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Can Poor Sleep Make Fibromyalgia Worse?

Nearly one-third of Americans are sleep deprived, according to a recent study. Results show that getting less than 6.9 hours of sleep each night takes a more extreme toll on the body than most people realize.

Inadequate amounts of sleep affects memory, according to a recent study conducted at Harvard University. Without enough sleep, newly-acquired skills and information are not properly coded in the brain, making it difficult to remember.

Sleep deprivation also decreases the ability of the immune system to fight off illness and disease. Reports show that just losing three hours of sleep causes a 30% decrease in immune system response. This lack of response suppresses melatonin, which contributes to breast cancer; a growth hormone produced during sleep is impaired, which contributes to osteoporosis; insulin resistance and impaired glucose processing, can lead to diabetes, and excess insulin and stored fat, leads to obesity.

While some people choose to give up some of the necessary hours of sleep, others are simply unable to sleep.

Factors that contribute to insomnia are lack of exercise, poor diet, excessive alcohol or caffeine; medical conditions, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, depression, hypothyroidism, and over-active bladders; medications, such as antidepressants, pain killers, allergy drugs and various hormones; natural conditions, such as PMS and menopause; and various health disorders.
Many of these factors can be treated with Chiropractic. If you suffer from any of the above conditions or are having difficulty sleeping, see your Chiropractor.

For more information, check out www.nevadachiro.com.

SOURCE: “Most Americans aren’t getting enough shut-eye,” MpHealth News, March 2001, Vol. 4

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Do You This ABout Your Health?

Many people answer this question, “good health is feeling good”.  This is nice, but it has very little to do with having good health.

What is Health?  There is so much more to being healthy than how you feel!  The World Health Organization defines health as: Health is a state of optimal physical, mental, and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.  Webster’s defines health as: Health is a state of wholeness in which all organs are functioning 100%, 100% of the time.  Health is not just how you feel, it’s how you are functioning.  Thousands of Americans die of heart attacks each and every year and the heart attack is the first sign of disease.  You can’t wait until symptoms show up before you decide to act.

Symptoms are a poor barometer of health and usually show up late in the disease process.  Would you rather choose a lifestyle of wellness so your body functions at an optimal level or live the typical American lifestyle and unknowingly allow various diseases progress to a level of crisis before you seek action?

Where does health come from?  Health comes from within.  Your body has the inborn ability to heal itself naturally.  You were born to be healthy.  The catch is, in order for your body to be able to heal itself it must be free from interference in the nervous system.  The nervous system controls the function of every cell, tissue, organ, and system in your body.  The number one cause of interference to the nerve system in science today is the vertebral subluxation.

Creating Wellness!  Wellness is the process of attaining health, happiness, and vitality, allowing you to live your life to its fullest potential.  My wish to you is to live your life to its fullest and improve the quality of your life by creating wellness naturally.

What more information about? Check out www.nevadachiro.com!

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One Cause… One Cure!

This is a simple wellness principle. There is one cause of disease and there is only one cure. In a health state, our body has the ability to adapt to the environmental stresses that we place upon it. It is our ability to adapt to environmental stresses and maintain homeostasis that keeps us healthy. When we lose the ability to adapt and maintain homeostasis, we lose our health. When that state is allowed to persist, we become diseased. The cause of all disease is the failure of our body to adapt to our environment. The key words are “our body.” This is an inside job. It’s the failure of our body to do the job it was born to do. Micro-organisms are constantly around us, but they only infect us when our natural resistance is lowered and our body can’t properly respond to the threat. It’s our body’s lack of function, not the bug, which makes us sick.

Our body is a self-healing organism. It has the ability to heal and maintain homeostasis naturally from within, as long as there is no interference to its function. What is the one cure to all disease? It is our body’s innate healing potential. The solution to health comes from within the body not from outside agents like medications and surgeries. Health and healing come from the inside as long as there is no interference to our innate healing potential. The real doctor is inside. The real healing comes from inside, from the innate healing powers nature has provided from each and everyone of us.

Andrew Weil, M.D. states, “Healing comes from inside, not outside. Healing can’t be prevented from occurring, nor can it be obtained from anyone or anything external. You are born with the power to heal because healing is an innate capacity of every person.”

Nerve interference directly interferes with our innate healing potential. It decreases our immune function and lowers our body’s resistance to infection and disease. When nerve interference is removed, your innate healing potential is restored.

For more information you can check out www.nevadachiro.com and find out how our advanced technologies can help.

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Heart Disease and Wellness Chiropractic?

Are your subluxations causing you an early demise?

A 1995 study indicated that unbalanced activation of the cardiac sympathetic nerves plays a crucial role in the development of sudden cardiac death. If you are concerned about yourself or a family member suffering a heart problem, call our office and find out more about heart disease and how we can help. At our office, we have computerized tools (Thermal-scan) that can assess how well your sympathetic nerves are functioning. Do you know how well your sympathetic nerves are functioning? Your life may depend on it!

Dr.’s Jarmel and Zatkin showed that mechanical irritation of the upper thoracic vertebral joints (the vertebrae between your shoulders) may create a source of unbalanced cardiac sympathetic nerve activity. The results of their study with patients who had dysrythmic cardiac abnormalities showed significant, enhanced cardiac balance following just one month of chiropractic care. A positive trend was also noted in ventricular beats, ST segment events, and maximum time of ST depression and elimination of after-depolarizations. In another study in 1997, researchers determined that there was a relationship between respiratory and cardiovascular function and spinal integrity. In a 1992 case study, the impact of chiropractic care on established cardiac risk factors, subjects’ total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein (HDL), and cardiac risk factor (CRF) was monitored over a one to three year period. The purpose of this study was to relate the possible effects of regular chiropractic care to changes in lipid metabolism in a group of subjects exposed to a stressful environment. The results were profound; all of the subjects studied obtained marked reductions in their cardiac risk factor during the duration of the study.

Chiropractors have been helping heart problems since 1895!

Shortly after Dr. Palmer’s first chiropractic case of restoring hearing to a deaf man, he came across a patient with heart troubles which were not improving. “I examined the spine and found a displaced vertebrae pressing against the nerves which innervate the heart. I adjusted the vertebra and gave immediate relief nothing accidental’ or crude’ about this. Then, I began to reason that if two diseases so dissimilar as deafness and heart trouble came from impingement, a pressure on nerves, were not other diseases due to similar cause? D.D. Palmer. Thus the science and art of chiropractic were formed. The beginning of a new era of health care was born, a system to investigate the cause of dis-ease and to care for the cause, not the symptom. This system was based on a wellness approach that allowed our bodies to heal naturally without the use of drugs or surgeries.

Wellness Chiropractic has always been about restoring health and wellness to the body not treating back or neck pain.

Want more information? Go to www.nevadachiro.com.


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Use Care When Supplementing with Fish Oil

There’s a tremendous amount of confusion about omega-3 oils and removing the confusion is the purpose of this post.

Fish Oil really started the omega-3 market and is an amazing supplement, and the research on the benefits of animal-based omega-3 fats (DHA and EPA) show it to be outstanding.

Fish oils are typically extracted from menhaden, sardines, and herring; fish that are generally not consumed by the average person. These types of fish are indeed very high in EPA and DHA, and the health benefits of these fats are well established.

Health Benefits of Omega-3 Fat

In fact, most of the health benefits associated with omega-3 fats are linked to animal-based omega-3 fats like EPA and DHA, not plant-based omega-3 fats like ALA.

Even the US FDA, which denies most nutritional claims, acknowledges the cardiovascular benefits of animal based omega-3 fats:

  • Antiarrhythmic: counteracting or preventing cardiac arrhythmia
  • Antithrombotic: tending to prevent thrombosis (a blood clot within a blood vessel)
  • Antiatherosclerotic: preventing fatty deposits and fibrosis of the inner layer of your arteries from forming
  • Anti-inflammatory: counteracting inflammation (heat, pain, swelling, etc.)
  • Improves endothelial function: a major factor in promoting the growth of new blood vessels
  • Lowers blood pressure
  • Lowers triglyceride concentrations

Researchers are also attributing a number of other health benefits to omega-3 fat, including:

Unfortunately, the majority of people who take supplemental omega-3 to protect and improve their health are taking the wrong fish oil.

I say unfortunately, because as you will find out, at least 25 percent and maybe even as much as half of the fish oil on the market are damaged products that can do more harm than good…

Why Any Fish Oil Isn’t Your Ideal Choice for Omega-3s

Yes, despite all the established health benefits of animal-based omega-3 fats, any fish oil is actually NOT the ideal source of these fats.

The primary drawback with fish oil is the problem with oxidation, which can occur at any point during the processing, or after you open the bottle. Dr. Moerck explains:

“There are a number of ways in which fish oil can be processed. One is by just simply squeezing the fish — in some cases with cod liver oil to actually remove the livers from the cod — and then remove the oil from those by classical mechanical techniques.

In some cases, to get the last few ounces of oil out of the fish, they use solvents, or they use fish oil as a solvent by taking fish oil that’s already been processed, using it as an extraction method to get more fish oil out.

Every time fish oil is subjected to contact with oxygen, however, it starts going rancid. It starts oxidizing.”

Omega-3 Fats are Incredibly Fragile

Omega-3 fats are extremely fragile and are VERY easily damaged by oxygen. This is true for ALL omega-3 sources, whether animal-based or plant-based.

This is where Nutri-West’s oil stands out.

The processing, the bottle, the purification process are all first rate.

Typical Fish Oils Contain Higher Amounts of Contamination

Another primary concern that is not widely recognized is that many of the fish oils on the market are contaminated with relatively large amounts of metals and toxic chemicals. And not just heavy metals. In fact, toxins like mercury are typically screened for, at least in higher quality brands.

But there are other contaminations that are more unlikely to be identified or removed.

Some of the most common contaminants found in fish, aside from mercury, include:

  • PCBs
  • Dioxin
  • PDEs
  • PCP’s
  • Radioactive substances like strontium
  • Toxic metals such as cadmium, lead, chromium and arsenic

If you’ve been in or around my practice for any length of time you know that I’m a huge supporter and user of Nutri-West’s fish oil and co-factors.

And some of the specific reasons for Nutri-West are:

  • Nutri-West manufacturing is run and governed under the rules of the Federal GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice Act) and is inspected at regular intervals by the Food and Drug Administration.
  • The Wyoming FDA uses the Nutri-West GMP book as the standard for the Wyoming FDA Good Manufacturing Practice Manual.
  • Nutri-West has a new, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility with ultra-modern processing and manufacturing equipment.

If I can be of additional assistance regarding fish oil contact my office at (702) 565-7474 or go to www.nevadachiro.com.

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VITAMIN B3 IS A POTENT ANTI-FUNGAL

Researchers in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, have found that vitamin B3 is a potent treatment for drug-resistant fungal infections that can attack people with compromised immune systems which can then lead to illness and even death.

Fungal infections such as Candida albicans and Aspergillus fumigatus have become resistant to current drug treatments, yet are found almost everywhere. Patients with compromised immune systems, such those with diabetes, HIV infection, or who are undergoing chemotherapy or organ transplants, are the usual victims of difficult-to-treat fungal infections.

Researchers at the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) of the University of Montreal found that Vitamin B3, in the form of nicotinamide, strongly reduced both normal and drug-resistant strains of Candida albicans virulence in mice. Nicotinamide also prevented the growth of other pathogenic Candida species and Aspergillus fumigatus.

A professor at the University of Montreal Department of Biochemistry explained that the need to develop new therapies to kill Candida albicans is urgent, because it has become one of the leading causes of often fatal hospital-acquired infections.

Candida albicans, although present in the body under normal conditions, is an opportunistic infection that takes over when immunity becomes compromised. When this yeast infection enters the bloodstream it can lead to death.

According to a book review in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Aspergillus fumigatus and Aspergillosis…” (the name of an Aspergillus infection) “…has emerged as one of the most common and most feared opportunistic infections in immunocompromised patients.”

Finding that vitamin B3 might effectively treat drug resistant fungal infections is seen as a much-needed breakthrough because it has fewer side effects for patients than currently used drugs.

SOURCES: Nature Medicine, July, 2010, http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v16/n7/full/nm.2175.html

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Chemicals in Teflon Linked to High Cholesterol in Teens

This is only one reason why I recommend people use only stainless steel cookware.

A class action lawsuit regarding contamination of the drinking water in mid-Ohio led to the discovery of a possible link between commonly used chemicals and high cholesterol in children and teens.

As a result of the lawsuit, the West Virginia School of Medicine enrolled more than 12,000 children and teens in a study to measure the blood levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS). When the blood levels of these chemicals were compared to those for cholesterol, researchers found that the higher the levels of  PFOA and PFOS, the higher the levels of total and LDL (bad) cholesterol.

Perfluoroalkyl acids like PFOA and PFOS are synthetic compounds used in the manufacture of non-stick, heat-resistant cookware like Teflon and of upholstery and fabrics, including those used for making clothing waterproof and stain resistant. They can also be a by-product of the breakdown of chemicals used in food packaging.

We’re exposed to PFOA and PFOS through air, dust, drinking water, food packaging, microwave popcorn, and even cord blood and breast milk. In fact, just about everyone has traces of PFOA and PFOS in their blood, but this is the first study that has shown a link between these chemicals and high cholesterol.

The accumulation of cholesterol narrows the space in the arteries and blocks the flow of blood to vital organs. As a result, high cholesterol is a risk factor for heart attacks, heart disease and stroke.

High cholesterol is not uncommon in older people, but because the condition is asymptomatic, they sometimes don’t find out about it until the worst happens — heart attack, stroke or another obvious indication of heart disease.

However, many adults get their cholesterol levels checked on a regular basis so there are no surprises. Kids, on the other hand, are not checked regularly — no one really expects kids to have cholesterol problems.

To help lower the risk of heart disease and its possible fatal consequences for kids, get their cholesterol level checked and take appropriate action to reduce it if needed: Proper diet, exercise, and avoidance of chemicals like PFOA and PFOS that may cause or exacerbate the problem.

SOURCE: Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100906203040.htm

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Do You Know this Thing that can Slow the Rise in Dementia and Alzheimer’s?

Large doses of B vitamins can halve the rate of brain shrinkage in elderly people with memory problems. It may slow their progression toward dementia.

A two-year clinical trial was the largest to date into the effect of B vitamins on “mild cognitive impairment,” a condition which is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Reuters reports:

“[Researchers] conducted a two-year trial with 168 volunteers with MCI who were given either a vitamin pill containing very high doses of folic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12, or a placebo dummy pill …

[O]n average the brains of those taking the vitamin treatment shrank at a rate of 0.76 percent a year, while those taking the dummy pill had an average brain shrinkage of 1.08 percent.”

Sources:

Los Angeles Times September 9, 2010

Because of food supply is so nutritionally deficient, you owe it to yourself to find and use a professional skilled in clinical nutrition.

Realize that competency is key if you are seeking nutritional advice. The health food store, the supermarket or your medical doctor is rarely skilled in this field.

If you want help call our office and one of our TEAM members will be more than happy to help.

Click here and you can see a glimpse of our amazing program.

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Seizures Helped from An Unlikely Doctor

ADJUSTMENTS PUT AN END TO SEIZURES, ALLOWS CHILD TO SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT!

When a child of only 5 months continuously cries, does not sleep very well and experiences up to 8 seizures a day, it’s going to be a worrisome situation for parents. Additionally, this child had a constant tilt of his head to the left and could not rotate his head and neck to the left. To top this off, the child also had experienced a surgery to close the joints between the bones in his skull.

All of these problems prompted the parents to seek Chiropractic advice and assistance for their recently born child.

First off, the child’s chiropractor had his diagnostic skills put to the test as the child was in severe distress and cried during the entire examination. However, the exam was completed success fully and revealed that there were subluxations (partial dislocations) in various areas of the neck, mid-back and the lower spine.

A regular schedule of Chiropractic adjustments commenced and continued for several weeks. The outcome of the care was immediately positive with the number of seizures decreasing after the first adjustment. Things were progressing along well until several weeks into the care when the child had a minor setback and experienced 5 seizures in one day, however, these quickly abated. In fact, following these episodes, the child remained seizure-free for an entire week. This was the first week of his life that he had lived seizure-free.

By the sixth week of Chiropractic care, the child’s life had made a drastic turn for the better: he was no longer experiencing seizures between adjustments. In addition, he was sleeping through the night and eating properly for a child his age. Periodic follow-ups were done and it was noted in the case report that these improvements represented a significant change to the child’s quality of life.

The author of the study, Dr. Nancy Brown, D.C., noted that each year approximately 150,000 children and adolescents experience seizures. The cause of this, she says, is a sudden onset of abnormal electrical discharges within the brain. A normal medical approach to this condition is to medicate in order to suppress the abnormal electrical impulses. Dr. Brown points out the ill-advised nature to this medical correction as there is no way to suppress the abnormal impulses without also suppressing activity needed for normal function and development.

“A Chiropractic approach may therefore be of more benefit as it will correct the abnormal impulses and not just suppress them,” said Dr. Brown.

Source: Chiropractic Research. June 2005. http://www.chiropracticresearch.org/News_chiropractic_helps_child_with_seizures.htm

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