips- the more time we spend seated, the more likely our hip flexors are to become tight and strained. While this in itself can cause pain and discomfort, the impact is multiplied when tight hip flexors create a pull on your spine.