This morning I got up early, worked out, and even did some yoga. I also got my back checked for subluxations by a fellow chiropractor. Why did I do that? Even thought I worked out, did yoga, and in good shape, I need to get my spine checked. I have yoga instructors that have been doing yoga for years that come in here, pilates instructors that are in great shape as well. They can have spines that move well, but there can be a segment that’s not moving right, and it could be out of alignment or subluxated. So for that reason, when it’s subluxated, the bone loses its position and it can choke on that nerve. If you look at Grey’s anatomy, it states that the brain and spinal chord control and coordinate all functions and structures of the body, just not some bad muscles, but all structures and functions, meaning your heart, your kidneys, your lungs, your liver, your immune system, your digestive system, all systems of the body.

So, if you have a subluxation it can interfere with the function of your body. Which means it interferes with your life and your health. For that reason, everyone should get their spine checked, for that reason I went and got my spine checked even though I worked out and did yoga this morning.

Which brings to mind another thing, this weekend at the Art Festival in Hermosa Beach, I’m going to have a booth down there. I will be there Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 12-6. I want to invite all my patients down. All of my patients that come down will receive a free spinal check up and adjustment. That’s right, patients, it’s on me. All I ask in return is that you bring a guest down, so I could meet them. Then I’ll perform a free spinal examination on any guest that you bring down. That’s the deal! Your guest will get checked for subluxations; you might save a life!

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.

Today, our weekly blog is going to touch on a question that many of my patients ask me. They ask, “Doc, What is more important, eating right or working out?”

Let’s look into that. When I get a patient that asks me that question, it shows me that said patient is looking to do just one thing, and will prioritize just that one thing to try to bring about health. But, that’s not the idea behind what we do. That outlook on health is more of a reactive situation: “give me that one situation that will help cure my illness.” It falls in the line of a more of a traditional type of healthcare which is a reactive healthcare.

We want to change our mindset to a more proactive healthcare. I get people that say, “Doc, give me the one stretch that will help me with this condition.” And that’s what we call an Asprin Stretch.

The idea would be, as a more proactive approach, to ask ourselves, “What can we do to add health to the body?” Instead of using one stretch, we should be stretching the whole body daily on a regular basis regardless if we have pain or not. It’s just a good thing that will add health to the whole body.

We should start changing our mindset, because reactive healthcare does not make you healthy, it just patches up the symptoms.

If your goal is to gain better health, better function, and a better life, you should add things that could build to your health. Like eating right AND exercising. So, that’s our answer to the aforementioned question; you have to do both. Look for ways to ADD to your health.

If you’re subluxated, that’s bad. It’s good to get adjusted, and on a regular basis.

If your kid is subluxated, has no pain, but may be subluxated, should we leave him at home developing the same problems you have, and just be reactive? That is up to you.

I would recommend the proactive approach, that’s why the whole family should come in and get checked on a regular basis.

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!

Today we’re talking about how medical doctors have said not to go to chiropractors because they’re quacks or unscientific or it’s a cult. I’d like to give you some history behind where all of that came from and the legal roots.

It started back in the early 60s when the American Medical Association, which is the largest healthcare lobbyist in the world, formed a Board on Quackery with the specific purpose to contain and eliminate Chiropractic Care. They did so by pressuring hospitals, their members: medical doctors. If they were to associate with chiropractors, they would be booted out of the AMA, which was a big thing back in the 60s.

It wasn’t until the 80s that five chiropractors challenged the AMA and sued them under the Sherman Act, an anti-trust act, stating that the AMA was monopolizing the healthcare field. On September 25, 1987, the Supreme Court found the American Medical Association guilty of conspiracy and of trying to contain and eliminate a competing profession.

So this biased opinion of Chiropractics stems back from the pressure the AMA placed on medical doctors to not associate with chiropractors.

What was interesting about said lawsuit was that it made it easy for the AMA; all they had to prove was that they were acting in the best interest of the public by protecting them from the “unscientific cultists”, the chiropractors. What was found was they couldn’t prove that chiropractors were doing harm, because a lot of the defendant’s testimonies proved to be in favor of Chiropractics. Also during the trial, it was disclosed that research being done by the AMA, proving Chiropractics to have positive effects, was being suppressed form the public.

There are reasons why a lot of people have this fear of Chiropractics and now we know it originates from the monopoly the AMA practiced against chiropractors, proven by the Supreme Court in 1987.

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.

This is Dr. Rob Bates again. The last several weeks we’ve talked about the different stresses on the body, the physical stresses, the chemical stresses, and the mental stresses, and when the body can’t adapt to such stresses, it will break down. The innate intelligence of your body can’t adapt to the environment and you start having these diseased states.

This week we’re going to talk about a very interesting subject: the placebo effect.

If you get a chance, take a look at the book “The Biology of Belief” by Bruce Lipton, Ph. D. He’s a medical scientist who has taught at med schools and does a lot of research in this area. Basically what one part of this book is talking about is the placebo effect.

Placebo effects occur when you have a study where you give a sugar pill to some people in the study without their knowledge while giving another set of people the drug they want tested and positive effects ensue. In other words, it’s just coming from their minds.

They did a study, in The New England Journal of Medicine, on arthritic knees. One group had actual knee surgery performed on them, while another group had debris flushed out of the joint that may have been causing inflammation to the knee, while the third had a mock surgery, a placebo surgery, where they made the incision and talked through an actual surgery but didn’t do anything to the knee. The three groups went through their normal rehabilitation, and what they found, interestingly enough, was that there was no change, no difference, in the outcome of all three of those groups; meaning, some of the people who actually had the placebo surgery were able to be active again. One man who had to use a cane before the study was able to go out and play basketball after the surgery!

The power of the mind!

Also, they did another study with the 6 main anti-depressants. They measured them up against the placebo, a sugar pill, and in all those cases, the placebo effect beat the anti-depressants!

Do you really need the anti-depressants or just the placebo effect?

What Dr. Bruce Lipton goes on to say is that our society is so ingrained with the notion that if you take this pill, it will help you.  There is billions of dollars worth of marketing right now from the pharmaceutical companies that will educate and ingrain into you, your kids, and your grandkids to take these drugs because it will heal you. In other words, we have a whole society that believes a drug will cure them.

He wraps up this section by saying that some of the pharmaceutical companies are trying to find out which people are more susceptible to the placebo effect, because they don’t want those people to affect their studies since it fouls up the possibility of their drugs to be pushed. So, they want to exclude the competition which is a placebo sugar pill.

Maybe what we need to do is spend all these billions of dollars researching why that placebo effect actually happens in the body, why the belief process actually happens. Then we can just pop out the miracle sugar pills instead.

??

This week we’re talking about stress on the body, mental stress to be precise. I know none of you have mental stress, except me…just kidding.

The prior two weeks we’ve talked about physical stress, which comes in the form of traumas. We’ve talked about chemical stress, which is poison to the body. This week is mental stress.

They say 90% of mental stress is in the form of auto-suggestion. Which really is just us beating up on ourselves. When we’re in a stressed state, there are two different sides of that. We are in the fight or flight response, which is like pushing the pedal to the medal on the gas. That is where everything is in high alert, such as when you find yourself in a dark alley and someone jumps out at you. Everything goes into high alert, and the blood rushes to the areas to get you to stay and fight or take flight.

The problem with that is a lot of times we get so used to being in this fight or flight response that our levels stay at a steady state of high stress for long periods of time.

We may feel stressed states for trying to get to work on time, waking up and rushing off to work, time schedules, paperwork, school, work problems, marital problems, and relationship problems. All these things create mental stress which is looked at, depending on how you interpret it, as a fight or flight response, and causes stress to the body.

When it does that your body is in high alert all the time, which is not what it’s supposed to do, it only should be during those life threatening situations when you have to fight or flight to save your life.

Your body has a tendency to start breaking down at that state, because it never has a chance to go on the other side of the coin, which is the restorative type of resting state that you should be in most of the time, in order to repair your body.

It’s really important to look at things this way, because a lot of times we are so used to it that we don’t even know we’re in this stressed state, because, it’s such a normal situation for our society or our lifestyle to be in a high stressed state.

It can be very hard to break these patterns, especially patterns of thought. Sometimes you think of something and automatically it’ll bring up a negative thought or feeling. It’s a reflex type of situation, because you’ve programmed yourself subconsciously that way.

The way the brain works is if you don’t use it, you lose it, but the more you use it, you have a tendency to go that way. It’s as if you’re walking through snow, the more you walk through one path the easier it is to go through it. So if that path is a negative thought or a negative auto-suggestion, when a situation arises, you will, more often than not, subconsciously take that negative path. So it takes a conscious effort to watch your thoughts, to see what you’re thinking, so that you can slowly start carving a path towards how you want to think.

It is up to you to really have the will to catch those negative thoughts of auto-suggestion. I want to some it up with a parable.

An old Cherokee was teaching his young grandson one of life’s important lessons. He told the young boy the following parable:

“There is a fight going inside each of us. It is a terrible fight between two wolves”, he said.

“One wolf is evil. He is anger, rage, envy, regret, greed,

arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies,

false pride, superiority, and ego.

The second wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility,

kindness, empathy, truth, compassion, and faith.”

The grandson thought about this for a moment.

The he asked his grandfather,

“Which wolf will win this fight?”

The old Cherokee simply replied,

“The one you feed.”

And it’s the same way with our bodies. Think about that, and next week we’ll go over the placebo effects of belief, which is very powerful as far as healing.

We’re here to talk about the major causes of disease, which will interfere with your innate intelligence to express itself. Basically there are three major causes that don’t allow your body to adapt to stress, which were the physical causes that we talked about last week, the chemical causes which we are going to talk about today, and next week we’re going to talk about the chemical causes.

Today as far as chemical is more of what is poisonous to the body. It can be done through the environment and it also can be done through things you ingest, for example, things like food, water, and also breathing.

Food is a big thing, because 90% of what Americans eat is processed food loaded with chemicals and preservatives that make it very difficult for your body’s intelligence to adapt to it; which will cause a stress response to your body, meaning it will eventually cause it to breakdown and cause a disease state.
The goal is increasing your diet with raw, organic, unprocessed foods. 90% of your diet should be made up of unprocessed foods and not the other way around. In prior blogs we’ve talked about what one should be eating, like the one pound rule. You can look back and check out our weight-loss blog on what to eat!
I also suggest a book called “Eat to Live” by Doctor Joel Furhman. That gives you a good basic understanding of what you should be eating.

Another thing that we have to concern ourselves with is other chemicals that we take in: drugs. Pushed or prescribed, a drug is still poison to the body. Prescribed drugs are always a concern, because we think it’s really going to be helping ourselves but really it is just a poison that the body is taking on. For example, a person going through chemo for cancer, all that’s doing is killing the body and hopefully killing more of the cancer cells so that by the end of the treatment, hopefully the innate intelligence can rebuild the body.

Again, push or prescribed drugs are still a poison to your body. You should really look at what is in your control and try to eliminate the drugs from your diet and life and look at increasing your body with whole, organic, unprocessed foods.

Supplements should be added to your diet as well. Think of it as if you were building a ship. To build ship, you have wood and you have nails. The wood of the ship represents you, your body. The wood of the ship is the macro-nutrition; it’s all the food you should be eating, the whole foods. But also you should have the proper vitamins, nutrients, and minerals, which are the supplements. The supplements are the nails that hold the ship together. You need both of those to have a sturdy ship, especially in today’s environment where the soil is depleted. You won’t get the same minerals, nutrients, and phytochemicals in your produce like we used to.

Investigate and not rely on just the supplements, your body needs the whole foods as well.

Chemical stress is important, it’s a large topic. We have to look at the food we’re eating, the water we’re drinking, the air we’re breathing in, and the poison we’re taking in. These things are in our control: our diet, what we’re drinking, and eliminating the drugs.

Hi, this is Dr. Rob again; we’ve been talking about the major causes of disease.

Basically there is one cause, which is your body’s inability to adapt to stress; moreover, the internal intelligence of your body is not able to adapt to environment. There are various forms of stress, such as physical stresses: trauma, emotional stresses: auto suggestion, and chemical stresses: poisons and toxins.

When we talk about physical stress, there are two main types of traumas: macro trauma and micro trauma. Macro traumas consist of those like the one Christopher Reeves experienced. He fell, head first, off his horse. He broke the top 2 bones in his neck which created major health problems for him, thus his early death. Other types of micro traumas consist of car accidents, slip and falls, boarding accidents, as well as birth traumas. A way the spine could be brought out of alignment with a newborn are through the birth process. Shortly after that, the process of learning how to walk and the inevitable falls that come along with that can also create traumas to the spine.

Micro traumas are insidious; they consist of posture: sitting, standing, even sleeping. Think of when you’re driving or when you’re sitting in front of the computer, what posture do you have?

So you see, posture can be a summation of little traumas that can be just as bad as if you’ve gotten into a car accident.  In fact, there’s a study done by The Journal of Geriatrics, in October 2004 that discusses posture; moreover Forward Head Posture, the kyphotic posture, where people were stuck hunched over with their head forward. The study measured people posture and its correlation with death. They found that the people who were stuck with their head protruding forward were closer to death.

The only thing that they could think of was that this posture promoted compression of the lungs and put pressure on the spinal nerves that feed out into organs like the heart and lungs. Those vital organs weren’t able to function properly thus the person died early.

These have been a couple of physical aspects of how you can cause disease, next time we’ll talk more about the chemical aspects.

If you have any questions, contact us at Bates Chiropractic (310) 545 – 4188 or www.chiropractormanhattanbeach.com