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The Elixir of Life
Posted on 2012-01-05 06:51:42
Often I hear the question, “What is the most important thing I can do for myself? Should I take vitamins, exercise, what should I do?” With so many products, services, new technologies, emerging superfoods, and alternative healing methods, I can understand how one might desire a simpler answer. And while there is no ‘one thing’ that will give you the perfectly healthy life you so desire, I find that most all of us fall short on one very important need: water.
The earth is made up of approximately seventy-percent water. Is it any coincidence that our bodies consist of roughly the same percentage of this miraculous molecule? Did you know that water is one of the ONLY substances that actually gets LESS dense as it converts from a liquid to a solid state? Every other substance, when frozen, becomes MORE dense, because the molecules are more tightly packed. When a gas, they are less dense, and take up a much larger space as they expand. What would happen in our oceans and lakes if ice was more dense than water, and sank? How would our plants and animals fare if they were under the weight of thousands of pounds of ice? Not only would we be eating less shrimp cocktails and sushi maki, but the effects on the ecosystem and the earth as a whole would be catastrophic! Coincidence, or the loving-kindness of our Divine Creator?
I see it as no coincidence that this wonder molecule is so important. Water is the medium for most chemical reactions in the body. It cleanses, flushes out many harmful, destructive toxins as we excrete it from our body. It is important for healing, for digesting our food, for our mood and energy, for our immunity, for… well, everything! We can go days without eating solid food, but how long can we go without water? After two days we would be suffering from dehydration. As blood gets thicker from lack of hydration, the heart must work harder to pump the blood to the brain and the rest of the body. Our energy drops, the body slows. Within a week, the body will give out (if in the desert one would be lucky to last three days!)
So the question remains: How much water do we need?
There are many variables to figure out exactly how much each individual needs, but follow this basic guide:
• Your body should get as many ounces as half of your weight (in pounds). If you weigh 100 lbs you need 50 ounces of water. 200 lbs = 100 ounces, etc. You cannot substitute juice, pop, tea or any other beverage. This must be pure water!
• For every caffeinated or alcoholic beverage you consume you must add an extra 8 ounces. Caffeine and alcohol are diuretics, meaning they cause you to excrete more water than they give you, leaving you with a negative overall water gain from them.
• If you exercise or are in a situation where you are sweating a lot, you must add more water. Some recommend an extra 16-24 ounces per pound lost during a workout. An average, healthy person can produce as much as 32 ounces of sweat during an hour of moderate to vigorous exercise. You can weigh yourself before and after to find out how much water weight was lost, or you can just estimate.
• Monitor urine color! The most effective measurement of hydration levels is urine color. If it is clear coming out, you are well hydrated. The darker the color, the more water you need. This is also a good way to monitor the hydration level of children.
As soon as you wake-up each morning, drink two large glasses of water before putting anything else into your body. This will this ensure that you get a good start on your water consumption for the day. Doing this ‘primes-the-pump,’ by kick-starting your metabolism, flushing out the digestive tract, thereby giving you a great start to your day.
Do this for four weeks, and you will feel like a new person!
Please, make sure that you are consuming purified water. While a simple Brita or Pur filter is much better than tap water, the best water is that which is filtered by Reverse Osmosis. Home kits cost between $200 -$300, will last for years and years, and cost between $50 and $100 a year in filters. It is one of the best investments our family has ever made!
So drink up! Cheers!
Oh Really, You’re Into Wellness?
Posted on 2011-03-31 18:20:18
Well, most people who claim to be into natural health and wellness will tell you that they are into preventative, holistic things, not just symptomatic treatment. Allopathic health care is all about ‘sick care,’ not about keeping people truly healthy. We live in one of the most unhealthy countries in the world, but have great emergency care. Most realize the flaws of the system, how many lives are lost due to over medicating and over-treating, and they want to live a more natural, simplistic life with regard to their health habits.
So, where does chiropractic fit into that? Do they get adjusted? Are they seeing their chiropractor regularly for optimal function, or are they using them ALLOPATHICALLY only when there is a pain or symptom?
Truth is, if you see your chiropractor only when you have pain, you are using chiropractic ALLOPATHICALLY and not as it was designed to be used! THAT IS NOT WELLNESS! Chiropractic is not about pain, anymore than brushing your teeth is about pain. An adjustment restores the proper input into the central nervous system, and prevents distortions of the signals from the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body. Removing these subluxations improves overall function, and allows the body to work as it was designed.
Did I say anything about pain? NO! Pain is a side effect of longstanding subluxations, just as a cavity and tooth pain is an effect of longstanding tooth decay. Do you only brush your teeth when you are in pain?
Eating well, exercising and having a great attitude are all essential components of a healthy lifestyle. But what happens when you do all that and the body can’t send the right signals where they need to go? What good is that Omega-3 EFA you just ingested if the nerves to the intestines are interfered with and they can’t properly absorb it? What good is all that running if the nerves to the heart are interfered with and you end up with a possibly life threatening arrhythymia? Do you want to just prevent illness, or do you want to live life to the fullest each and every day!
Chiropractic was never intended strictly for symptomatic, pain relief. Chiropractic care is about proper function. It is about restoring life! So if you are not getting adjusted on a regular basis for wellness care, you are not functioning at 100%, therefore you are not as healthy as you SHOULD be, and quite frankly, not as healthy as you think.
Be Healthy, Be Well, Get Adjusted!
Chiropractic: More Than a Feeling
Posted on 2011-01-03 14:37:53
Chiropractic: More Than a Feeling
Chiropractic has been time-tested and helps many people to feel better. Low back pain, neck pain, headaches, even asthma and allergies, can be improved through regular chiropractic treatment… but what does that have to do with health? Does "health" only refer to how you feel? Are people who feel good always healthy? When you hurt, does that necessarily mean that you are unhealthy? Have you ever even stopped to ask yourself these questions?
Right now, there are many people in your own town walking around with cancer and heart disease, and they have no symptoms. Right now, there are people whose immune systems are doing their jobs to purge their bodies of destructive microorganisms, and they feel AWFUL! Our symptoms do not define whether we are healthy, and the sooner we understand this, the better off we’ll be.
You see, most of us are motivated either toward pleasure or away from pain. Though we all exhibit signs of both motivations, usually one of these is dominant over the other. Those who are motivated toward pleasure tend to be more proactive in their lifestyles. They work out and eat right, not just to stave off illness but because it is the right thing to do. They get adjusted regularly to keep their nervous systems working properly, not just because they have an ache or a pain, and therefore keep their bodies functioning at 100%.
You see, waiting until your back hurts to see a chiropractor is much like waiting until a tooth hurts to see a dentist: It takes a lot more effort to fix a problem than to prevent it from happening in the first place, and usually costs a lot more as well!
Be Healthy, Be Well, Get Adjusted!
Ask Your Doctor?
Posted on 2010-08-02 13:12:42
This weekend I had one of those moments. You know the ones. One where your head feels like it’s going to explode. Where giant green flames are going to shoot from your nostrils, large enough to topple an infrastructure that is corrupting America, large enough to engulf to money-loving sell-outs that are touting “Health-Care” reform, and bring down an industry that is literally brain-washing our kids, and to a lesser extent, adults as well. So what could have been so aggravating? What could have gotten me so frustrated that I needed to compose myself before I could answer my son’s commercial-inspired question? It was something that I’ve seen hundreds of times already. I don’t know why, but this time I had an epiphany. THIS IS WRONG! THIS IS AFFECTING MY CHILDREN!
My son and I had been watching a really cool episode about construction crews building a huge bridge adjacent to the Hoover dam, when a commercial came on for Cialis. What I realized was that the pharmaceutical industries are teaching our children a new vocabulary without our knowledge. Yes, that’s right. If you have kids that watch TV, they have probably already been exposed to terms such as incontinence, acid-reflux, or the one that my son and I heard: Erectile Dysfunction. And this burns me up! My son doesn’t even know what an erection is for, let alone that it can be ‘dysfunctional.’ And he has to hear that he should ‘ask his doctor’ about it? Why should every other commercial be an advertisement for prescription drugs?
Now what I realized, other than the fact that my six year old asking me what erectile dysfunction is is quite an uncomfortable moment, is that we are desensitizing our kids to the truth about prescription drugs! These substances are being peddled like candy, often with the side effects minimized or not discussed at all. The average child will see over 50,000 pharmaceutical commercials before the age of 18! Psychologically, kids, and many adults, are being trained to think that when you have a problem, you take a pill. We have an obligation to set the record straight and shout from the top of our lungs – NO! This is not right!
Even medical doctors are taught that the care of their patients follow a course of least invasive, to more invasive in the treatment. The first steps should always be to focus on lifestyle change: Diet, exercise, relaxation, CHIROPRACTIC! Yet how often does a person’s doctor prescribe a pill FIRST, without taking the time to look at their patients’ lifestyle? Is it because it is so much quicker to push a pill than to take the necessary time with a patient, or because Big Pharma is subsidizing the doctors’ education about the drugs, as well as paying out bonuses based on the number of prescriptions sold? How can you “ask your doctor” and expect an honest, non-biased report on the drug if the people educating the doctor about the pill are pharmaceutical salesmen, not scientists?
Something even more shocking, the pharmaceutical industry spends about $4 billion a year in direct-to-consumer ads such as commercials. THAT’S A LOT OF MONEY! What if they took that money and actually made the pills safer? Or used it to promote lifestyle change so our society could actually be healthier, not just doped-up? Or maybe just reduced the costs of the drugs they sell so they could be afforded by those without health insurance, and reduce the payouts of insurance companies, which could ultimately lower our health insurance premiums? The amount of wasted money is ludicrous, not to mention it inflates the over-all health care budget in our country, which we all wind up paying for one way or another.
Over an eight year period from 1997 to 2005, direct-to-consumer ads have increased 296.4%, and direct-to-physician promoting has gone up 86%. In the past 7 years, we have seen a 65% increase in hospitalization from prescription pain killers, 33% increase for all other prescription drugs, a 37% increase in accidental poisonings from prescriptions and a 130% increase in INTENTIONAL poisonings. According to a 2007 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, over 106,000 people die each year as a result of prescription drugs. We are fighting the WRONG war on drugs. The pushers aren’t the ones on the streets, they are the ones training our doctors, the ones advertising on TV, the ones brainwashing our children.
So please, if you don’t want your kids asking you what E.D. is, or why they should ask their doctor if the ‘purple pill’ is right for them, turn the TV off! Or at least mute the commercials. You could get involved and write to your legislator. The truth needs to be told: Health does not come from a pill bottle, or from a scalpel. Health comes from inside of us, from the regulatory systems that we have been created with, and controlled by the NERVOUS SYSTEM. Chiropractors are the ONLY professionals trained to locate and remove this interference in a safe, gentle and natural manner. Make an appointment today!
PS: In the words of Bill Maher (love him or hate him), “Ask your doctor if getting-off-your-butt is right for you!”
The Pain of Growth
Posted on 2010-04-13 10:30:02
WOW! What a great month it has been! So much has changed. Many hours were put in breaking down everything in our old office, and moving it piece-by piece to our new space. Renovations were done. Carpets were torn out, yanked and ripped bit-by-bit from the floor they were once glued to so the new carpet could be fit in and glued down. Walls were scraped, sanded and spackled so that the proper paint could be applied. Rooms were measured to see if our furniture would fit. Four-Hundred pound tables were heaved, pushed, pulled and thrusted in any way possible in order to get them to the proper position within the rooms. Network cables were ran, re-ran, and ran again until they were right. So many little things had to be done so that we could open and begin to care for you, our incredible clients, in this new office space.
And then... the pain set in.
Each movement sent shooting, cramping pains throughout my limbs. The dull ache in my back reminded me for weeks of the immense work that I had done, and still was doing. It was as if to say, "STOP! You are doing to much! You're just one man!" And guess what. It was right! My body was working perfectly. My pain was there as a sign, a reminder not only that I had pushed myself pretty hard, but also as an early warning system to prevent me from hurting myself by continuing.
You see, almost all growth requires us to push ourselves, to reach beyond our comfort zone, get a little uncomfortable. This is how we grow. Bones strengthen only when stressed. Muscles grow in size only after they strain from so much effort that they use up all the oxygen around them. Our mind learns only after we force the use of a specific pathway over and over again until the brain 'glues' it into place. Nothing comes without effort.
After a hard workout, you should feel a little sore. After doing a new workout, you should feel a little sore. But there is a difference between feeling a little sore because of pushing yourself and hurting because you have damaged your body.
Pain is our friend. No, that is not a typo. Yes, I meant to say that. In fact, look at what happens when someone can't feel pain.
There are neurological conditions out there where people lose the ability to feel pain. They bump their toes into things, they bleed, get infected, in some cases gangrenous, and need to be amputated. Otheres will burn themselves and not know about it. They risk serious infection, loss of body parts, the risk of bleeding to death, and many other complications because their body cannot tell them there is danger.
Pain is GOOD! It often brings clients into our office. They realize it is not natural to have headaches or low back pain, shoulder pain, etc as much as they do. They listen to their body and want to know why this pain reccurs. They eventually understand the relationship between their pain and their nervous system, and learn how to prevent recurrences in the future through Wellness-based chiropractic care, not symptom-based care.
Pain is an early warning system designed to stave off danger. Fail to pay attention, and you risk damaging the very body that tried to warn you. Listen to those subtle clues, and you will have a long and wonderful relationship with the 'human suit' you are wearing.
Yours in Health
Dr. Powell
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