This week Dr. Rob discusses the importance of maintenance. It is better to be proactive as opposed to reactive. Be proactive about your health!
Maintain your spine for 100% nerve flow to all the organs, muscles, cells, and tissues of your body!
Maintain your health in order to live long and strong.
Best Ways To Add Calcium For Optimum Bone Health
The question for you this week is if you had to choose one thing that would add calcium to your diet, to keep your bones strong, which food would you choose?
When I ask people this question, most people would say dairy, like milk.
But what is interesting is that it is not your richest source of calcium. If we take a look at the studies, the studies say that the countries that have the highest dairy intake have the highest rate of osteoporosis and hip fractures. In essence, the people that drink the most milk will have the worst bones.
We should realize that the sources that have the richest calcium are green leafy vegetables. For example, As far as the amount of absorbable calcium, it is far better in green leafy vegetables.
In our office, there are other ways to strengthen our bones to promote bone health. You can do it by doing weight-bearing type of exercises. This will add more stress to the joints, which will cause the body to start laying down more calcium in those weight bearing joints. The weight bearing joints, such as the hips, are the most frequently fractured bones of the body where people have osteoporosis.
What we do in our office is tell our patients to walk for 15 minutes with weights. We kill two birds with one stone when we do that, because we add weights on the body in certain areas that actually add stress to the joints as well globally correct the posture. So, our patients get two great health benefits: the weight bearing stress to the joints to get more calcium plus the correction to their posture.
Check out our video above to see examples of how we add the weights to our patients.
March is Blood Pressure Awareness Month
According to the American Heart Association, March is Blood Pressure Reduction Month. The reason being that high blood pressure is a big problem; about 1 in 3 people have high blood pressure. 21% of the people that have high blood pressure don’t even know it!
Interesting enough, a study done in the Journal of Human Hypertension found that a specific adjustment done on the neck helped reduce blood pressure.
According to the study, 50 test subjects had specific chiropractic adjustments applied to their upper neck area. There is a specific area in the upper cervical area that can control blood pressure.
What they found was that on an average, the adjustment dropped the blood pressure 17 points!
This drop would take the equivalent of two prescription drugs to get the same results as this one adjustment.
A follow up study done 8 weeks down the line showed that blood pressure levels were still lowered, which means to get the same results you’d have to take the two blood pressure medications every day for not only those 8 weeks but for the rest of your life. The problem with taking drugs is that there are always side effects. And drugs are poison. Taking drugs for the rest of your life means that you’d be poisoning your body for the rest of your life just to try to keep the blood pressure low instead of just allowing the natural processes of your body to work the way it’s intended by relieving pressure of the nerve.
Chiropractic’s not for high blood pressure, but your body doesn’t need the interference. That’s why you should have yourself and your family checked for subluxations.
Topic of the Week: Maintenance
Topic of the Week: Maintenance
One of the most important aspects of maintaining your health is maintaining your spine. Grey’s Anatomy talks about your brain’s spinal chord as the major control center that controls all the structures in the human body.
One way we maintain the spine is by wobbling. We maintain good spines through proper motion, such as using the wobble chair. But spinal subluxations cause a lack of motion which causes interference to the nervous system which, in turn, causes bad health.
It’s important to keep the motion. Life is motion, motion is life. So, you have to keep regular with your chiropractic adjustments.
“How regular,” you ask? Some people should come once a week, some once a month, but it definitely has to be on a regular basis.
Do You Have Health Insurance or Sickness Insurance?
Our topic today is whether you have Health Insurance or Sickness Insurance.
The question is when do you really use your insurance? Is it when you’re healthy or when you are sick?
Most of us are going to answer “when you’re sick, of course.”
When you have a problem or some sort of symptom is when you’re going to use your insurance. That’s when they will pay.
We should get out of our minds that our health insurance is going to bring us health. It is really there as first aid or when your body breaks down.
This brings me to another situation which just happened today. There are two sickness insurances called Health Care and Pacific Care who has contracted a manage care company called Optimal Health. The purpose of a manage care company is to not allow you to utilize your benefits.
For example, I was interviewed by the Optimal Health manage care doctor who was looking at my cases of patients who had said insurances. According to the national average, most people were going to the chiropractor an average of 8 times, where mine was an average of 12 times. He told me I was over-utilizing this type of care; however, if we look back at where they get their averages it stems from when the insurance companies had specific procedures implemented on the doctors. Forms had to be filled out with specific information on the care plans for the patient. They would then determine whether they would accept the recommended amount of care for certain conditions.
I would put down what was more accurate for the patient to get over their symptoms. For example, I would put down 20 visits for symptomatic relief NOT corrective care, and ALWAYS get rejected. This was before they had their national averages, by the way.
I would call other doctors and they would have the same problem, until I found one doctor who told me to send it in for 12 visits and then try to ask for more later. That way the patient could at least receive some Chiropractic Care, otherwise the patient wasn’t going to get any care. Once the doctors found out a way for their patients to receive some chiropractic benefits from their insurance, they started to recommend less visits. Unfortunately, the insurance companies developed a profile and would use that to back up statements of over-utilization violations. It’s a strong arm method, a sneaky method utilized by insurance companies so to not have to pay for care.
What we should realize is that the manage care system is not designed to allow you to utilize your benefits. Your best bet would be to get together and try to fire the manage care system that is not here for your best interest.
If you have questions about this, don’t hesitate in asking. I just brushed across one of the many thing we, as doctors, have to deal with when dealing with insurance companies. Unfortunately, our hands are tied, as doctors, when insurance companies manipulate statistics in order to justify their utilization of care.
Just a reminder, in our office we practice corrective care not acute care. So, insurance companies will pay for acute care and not full correction. Once those visits are up, however many they are, it will be up to you to shift into corrective mode. If you have any questions about that, do realize our fees are 30 – 50% less than chiropractors in our area, to allow you to get the care you need.
Any other questions, ask us here @ Bates Chiropractic!
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 9
- Next Page »