one welcome my name is dr jones marin this is a life without limits family well michelle they were going to be talking about indicators for a while you may need to see a chiropractor but before we do that i want to kind of touch on what we what we spoke about last time which was what to do to get through the holidays without really wiping yourself out one of the most common things that we see especially as we come into the holidays is illness you know it suddenly crops up and people have been fine for the whole time and a lot of people think that because it's winter time  they're just going to get sick the fact of the matter is there's no more bacteria or viruses in the winter than there are in the summer so it's the same all the time but what is different is the fact that we change our routine considerably and one of the main changes that we make is we change what we eat diets a big part of what impacts our immune system a lot of people don't realize it but eighty percent of your immune system is in your gut is in your intestines that's really where the core of that process takes place so if you understand this and you understand that we're going to be eating differently or possibly just going to be eating more then we can really begin to impact how our immune system is functioning one of the simplest things you can do as a good probiotic a lot of people soon as they hear that where they automatically think yogurt which is a wonderful marketing campaign but it's not really accurate a lot of times the dairy products yogurt in particular the probiotic is in inhibits the ability of the probiotic to function properly most people don't process dairy even though people say i'm not lactose intolerant it's a huge protein and it's difficult for the majority of people about seventy five percent of population to really digest adequately so it does create some irritation in the gut if it does and that's your means of getting your probiotic then you kind of you of costing yourself in the process you're not really getting what you need the other thing is a probiotic in a dairy product generally doesn't have the levels that you need to talk in terms of hundreds of thousands or millions of cultures in there you need far more than that so a good a good supplement probiotic is really the best way to go and they're everywhere there's there's health food stores around we carry them there's a lot of things that you can look for out there just make sure it's from a reputable company and the other thing is this you're always you're also changing your sleep patterns you know people are starting with black friday just occurred and people are starting to really shop and get out and do more and i know that they're going to be up late and doing those kinds of activities when you change your sleep pattern you really impact your ability to heal sleeping is where you do about seventy percent of your healing and it's only if you get into that deep sleep so if you're having trouble sleeping and say you're taking something to get you just sleep you're not really getting into that deep rem state which is where healing really a curse you're unconscious for six or seven or eight hours but you're not really full blown sleeping a lot of people know this because they'll say to you i slept for seven or eight hours but i felt tired when i got back up in the morning and that's because they haven't hit that rem state and without turning this into a sleep discussion or topic on sleep it's really important you go through a nightly routine to get yourself to bed each night if you're watching t v or something that really gets your you're minding gauge right before you go to sleep that it's likely you're going to continue that need to have a hard time going to sleep or going to processing while you do sleep which could cause you to wake up so one of the really simple things that you can do is just create a routine for yourself about a half hour forty five minutes before you go to bed and get yourself ready you would warm up to run a race you would warm up to workout you need to warm down or cool down and really disengage your brain in order to get yourself into that proper sleep state so sleep is a big one consider each of those as your as you're moving further into this holiday season and just be aware that if we are seeing those changes or somebody is under the weather more rest modify your diet intake water is at the top of the list i've constantly talking about water all almost all of your cellular reactions in the body occur in a watery environments if you're the hydrated i mean think about your houseplants they drew up your body's going to do the same thing if you do not have enough liquids in there your muscles are seventy percent water your blood eight percent water even your bones are twenty percent water so being able to be fully hydrated or properly hydrated is really important because you're going to decrease your ability to have normal cell function  your cells aren't working right your body can't work right so make sure that you're taking the extra steps to get your water intake a little bit of extra rest if you feel like you're fighting something make sure you take this this sugar out of your system when robin was here last time we spoke about this  she talked about sugar being an anti nutrient it's an anti nutrient it's a really good term that's really a terminology for that or the most appropriate language for that because it requires nutrients from your body to be processed now having said that a lot of times people go well that's why you sleep sweetener is far worse than sugar your body knows what to do with sugar and while it does cost you to process it knows exactly what to do with it it's easy to do the fake sweeteners and this includes all of them so the commercials that are out there saying well this is natural and we've only done this little thing to it sort of many calories is all really a lie those sweeteners are difficult for the bio process if they can process it all and they've all been linked everything from nutrasweet to the pink stuff sweet n low and all the rest they've all been linked to either some kind of mental or physical disorder and most of them both so just be aware that sugar suppresses the immune system if you modify the amount of it you're having is not the end of the world  and last on that list is going to caffeine just because again it's a direct it can also inflames that it's purging the body of water it's drying you out think of that plant again there's leaves become brown and weaker crinkled your body's going to do the same thing if at the same time you're you have something that's an irritant or inflammatory and you've now dried it out this would be like having a forest that hasn't had any rain and dropping a match there the body can become really aching so there's a few simple steps that as we come into this holiday season that you can do just to stay on track so that you're feeling well that you can really enjoy yourself and enjoy your family which was the goal in the first place and be able to really get through the holidays and more importantly that come out on the other side feeling well so that you're not making these silly resolutions that usually nobody keeps to drop ten pounds or do this or do that if you take those steps now you've got to get through that just fine and really come out on the other side feeling well and be able to continue on into the new year so we're going to get we're going to come back in a second we're going to take a quick break but we're going to come back in a second to discuss what indicators there might be for you to actually be a chiropractor i know a lot of times what i do for people what i hear from people as they had no i don't know this is going on and they honestly don't the indicators are not always obvious to them and because we well welcome back i'm dr marion today we're talking about indicators that you might need to see a chiropractor a lot of times there are people that come into the office after they've been everywhere else haven't been able to get the relief that they're looking for and the they most commonly speak to me is i didn't know i didn't know this is what was going on why didn't somebody tell me the answer to why somebody didn't tell them is because as far as a lot of the doctors go out there for speaking of the medical doctors there it's just they're not trained this isn't part of the training that they receive so because it isn't they can't make a recommendation it's not their batarang they're trying to hold you up it's just that it's not part of the training they receive they don't have the education that we do and as a result they don't get that piece of information they're always capable of making that will some of them are becoming more educated and they're getting to that place where they can but because i'm finding still so many people who who are speaking those words i didn't know who have been through the gamut of physical therapy or and really still having the same issues and i would be important kind of go over this the people that have done or the profession that has done the very best job with this are dentists you know it used to be that people didn't go to the dentist until a tooth needed pulled which is kind of  silly especially the technology that we had and is a result dentist began educating people and people started getting checkups just to ensure that their teeth were in good shape and they could keep those teeth so chiropractors are no different in fact you have the exact same number of teeth that you do spinal segments and it's time we started treating them in the same fashion and getting a check up just to insure because while two can be pulled or replaced their dentures can be fitted the spine you can't do that with so it's time to start considering what to look for the top of that list is posture i talk about posture fairly often because it is such a good indicator posture simply is this a bill you stand up straight have the hips and pelvis be level and bear weight evenly on each foot so if you're somebody who weighs one hundred pounds there should be fifty percent your weight on your right foot and fifty percent your weight on your left foot if you're off at all sixty forty seventy thirty and we actually see those kinds of numbers fairly often then you're overloading one side you're under loading the other which means you're going to create issues relative to your knees in your hips and your back and so on the body if it's in fairly good good shape is going to compensate for you so you may not notice it for a while and that's where we get i didn't know so about how we see them they think they've just done this in the garden last week or shoveling snow here soon when in reality this  a while that was just the camel or the straw that broke the camel's back so posh is very easily assessed anybody can do it doesn't require any special ability take whatever it is that you're wanting to look at put him up against the wall on a fairly neutral color and just have him stand there take a look at where their shoulders are where their hips are you can put your hands right on the tops of their hips and see if they're even shoulders are pretty easy to see and also look at the ears you know the head shouldn't be this way and lots of times it is and it's fairly simple to to notice now people right away say to me but everybody's a little uneven or asymmetrical and that's sure everybody's a little asymmetrical but when you start seeing you know shoulders that are this way or hips that are this way that's far more than asymmetrical and so what that tells us is that there's a change that's gone on if that happens especially if we see in the pelvis we know from research that it's absolutely a predictor of future organ disease or dysfunction so we see pelican leveling as what we call her hips that are on even then we know that there's a possibility of future organ disease so we want to definitely check that we especially are checking our children something like that's an easy catch it's very easy to correct especially when you see the child because they tend to heal really quickly and the other piece is that when we are able to do that we save them down the road we save the young lady who's trying to become pregnant or has a difficult birth because the pelvis is so and even or the young athlete who's having a difficult time performing and i've seen all of these things that we see on a regular basis a posture is pretty critical the next one is energy level if the body isn't functioning like it's supposed to then your energy level is going to be reduced and if you think of this like a car which is very simple if you have a six cylinder car you drive around four cylinders you're not as efficient as you could be gas mileage is going to be different wear and tear on the engine is going to be different the car as a whole is going to be affected so when we see energy level changing you know if it's in fact hey i'm just not sleeping well that's a different story but supplication can be the cause of lack of sleep but we want to look at that if your energy level or commonly what's coming out of your mouth is i'm just so tired or when i get up in the morning i'm still tired like we said earlier these are indications that there could be an issue because efficiency decreases it's a direct result of having changes in the spine unless we have a known cause so you know if you've been up all week studying or working or you're on a different shift or something like that that would be a different story but for the regular person is routine is really fairly the same but it's still having an energy issue there's a good chance there's something going on in the spine needs to be evaluated what you're really talking about at that point is metabolic state and so our next one really is sleep and we kind of talked about that at the start of the show  but it's something that consider sleep i wanted to throw in there just for two reasons one sometimes you have a bed that isn't great and you're tossing and turning all night and that could be it and so our on the topic let's though this out there because i get asked about beds almost  daily all beds are pretty much the same and the bed manufacturers i think are below horrified if they are me say that but we're talking about a coil spring mattress they're all pretty similar now you can get a few bells and whistles as far as how they treat the springs in the internal aspects of the mattress but the fact of the matter is c mattresses are very very similar the only other type of matches that you're really going to encounter out there is your temper p take these last much longer a regular coil spring mattress last about six to eight years maybe ten you do have to flip them if you bought a one sided mattress they've tricked you you do need to match it to the seaside they need to be flipped the temper predicts will last longer but they tend to hold heat so if you're hot when you sleep it's not going to be a good idea for you blasters of the air mattresses the air matches of the sleep numbers ok i've got a lot of people who really like and the problem with those like anything else is it relies on a ceiling that c l over time will go and when they do you tend see them lose their overtime so people who will maybe be starting with a fairly firm mattress a wake up with a can't find a comfortable position even though your mattress is new you have to consider what's going on with the body as you lay there you're putting pressure on different aspects of the body in the spine the shoulder girdle and the pelvis way the most so they're going to think in the most  when they do especially if a mattress is fairly squishy you're going to blow the middle of the back and it's going to create an irritation in that region across the shoulders if you sleep on your back it's really going to be in the same area the worst thing you can do is sleep on your stomach sleeping on your stomach has a huge impact on your body  you have to rotate your head to breathe and if i asked you to sit all day long with your head turned in one direction for at least eight hours you find it difficult yet when you sleep if you're fortunate enough to get eight hours of sleep you don't have kids waking opera company in your room then that means a third of your day is spent in a bad position or posture really altered position and so what it does is it begins affecting the muscles so when you get up the body thinks you're still in that position you get short muscles on one side long on the other and this can absolutely ind subak sation is what this is all about it's what we as chiropractors look for your bones don't pop out little pop and back that cracking noise you have is gas in the joint hearing it doesn't mean you've got adjusted not hearing it doesn't mean you didn't it's just the noise that comes from having a certain type of gas in the joints specifically nitrogen that sub luxation is a teeny misalignment relative to muscles that are pulling out evenly on the spine if we see that then it's something that we know needs adjusted whether it's a child or an adult children can be so excited just as easily as adults how do young couple and just yesterday they brought their newborn in and people you know every time i say that a their get that knowing glance yeah you know what we've gotten our kids adjusted all through all through their life up to this point they're doing great or i get the other glance and it's always a hundred years the other day why would you adjust the child there's two answers to that one children can be affected especially the birth process just like anyone else and to we don't adjust them like we do adults most of the time you got to think of adjustments as these big twisting adjustments that's not just an idea a lot of not because it's unsafe it's absolutely safe it's just not my favorite way to be adjusted so i don't do a lot of that i have people ask for it if it meets their needs will do it but outside of that not so often and children do not get adjusted that way as a pediatric chiropractor we approach children spawns very differently and it needs to be approached differently and even their sleep positions are important because if you lie a child on the same position every single night you'll create a flattening of the skull either on the side or in the back and it's not it's not conducive to normal growth and development their brain and their spinal cord so sleep is a big deal something you need to consider when he's talking about children or adults or next one's mental clarity if your sub let's say did you reduce the body's ability to think clearly in the fore brain the front part of the brain that for brain areas where we really do all our language math all our higher brain functions as well as be able to consider the emotions and impacts of your activities on others so it's a really critical area that needs to be turned on when your subject say we know through m r i imaging that that area is not turned on it's not functioning properly so we want to make sure if you're telling me i'm really having a hard time remembering things i'm having a hard time concentrating while that's on my schoolwork or my work then we know there's a good possibility there's some change going on in the nervous system because what happens is the body will speed up those people think that when there's something going on their spine it slows down the initial reaction is to speed up and when that happens it overloads the brain the brain kind of shut everything off and this is where we see that issue with mental clarity so it's definitely something to consider last pain and i put it last because it is last year in the last symptom you see that's the first one that usually goes away it's no indicator of health i've given you guys this statistic a hundred times forty seven percent of all people who have heart disease and die of a heart attack do not have any symptoms they just fall over dead so symptoms are really poor indicator i'm trying to give you guys some signs so that you know the symptoms can go up and down and they're very subjective they're person to person and they change easily especially when you're talking about pain because everybody's paying threshold is very different so pain is your body's last ditch effort to say hey get your attention and make a  change as i said it's a really crude receptor in the body and it doesn't provide a lot of information it's why we don't chase it if you've got pain in the area that we can correlate back to an actual injury or spinal issue then we know we're on the right track if not then very often it's a soft tissue injury and if that's all it is then a physical therapist or even a massage therapist bending upon the severity of the injury can be appropriate but if there's an underlying spinal issue a subway station then all the massage and all the p t in the world is going to change that you must adjust that area because the nerve cell the muscles what to do so they've got to have proper nerve function or neural integrity in order to get those muscles to function like they're supposed to so these are just some of the topics or indicators that you might see there easy for you to check posture simple you can easily look your overall energy level you self report on that very easily how you're sleeping also easy to indicate for yourself a week or so of bad sleep but normally really good is not it's not the end of the world mental clarity you know whether you're concentrating or not whether you're able to stay on track and stay focused and last that level of pain worst thing you can do is take that painkiller if your body's giving you its last this ditch effort to get your awareness and you shut it off and what you're doing is causing that problem to go forward unintended and continue to do damage you would never spray paint the oil light on your car if it came on you take it in to get it checked don't do that to yourself if you do then you can expect a really big repair bill and there could be damage there that we really can't correct at that point so consider these five topics both of them in your mind check your children as far as their posture goes if you're on shore you're welcome to bring them by our office we'll be happy to look at them or give you some insight you can stop by and get this information in a timely or times a handout handouts in the meantime we're going to finish up the we won't see you for about for four weeks have a great holiday enjoy yourself slow down get