specifically geared towards children we don't get enough i don't think we get enough input as far as what's happening with our kids developmentally unless there's an actual injury so you know we kind of go along go to the school meetings and you know see the pediatrician here and there but not realizing there are things that sometimes go unnoticed that absolutely affect their function both physically and cognitively so today the bit of research that i pulled is actually from the journal of neurology and neurosurgery and psychiatry this particular bit of research speaks to head injuries and kids there seems to be more and more information or talk about head injuries specifically in the form of concussion recently this would be less than that this would be an injury that is less intense than a full blown concussion this is considered a mild head injury did not require stay in a hospital and did not require observation beyond the actual injury itself so what we find is that kids bump their heads mom and dad take the hospital determined he's gone on and they get a clean bill of health and get really the problem is with with the children in this particular study we found that there were cognitive issues down the road so at six years she's missed five years and six months these children were looked at and they were found that one compared to another group their reading skills and a visual acuity had been decreased this is a big deal because if their visual or cognitive skills are decreased in their visual area their ability to perform adequately in certain school settings is going to be decreased but especially that reading area so we know that kids who are good readers tend to function better across the board in every class doesn't matter where it is when they talk about history or math or science or anything else that reading base is absolutely essential so how many kids out there you know have this kind of injury i can tell you it's quite a few because in my practice i get the story at least once a day johnny fell and bumped his head or  as they're learning to walk there's thousands of fall the national health and safety institute i think their numbers are five now three thousand fall by the time a child is is five years of age and that's just learning to walk and doing the things that kids normally do so cumulative effect over time can be big and we know for sure that this kind of change is going to impact their ability to to function and grow and some of those areas so it's really important we take this into consideration if your child has had an injury like this we want to keep it in mind get them a value way that one of the things i think that's missed most often and i talk about it in the in the couple of shows that we've done relative to getting to concussion it's the if the neck is not evaluated a lot of times we miss what's going on so they had is literally attached to the body via the neck that is that true mind body connection so becomes really important that that we stay aware of this they had maybe ok oftentimes i hear the mom say well the bump is on the outside server thing must be you know must be fine there's a lot of language around this some of it accurate some of it not so if you're not sure or or if it's happened just based on this information again check make sure they're seeing by their chiropractor make sure that upper part of the neck or upper cervical spine has been evaluated and we're ruling out any further trauma in those areas that's where the majority the blood flow comes through it's going to the brain and if we see a change in that particular area then we're decreasing blood flow to the to the front of the brain before brain area and that's where these kinds of cognitive skills really are located so it's important we get this checked and we keep an eye on it it's important we follow up the interesting part of this study and i think was really the main focus for me is that we didn't see these kind of changes for six months or so the children appeared fine the injury occurred they were released no big deal and at the six month mark when they started their evaluation process with these guys that's when we began to see this change so sometimes it's slow and progressive you may not notice it right away suddenly they're having a problem in this class or that and we're not sure that's coming from that's a big deal to to be aware of so if we know that we have this info and we can get them checked now regardless of what the timeframe is we can do something about it because we do know for sure that even though this occurred in these kids had this injury and were followed up and had this problem when they did receive care they all corrected so they came right back up to their peer level without any further issues so just an important thing to keep an eye on and it really kind of leads us into where we're going to be going today which is how stress affects the body so stay with us we'll be back and we'll be back in just a few minutes and we're going to cover the impact of that stress on the digestive system and blood  main cause of most diseases that we see out there as far as research goes today we are finding that stress levels seem to be at the core of everything from heart disease to stroke to cancer and really those are the big three heart disease being the number one killer of americans today when we consider how stress affects us we find that there are two primary chemicals involved one is adrenaline the other's cortisol dissolve and blamed for everything from weight gain to the things we just mentioned and adrenaline you know if you've ever been under stress adrenaline is that that part of the body or that chemical that causes us to go into that fight or flight response that fight or flight response is an appropriate response if in fact you need to fight or run if there is a threat there then that's how we should be reacting but there's no threat and your body is reacting that way then we have a problem and what we call that is discipline he says it's the body's inability to respond appropriately to the environment it's stuck in other words it's stuck in a rut  reason i picked these these four topics digestion blood pressure muscle function and brain function is because these are probably the big four that we see that are at that base again of diseases that tend to show up in our offices today so it's important we know how to address  those and have an awareness of what they look like because before we can address it you need to know if you actually fall into that category or not so as far as digestion goes if you are in sympathetic dominance or that stress state that adrenaline cortisol are going on then your body is not going to digest it shouldn't and that's the big thing i think i really want to get across is if you're unsympathetic dominance instead of trying to fix the symptom which is to put you on privacy or private sector some of the digestive thing or give you toms and tell you there's calcium in those they're good for you it's really not only the false advertising it's not the road it's going to get you back to health we're missing the primary component and that is that the body's responding to something that isn't there and that's what we really need to work on so  going to be out the window the stomach is not going to be able to produce the appropriate amount of acid because if you really were in a threat environment you shouldn't be digesting anyway so it's a simple simple concept what i want to get across to people is if we're seeing a digestive issue for seeing chronic and one of the things that's being talked about quite a lot of such as baby boomers are moving into that that a little bit further along in their life we're starting to see a lot of these kinds of symptoms creep up and being diagnosed more often if happening if you really were in that stressed state digestion would be the top your list you'd be pushing the blood out to your muscles if you push the blood out to your muscles that would be appropriate because if you have to run or fight that's where the blood needs to be you're not going to fight with your stomach lining so the stomach is going to stop digesting properly if the food stays you know if you're if you're eating and it's staying because you're taking your private sector something else then you're pushing that food that's really not properly that just is down to the small intestine if that happens it makes it that far then you're going to pancreatitis causes people to sometimes have to be completely taken off so they end up on a feeding tube for a while until that bankers can settle down and you can be talking months so if we understand the mechanism of this then i think we can approach this a little differently and create more options so people get that far if we go a little further down if it does make it into the small intestine then again we're not the nutrients properly because we're shutting blood away from that part of the body that's not really where we want it we need it out in the large muscle groups  and we're not going to be getting the nutritional absorption that we really need to if that's the case and we're not pulling in those nutrients that we need then what we're going to see is a decrease ability to heal so i mean system is sometimes that function is down and remember your immune system is two jobs one is to repair the others to defend when i ask people to meet system does most people immediately say it's a defensive system is fights infection it does but it also helps repair even all the way down at the cellular level so if that immune system isn't functioning properly we're not repairing and rebuilding which means we're not growing so that becomes really critical as well as far as the rest of the body goes from this digestive perspective we're also going to be impacting how we use calcium we're seeing osteoporosis being also diagnosed at record levels today both in the young annulled if you're under chronic stress the body actually begins to erode the bone to pull some of those calcium minerals out to handle that stress saussy process becomes a big deal as well we decreased our  bone formation over time so that the death of component a huge issue blood pressures the next one you know high blood pressure seems to be very very common i know there are several people in my office that i you know keep an eye on regularly for that reason blood pressure is going to go up when everything else goes up and again it's supposed to if you're unsympathetic dominance if you're that fireplace state your blood pressure should be up because you need to get the blood again out to the extremities not into the organs so as we shunt that blood to the extremities so that you could run or do battle the blood pressure is going to go up because heart rate goes up and so if this is done over time we're putting a pretty tremendous stress on the vascular system we're also impacting blood flow to important areas like the brain and if that's if that's occurring with regularity and our blood pressure is up constantly somebody's going to come along to you and say ok your blood pressure is too high we've seen it by the way blood pressure can only be diagnosed as being high if it's high in three consecutive events there are reasons for blood pressure to go up and blood pressures fluctuate all day people do not walk around in a one twenty over eighty constantly you've got up the steps your blood pressure is diffuse just wakened your blood pressure is going to be different so before you do go on that medication make sure that it's been it's been shown to be high three consecutive times and there's a good  t like i was saying if that blood pressure is up there's there's a reason for that if you're in that dynamic state so rather than put you on the medication instantly which we may need to do especially if it's very very high we do want to keep you safe but we need to find out high if you are unsympathetic dominant it should be hi you're on high alert the problem is we don't want to keep you there so what can we do to begin to change that deep breathing and i've probably said that on this on this show thousands of times is crucial when you deep revealer your blood pressure improve your digestion aid in changing brain wave activity there's a lot of benefits that and i said at the start we talked about some of the corrections depraving is probably the fastest way to shift this entire process so you know if you're two hundred over a hundred i don't want to just sit there deep breathing we need to make sure you get ok but down the road as a long term solution we do need to give you some different activities and give you some things that you can do to begin changing that our blood pressure big deal we do not want to put a tremendous load on the heart on that kind of basis not designed to handle things that way as well as the rest of the rest of after system now muscle function is a big one and this is probably the one i see the most being a chiropractor i hear about this the most  people but as doctors of chiropractic we're looking at the whole body this happens to be just an indicator that we get muscle function is going to change like everything else if you're prepping to be in that fight or flight mode that alarm state that body alarm state then you're going to turn certain muscles on the muscles you're going to turn on of the big muscles the lower body the muscles in the lower back in the muscles of the neck if you've ever seen a dog whose is growing and upset the back arches the neck broadens as they pull head down in the years go down you're no different you turn on the same exact muscles the problem is again if you're not if you don't really defending anything and you're walking around that way in quite a bit of stiffness soreness decreased range of motion in there and that problem over time the fourth rightists it also leads to decreased blood flow to the brain and if we have decreased blood flow to the brain we know that we're going to bring less oxygen less nutrients to those brain cells and there's actually research out right now that shows that that is in fact the cause of parkinson's parkinson's having been diagnosed and understood for quite some time we believe that there's damage chips for a specific part of the brain the substantia nigra it's not producing the hormones that we needed to for normal body function including muscle function but they've been able to regenerate those cells and when they do we do not see an improvement in those patients that we would expect when we increase blood supply to that area though and we improve digestion in other words get them out of sympathetic dominance we do see those changes so there is research that substantiates this those tight muscles through the neck region and see the back of a head absolutely going to people of flow so something to be aware of if you find that person's got the stiff neck could be because they slept wrong could be because they have a job or they're stuck in front of a computer all day and they're leaning forward there are lots of causes and regardless of how you got that way it's something that we want to take a look at we started the show off talking about the little kids and how they were impacted with a head injury they create th same type muscles and the thing is we found that with them we didn't really see symptoms or a change in their cognitive function for about six months so what i want you guys to really get is the fact that you may have had that event or that particular injury and not have symptoms right away and the hardest thing i have is to get people to put together that this happened and now we have this change in the body when there's time in between people tend to lose sight of how that could be related and very often people show up at my office having tie their shoes and got that can't get up my back is killing me i can't move i'm in severe pain and we all know that's not that they tie their shoes it's all the things they did before that so that old saying the straw that broke the camel's back one hundred percent accurate now the next one is brain function we kind of  ago but the thing i want you to really take away from this as well as when we have adrenaline cortisol running in the body we're going to turn on a different part of the brain completely and the part we're going to access is the hind brain and your hind brain is just that it's in the back your head it's back here it's responsible for your reflex of states sometimes people call it the reptilian brain or the old brain and it does the things that you don't think about how to pump your heart cause you to breathe blink your eyes digestion elimination it controls all of those  automatic functions and hindbrain will be running the system at that point the problem with hindbrain running the system is you are no longer consciously choosing you're just stuck in a particular state and that's where that sympathetic or fight or flight mode comes in and takes over and it's important we don't stay there because the body was never designed to you know like being it was like being a race car driving a hundred miles an hour from stop sign to stops on race cars belong on track so that's where we want to what your daily drive should not look like that it should be really relaxed it should be very simple it should be not one hundred miles an hour car or a car because you're going to you're going to wear out the brakes are going to wear out the engine you're going to wear out the driver so we want to be able to bring that down relax that situation a  and bring you into the other side of that which is your parasympathetic so we call that the wine and dine side that's where the body is really healing and functioning best that's where the body's able to repair most easily and we're going to rest the most the less easily as well when we are in that sympathetic state we see these kinds of changes we'll see retch change will see attitudes change will see eating habits change so if you see these things they're an indicator if you're chiropractor have them evaluate you the reason i say get here chiropractors because there isn't a medication that will switch you there isn't anything you can do on that and see the need your psychologist your therapist your behavior list or your cairo they really work on all the same level because they're directly interacting with that nervous system so it's important for things that you can do on your own there's got to be an outlet you gotta have something you can do that allows you to rest and relax and kind of unwind a bit that daily outlets a big deal the deep breathing we mentioned it affects all of these across the board and on some deep breathing is so simple make sure using the abdomen is standing tall so that the stomach can actually flex and extend like it's supposed to very very easy to make sure well hydrated all the things that i normally would give you the solutions to these problems they're always the same because we're always doing the same to them which is the nervous system so when you hydrate properly the body works better the blood stain or the muscles are healthier everything tends to heal on that and i'm more hydrated environment last is you know evaluate how you're looking at things you know what your attitude towards things if you tend to fly off the handle very easily th we're back to managing our thought process and making better decisions in the not just in the moment but understanding how that affects you down the road as well so i hope this helps gives you an idea of of what we're talking about what you may be going through if you have one of these issues that you've been dealing with for a while i understand that there is additional information out there that could benefit you and you know most importantly take the time to relax a little summer will be here before you know it will be busy all over again building the time now as you create those new patterns and new attitudes it just becomes a lot easier to hold on to them so if you have a great week stick with us we'll be back one or two more times before the end of the year and we'll cover some additional information i hope you can integrate in your life