Archive for January, 2009

Absolutely! Too much stress can cause subluxations in your body – areas of decreased communication or dis-harmony.  These subluxations frequently cause pain, muscle spasm, contraction, muscle weakness and muscular in-coordination (as in you just can’t seem to get a good golf swing). When a practice member is getting adjusted, we are working to restore the normal nerve impulse that brings life to the body and that includes muscles and ligaments. Imagine trying to push a car when it’s in park with the emergency brake still on; before long you are going to be stiff achy tired and sore ending your day feeling as though you’ve been run over by a truck.  When you have subluxations, your muscles are working hard all day to move parts of your spine that are stuck in park.  Ligaments that normally help support your skeletal system begin to stiffen and the muscles that normally work to move it begin to spasm; both will benefit greatly from deep tissue massage. 

A very good friend of mine, Joel Ward with Path of Harmony Massage, excels at helping restore normal function to muscles that should otherwise be supporting your body in the quest to heal from subluxation.  He says, “I offer compassionate quality massage therapy in a tranquil environment at an exceptional price” and he’s right.  He’s done wonders for me and can do a great deal to help you speed up the rehabilitative process.  Give him a call and let him know Dr. Siemers said hello.

Not too long ago I was blessed with a chance to help a child avoid having tubes surgically inserted in her ears for chronic ear infections.  As I find so often with these children, we found subluxation in her spine and with some gentle adjusting, we were able to help do more than just avoid surgery.  Take a moment to hear what her mother had to say as I think it’s a beautiful example of what can come of “turning on the power!”

It was July 10^th, Ellie’s one year well baby check up and her first birthday. Everything was looking good, until the doctor looked into her ears. Then those words I had heard 3 times in the last 6 weeks, “Well, it looks like another ear infection.” I groaned. Those words meant more antibiotics, more messy diapers, and a diaper rash that rivals third degree burns.  Then the doctor dared to utter the word I feared the most, tubes.

I had made up my mind after my nephew had tubes, two sets before his second birthday, that no child of mine was undergoing surgery for these plastic things. I had heard from friends that their children had to have them put in again two or three times! It is a personal choice every parent must make for themselves and my mind was made up. Ellie is NOT getting tubes.

On the way to fill the prescription I tried to think of ways to avoid the unavoidable. I had heard chiropractors helped the ear to heal itself naturally and without tubes, so that was my ticket. Once home, I called my friend, Catherine, and explained the situation. She immediately told me of this amazing chiropractor her and her family see, and gave me some literature. It turns out this chiropractor is her brother, Dr. Paul Siemers! I had been to chiropractors before and had taken Ellie’s sister, Rachel, to one as an infant to relieve the symptoms of colic. That’s when Catherine told me how much he has done for her whole family. They travel once a week from Mankato to Northfield to see him, so if we wanted to tag along we were more than welcome. So I packed up my whole family and off we went to Northfield to see Dr. Paul.

Well, it’s been almost 3 months and Ellie’s ear infection is gone. The doctor no longer is talking tubes, and Rachel (Ellie’s 3 year old sister) is no longer wetting the bed at night. Plus, I love getting adjusted! I feel better, and have more energy. “Power’s On!” The girls love going to ‘Uncle Paul’s’ to get “justed” as Rachel says. Thank you Dr. Paul for giving me my girls back! The difference in Ellie is amazing. I had forgotten what a good baby she really was until after she had seen Dr. Paul just 2 times! Thank you for everything we have learned from you, and thank you for getting my girls back on track.

                                                                                                             Lynn F.

“There is a principle that is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance.  That principle is condemnation before investigation.”  — Spencer

In the last 24 hours, as an adult, your heart beats 103,689 times, your blood travels 168,000 miles, you breathe 23,040 times, you inhale 438 cubic feet of air, you eat 3 1/4 pounds of food, you drink 2.9 pounds of liquids, you perspire 1.43 pints, you give off 85.6 degrees F, you turn in your sleep 25-30 times, you speak 48,000 words, your nails grow .000046 inch, your hair grows .01717 inch, you exercise 7,000,000 brain cells, and you move 750 major muscles. The only reason you would have less energy each day is if you had subluxations preventing your body from doing these every day tasks efficiently.  Remember, it takes 17 muscles to smile and 42 to frown and only three to extend your arm and pick up the phone to make an appointment to get adjusted.

Every year roughly 280,000 children under the age of three have ear tube surgery, which is designed to reduce the number of ear infections or drain middle ear fluid that might muffle sounds and hinder language development.  Many parents are scared into agreeing to the operation because they’re told it might prevent developmental problems later in life. The facts however, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, do not support such a claim.

Researchers at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh conducted a study of nearly 400 children and concluded that waiting to implant the tubes had no effect on a child’s performance on language and speech tests at age three or four or six. (7)

This off course being a study designed to observe outcomes related to speech, it does not address the relevancy of doing the surgery at all nor evaluate the damage done when the surgical procedure performed doesn’t even work.  This is a subject that is near and dear to me as I have and continue to care for many kids in my office who time and time again are told that antibiotics and surgery are the only solution.  My own experience was such that I endured multiple surgeries, the last occurring when I was 17 years of age, whereby I had a skin graph done to patch up the hole left in the protective membrane of my middle ear.  Needless to say the consequences have been lifelong, that is until I was introduced to chiropractic.

If you have a baby, grandson, granddaughter, cousin, niece, nephew or even know of a child who is facing surgery, please encourage their parents to have them evaluated for subluxation before making such a profound life altering decision.

Recently, while listening to my friend Lance Heisler with Lampe Law in Northfield Minnesota, he stated “we are all afraid of the things we don’t understand.”  At the time Lance was sharing with a BNI business group we’re involved with that in thirty two years of working in the legal system, he’s come to see that most of the fear generated about the legal process is based in misinformation and as a result is completely unnecessary if not harmful.  As a natural consequence, Lance spends a great deal of time and energy nurturing confidence in his clients as he guides them through the legal system; no doubt a reason why he’s so successful. 

I can empathize very much with Lance as I find the same to be true about the ‘health care’ system.  It’s a lack of understanding that eventually leads to the fear, sometimes overwhelming fear, I often see in practice members who come to me for help.  In many cases, they’ve experienced thousands of dollars worth of testing and multiple doctor visits and yet they still don’t understand “what’s wrong.”  This is where my work, much as it is with Lance, really begins.

Helping practice members discover how their body really works is the first step in unwinding the years of misinformation as it lays the groundwork for what questions you should ask in order to help the body heal.  If your doctor believes your body is weak and in need of outside intervention, he will ask “what do you have and how can we get rid of it?” thus the reason for so many tests and the use of drugs or surgery as a solution.  If your doctor believes that the power that made your body heals your body through a clear neurological connection, then he will ask “what are you toxic or deficient in and how can we help increase what the body needs to heal?”  Whether we’re conscious of it or not, most of us are simply asking the wrong questions and were we willing to face the fear, we would find that health is far easier to nurture than disease is to destroy.

Did you realize that if you placed all of the blood vessels in your body end to end they would travel around the equator two and a half times?  It’s true, while you read this article, nine pints of blood are traveling along 62,000 miles of blood vessels to support the hundreds of trillions of cells that make up your body while your brain and nervous system, the most complex and powerful communication system on the planet is orchestrating every single detail.

Your brain, communicating through the nerves from your spine, controls the size of every blood vessel that feeds your internal organs and not once in your day will you have to consciously think about raising your blood pressure to increase the oxygen to those same organs when they’re in need. It’s all done for you and by the innate power that created your body beginning from conception.  If your blood pressure isn’t what it should be, consider the possibility that a subluxation, irritating your nerves can affect the blood vessels and cause internal organ malfunction. It’s far more common than a beta blocker deficiency so see your chiropractor today and find out why it’s just that simple.

The person who takes medicine must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medicine. – William Osler, MD

Want to find out a lot about the health of a person?  Look at their posture; more specifically look at how they carry their head.  When viewing a person from the side, you will often observe that their head is poking way out in front of their shoulders. This condition, known as forward head syndrome or forward head posture is a key component to understanding the ‘what’ ‘where’ ‘when’ and ‘why’ of an individuals state of health, or for that matter, lack of health. Let me explain.

Your nervous system controls every single cell, organ, and tissue in your body without exception; and posture, especially head posture, is a way to measure how well your nervous system is performing.  At any given moment, millions upon millions of individual nerve impulses are sent to and from the brain in the most impressive dance you could ever imagine, to control and coordinate every function necessary to our survival and health.  Imagine your head and neck is the control tower for the busiest airport in the world.  In the normal healthy person, the tower is upright, providing it with a clear view to all approaching and departing aircraft thus allowing and maintaining clear communication.  Now imagine for some reason the tower sustains an injury and as a result begins to lean.  At first the lean is hardly noticeable but with time, momentum and weight begin to move that tower away from its normal position which, as you might already guess, begins to obstruct the towers view and ability to control the aircraft.

Our neck and head make up the tower for the most powerful and amazing control system on the planet and unlike the air traffic control tower; we cannot simply build another tower or replace the controller should it crash.  If our tower begins to lean from its normal healthy position, the stress and strain rapidly degenerates its ability to perform and as a direct consequence, the communication system held within begins to malfunction until without exception, a catastrophic accident occurs.

There’s no lack of evidence to support what happens when our control tower begins to lean but for the sake of brevity, I will offer just a few facts to give you a better understanding of this process.  When the head first moves forward it creates strain and dysfunction for the joints of your neck.  Troyanovich et al, showed that “Altered alignment of the spinal column is known to cause bone, disc, ligament and myofascial degeneration.”  So much strain occurs that “For every inch of anterior head carriage (Forward head posture) the work required of the posterior cervical muscles is effectively increased by a factor of 10.”  In other words the muscles of your neck have to work ten times harder to hold your head just for one inch of change in the posture.  No wonder so many people complain of being warn out at the end of the day.  With time however, it gets worse. Videman, T.  showed that  ”Scar tissue begins to be deposited immediately upon immobilization (a forward head can’t turn like a normal head) and serves to further decrease mobility. Within 2 weeks eburnation in bone is detectable and radiographic evidence of joint space narrowing, osteophyte formation and subchondral sclerosis is apparent.”  This is all just fancy talk to describe spinal arthritis is a normal consequence of ignoring the leaning tower and will occur regardless of your age.  This isn’t the worst of it.  Remember, the brain controls everything and if the tower that holds it is falling apart, the communication is interrupted and before long, the body doesn’t heal or regulate normal function as it used to. This isn’t new, the Mayo Clinic Health Letter Volume Eighteen, #3, in March of 2000 reported “F.H.P. (Forward head posture) leads to long term muscle strain, disc herniations, arthritis and pinched nerves.”  This whole process is known as subluxation.  Subluxation robs the body’s ability to focus, think, organize and heal and if your subluxations are corrected, your body can & will heal itself with the only exception being that you choose to do something about it before it’s too late. To learn more about the healing process, join us each week at our half hour to health workshop where we separate fact from fiction on the road to better health naturally.

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What would it be like to live each day without undue concern for your health or the health of your family? I don’t mean living with reckless disregard for the future as many do albeit unconsciously, I mean having a sense of peace about living a life free from the diseases that are so prevalent in our society today. 

We live in a time of unprecedented prosperity and abundance while at the very same time degenerative diseases, some of which are only unheard of until the last 50 years, claim the lives of more and more people at younger ages every year. There are few and far between who do not believe it’s inevitable that they to will eventually suffer from such diseases as diabetes, cancer, stroke, and heart disease just to name a few.  The fear of such an end is not without merit when you review statistics that each year support the vast majority of us will die of heart disease, cancer or the methods used to treat them.  Add to this the suffering and premature deaths so often associated with these degenerative diseases and you begin to understand why there seems little hope to enjoy life without fear. 

The simple truth however reveals that each and every one of us can live a long and healthy life with an understanding of a single and yet profound fundamental truth. The power that made the body heals the body through a clear neurological connection from above down inside out!  Health is not gained so much by what we put in the body rather it is expressed in how we support this power that lies within through the implementation of three deliberate and yet essential habits. Once understood and implemented in our daily life they become the security that can only be described as a life without fear.  To learn more about these life changing habits, call us for a copy of our current workshop schedule where each week we devote a half hour to expand on the principles to the full expression of life, love and the divine spirit in humanity.