Posture is the Window to the Spine

Which one of these looks like you?

Have you seen someone whos head sits way far forward off their chest and shoulder? This is called, "forward head posture," it is dangerous! It reduced proper nerve function from the brain to the rest of the body, decreasing your good health potential. For every 1" of forward head position, there's an extra 10 pounds of stress on the neck, leading to early degeneration and to early death. When your posture fails, your joints suffer! So many people shrug off poor posture as if it was like biting their fingernails. Bad posture will cause accelerated arthritis and rapid degeneration that is irreversible. Regular adjustments promote better posture and prevent degeneration.

Dr. Singleton shares low back exercise for beginners.

Here is a simple exercise that you can do at home with no equipment. It works your multifidus, erector spinae, transverse abdominus, oblique muscles. The good thing is, you don't have to go to a gym to do this exercise and it's going to help stabilize your loser back and feel better.
The purpose of this exercise is to increase your low back strength and muscular endurance which will help you with any loser back pain or discomfort.
By doing this simple exercise you will also have the benefits of improved stability more functional strength and you'll help prevent any future injuries, so it's a great exercise to do every day

Begin by laying on your back. Extend your arms above head flat on floor. activate your core and your knees above your hips and maintain a 90/90 hip knee position like you see in the picture. Now, activate your core. Lift one arm off the floor and raise it towards ceiling  until it's above shoulder level while simultaneously extending one leg downward towards floor. Pause momentarily. Return to start position, alternating sides. This core activation  should be maintained throughout the entire exercise. Repeat this for 10 repetitions and do 2 sets of ten. Then you're done.

Get Alkaline, Get Healthy

Do you remember high school chemistry class when we learned about pH? It provides a measure between 0 (almost acidic) and +1 (most alkaline). Our body sits near a normal pH of about 7.6. Research has shown us that inflammation and disease, including heart disease and cancer, occur in more acidic environments. Our current day diets of common sense would tell  us, then, that better health and body healing will come from and alkaline environment. So the question is, how do we make our bodies more alkaline? The following are some ways you can help your body return

1. Eat more vegetables, beans and nuts. Increase green, leafy foods.
2. reduce acidic foods, including red meats, eggs, carbs and refined sugar.
3. Reduce or stop alcohol intake and greatly increase  alkaline water Most alkaline water has a pH near 9 while regular water or tap water is near 6.5 to 7.0.
4.Increase alkaline drinks, such as lemon water or peppermint tea.
5. Exercise at  least 30 minutes 4-5x a week.
6. Stress can contribute to acid build-up. so jump into yoga, meditation and other deep breathing techniques to help you relax and "de-stress."

Keep in mind, if you eat healthier foods and drink more water, your acidic body will move towards alkaline. This will decrease inflammation  in the body. This in turn will promote healing in your body of many conditions and maladies affecting you right now. If you are diagnosed with cancer, it just may be the thing that improves your health and saves your life.

The Secret Statistic

There's one medical statistic doctors don't much talk about despite it's importance. It's called "number needed to treat," or NNT. It's measure developed in the past 20 years, and it's one of the best-kept statistical secrets in medicine.
The idea of NNT is simple enough. Most clinical trials look at how much better people do on a particular medicine. NNT answers the question: how many people have to take a particular drug to avoid one incidence of a medical issue (such as heart attack, or recurrence of cancer)? For example, if a drug had an NNT of 50 for heart attacks, then 50 people have to take the drug in order to prevent one heart attack. That doesn't sound like a lot, so pharmaceutical companies tend to keep the number quiet and focus on broader, U.S. population-based statistics. But that could be changed if you ask for the NNT up front the next time you're handed a prescription.

When the NNT statistic was first developed in 1988, it was intended to help you make a decision about whether or not to take a drug. After all, having it put in simple terms such as "out of every 50 people who take this drug, perhaps one heart attack will be prevented, and the other 49 will receive no benefit," puts things into perspective...a perspective that the drug companies do not want you to see. One of the most blatant examples of how drug companies have hidden NNT for their own self-serving purposes lies with cholesterol drugs. These drugs, which can cause side effects like liver damage, muscle weakness, cognitive impairment and many side effects like liver damage, muscle weakness, cognitive impairment and many others, are touted as miracle pills that can slash your risk of a heart attack by more than one third.
Well, "business week" actually did a story on this very topic earlier this year, and they found the real numbers right on Pfizer's own newspaper ad for the cholesterol lowering drug "Lipitor."
Upon first glance, the ad boasts that Lipitor reduces heart attacks by 36 percent. But there is an asterisk. And when you follow the asterisk, you find the following in much smaller type: "That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor/"
What this means is that for every 100 people  who took the drug over 3.3 years, three people on placebos, and two people on Lipitor, had heart attacks. That means that taking Lipitor resulted in just one fewer heart attacks  per 100 people.
What if you put 250 people in a room and told them they would each pay $1,000 a year for a drug they would heave to take every day, that many would get diarrhea an muscle pain, and that 249 would have no benefit? and that they could do just as well by exercising? How many would take that?

Headaches and the Neck

"orthopedic surgeons and neurologists studied 100 headache prone children. They tested children because so many adult patients traced their chronic headaches back to childhood and because children wrestle with each other, fall off bicycles or sleds or get inured in sports. Pain and stiffness in the neck disappear in a day or two and the injury is forgotten. But that slight injury can be -permanent, and flower periodically into headaches.

By stretching and putting the neck into traction using a 4-7 lbs. weights,  97% of the children improved after a 20 year follow up."
Does this sound like new exciting recent research to you? It was completed and released to the public in 1970! After nearly 50 years, we are no closer to accepting that most headaches start from neck problems! It need not be treated by aspirin, pills, injections, prescriptions or surgery. When will we learn? Or will we? I'm not sure any longer...