Is it difficult to grasp a jar, bottle, or cup? Have you lost the strength to twist open a large jar? Do you have tingling or numbness in your hand, wrist, or fingers? Or, does your wrist just plain hurt? If you have some or all of these symptoms, you may have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

What is CTS? It is common to hear this term used frequently when patients have wrist or hand pain. The human body has two long bones that start at the elbow and extend to our wrists. These bones are called the ulna and the radius. Connective tissue attaches the bones near the wrist from one side to the other. Picture in your mind, a piece of silk attached to both bones and pulled tightly. The pressure on the nerves below is the most common cause of true carpal tunnel syndrome.

Fortunately, not all wrist pain should be called CTS. It is important to determine, if in fact, the symptoms are being caused by the pressure on the nerves of the wrist, or if there is a different cause of the problem. It is VERY common for these types of symptoms to exist when there is a neck misalignment, history of auto injury, or other spinal conditions. The nerves of the neck control all the function and sensation of our arms and hands. If the nerves of the neck are being compressed, wrist and hand pain is a common symptom. Your Doctor of Chiropractic is trained to determine whether your condition is a true carpal tunnel syndrome or not.

In some cases your chiropractor can use physical therapy or manipulation of the wrist to alleviate the symptoms of true CTS. In more serious cases, a surgical referral may be required. If it is determined by your chiropractor that the cause of your symptoms is due to a neck-related situation, a series of chiropractic adjustments may be recommended. Whatever the cause, be assured that we will do our best to lead you in the most appropriate direction for the resolution of your health issue.

Many people do not realize chiropractic care is not limited to only the joints of the spine. Though not all chiropractors adjust beyond the spine, at Natural Balance Wellness Center we have great success treating conditions of the extremities along with spinal adjustments. So, what exactly do we mean by joint pain?

Joints are where one bone connects with another. They are the space between that allow for proper movement and function. Our body has many different types of joints, from those that barely move at all, like the sutures in your skull, to joints that move in many different directions, like your shoulder and hip. We know that when the joints move properly, your muscles and ligaments do not become stressed and therefore decrease chances of injury or pain occurring.

However, when joints do not work properly, this leads to a whole host of problems. Primarily, when the joints do not work properly, the muscles and ligaments cannot function properly either. They will tend to either shorten or elongate, depending on the joint problem. When this occurs, this can lead to pain, muscle tightness, or nerve pressure that causes numbness, tingling, shooting pain, or muscle weakening. Commonly, a minor problem can become a chronic and more debilitating condition unless the underlying issue is resolved.

There are countless reasons a joint may become stressed or misaligned. There are three basic factors though.

1. Most common is a mechanical cause or injury.
   • Macro trauma (large trauma) – such as a car crash, athletic injury, or bad fall that creates an injury to that joint, muscle, or ligament (or combination) surrounding that joint.
   • Micro trauma (repetitive use injury) certainly can lead to joint damage as well. This is common in careers utilizing repetitive motion like construction trades, computer work, or even in athletes like pitchers, swimmers, or tennis players.

1. Another factor is chemical. If your diet is inflammatory, you will be more likely to swell easily and be susceptible to more injury.
2. The third factor that affects joint function is mental. This is apparent when people are under stress. Many times they will get headaches, back pain, neck pain, stomach pain, etc. Stress affects the hormones and chemicals in your body and can create an environment where healthy joint function is hard to maintain.

Chiropractors correct the underlying cause of joint dysfunction so that the body can restore normal range of motion in the joint allowing for the compensatory soft tissue reactions to heal. It is through this manner that chiropractors are best suited to deal with joint pain and dysfunction. Remember, many joint injuries can be fixed naturally, without risky surgery.

Have you ever awoken in the morning and felt neck stiffness or pain? Have you ever finished some type of physical activity and just didn’t feel comfortable in your neck? How about backing up your car, and you can’t seem to turn your neck far enough to see behind you? These are all typical symptoms of neck problems that are caused by misalignments of the spinal segments in the upper back and neck.

Why does it happen you might ask? The neck or cervical spine, as it is called, is comprised of seven vertebrae. Surrounding these vertebrae are muscles, tendons, and ligaments. If the vertebrae are pushed out of place by poor posture, accidents, or overuse, the muscles and tendons will be forced to stretch too far. This can cause pain and discomfort. Also, this action of the connective tissue can force the spinal segments out of place, putting pressure on the spinal nerves. This whole syndrome can be very uncomfortable, and until the spine and connective tissues are helped back into their normal positions, the pain usually does not go away.

Activities and events that affect cervical biomechanics include extended sitting, repetitive movement, accidents, falls and blows to the body or head, aging, stress, muscle imbalances, and every day wear and tear. Your neck supports the full weight of your head, and moves it in nearly every direction. This flexibility, along with the weight of your head (average is 12lbs), makes the neck very susceptible to pain and injury. Neck pain can range from very bothersome to severely debilitating, and have a variety of causes and can actually cause further conditions if left untreated.

Chiropractic offers the best treatment option for neck pain that is utilized by millions of patients. Chiropractors are doctors who specialize in the mechanical (how the spine moves) and neurological (nerve-related) causes of neck pain. A neck adjustment is a precise procedure applied to the joints of the neck, usually by hand. A neck adjustment works to improve the proper mobility of the spine which helps in restoring regular range of motion. Once adjusted and in proper alignment, patients typically find improved neck mobility, decreased muscle tension, and relief from their neck pain.

At Natural Balance Wellness Center we will develop a specialized program of care that may combine more than one type of treatment, depending on your personal needs. In addition to manipulation, the treatment plan may include heat/ice, stretching, trigger point massage, rehabilitative exercises, or something else. We will do everything we can to give you the best treatment possible., on-site celebrity, or other event? Be sure to announce it so everybody knows and gets excited about it.

Colic, one of the worst words a parent of a newborn can hear.

Your baby cries for hours on end and there is nothing you can do about it. What’s worse than the disturbing, high pitched screaming that doesn’t stop and has no apparent cause, is the fact that there is nothing you can do to help your child when it sounds like they need your help the most.  It’s heartbreaking to hear your baby screaming like it’s in pain, and being able to do nothing about it. Well, almost nothing. This is where chiropractic comes in.

Chiropractic Can Help Relieve Colic Symptoms

Chiropractic care is a conservative, gentle, and very successful option for treating infants with colic. Chiropractic adjustments for infants are specific, gentle, and safe. An infant adjustment utilizes no more pressure than someone applying make up to their face.  Often times, releasing right muscles or restriction in the musculoskeletal system can provide a lot of relief to the growing nervous system. 

It is estimated that nearly 80% of people suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. Back pain is actually one of the most common reasons for trips to the emergency room or doctor’s office. So, why is the low back injured so often? The low back can be an unstable area of the spine due to the amount of mobility it possesses as well as the compression it sustains between the load of the upper body and the low body.

As long as the spine is healthy and functioning correctly, the low back can withstand tremendous forces without injury. Think of a professional power lifter and how they can pick up several hundred pounds off the floor without injuring their low back. However, if the low back is out of adjustment or has weak supporting muscles, something as simple as bending down to tie your shoes can cause a low back injury.

Have you ever had pain doing the simplest of activities? Perhaps you were bending over to pick up a young child, driving in a car, or taking a bath. Maybe your pain occurred after shoveling snow or weeding the lawn. For others it may have been while playing a sport or working out.

All of these actions and many, many more very common activities can aggravate and weaken the lower back. It is easy to know how your back got hurt if you lifted heavy boxes, or suffered from an accident. These are obvious causes. However, the more common causes are the everyday activities that we perform for months and years. Even though they don’t feel painful at the time, they cause micro traumas to our spine. That is, they cause little irritations that, over a long period of time, end up causing significant changes to our spinal structure, weakening the low back until pain and muscle strain occurs.

For many years doctors and researchers believed that back pain would heal on its own. We have learned, however, that this is not true and to actually be quite the opposite. When back pain is not treated, it may go away temporarily, but will most likely return and often return worse than before.

Chiropractors are experts at diagnosing the cause and determining the proper treatment for low back pain. Most commonly, it’s simply a matter of adjusting the lower lumbar vertebrae and pelvis to re-establish normal motion and position of your bones and joints. Chiropractic for the low back has been repeatedly shown to be the most effective treatment for low back pain both for acute and chronic conditions. This makes sense because chiropractic care is the only method of treatment that serves to re-establish normal vertebral motion and position in the spine to correct the cause of the pain.

Low back pain is one of the most common reasons we see patients in our office. Don’t wait any longer, call us today and find the relief from pain you deserve.

Discs are pads that rest in between vertebrae. Their purpose is to minimize impact on the spinal column when movement takes place. The discs also create space between your vertebrae to allow the nerves of your spine ample room to exit the spinal column without irritation.  Inside each disc is a softer, more jelly like component. Several things can occur to make the discs and ligaments surrounding them hurt, swell, or rupture.

The most common reasons for disc injury can be something as simple as normal wear and tear or something serious, such as in an auto accident. A bulging disc is when the outer portion of the disc swells and weakens due to old age. A herniated disc is generally the result of an injury. The disc ruptures causing the soft inside of the disc to leak out and press on surrounding nerves and ligaments. Herniated discs are a common cause of acute low back pain.

• Shooting pain down the leg and buttocks
• Pain when standing
• Numbness or tingling in the leg
• Localized spinal pain
• Severe pain down both legs
• Incontinence  or bowel troubles

Treatment really depends on the severity of your pain and how affected your movement is. The best first approach would be to rest and avoid further injury.  From there, chiropractic adjustments are utilized to establish proper motion of the spine to ease the irritation of the nerves and muscles allowing the disc to heal. It is important to realize disc injuries may take time to heal and each case may be treated differently.  It is very important to get the proper care to not only get out of pain now, but to not re-injure yourself again in the future.

The sciatic nerve is the longest and largest nerve in your body. When it is inflamed, the condition is called sciatica. Not all leg pain is sciatica, but most all sciatica involves leg pain. Sciatica sufferers often have severe pain along the sciatic nerve path, usually in the back of the legs and thighs, although sometimes the pain may also be felt in the ankle, foot and toes.

Occasionally pain is felt in the front or side of the legs, in the hips, or for some hapless sufferers, in both legs. Apart from pain, burning, tingling, prickling, crawling sensations or tenderness may be felt. Ironically the painful leg might feel numb as well!

Sciatica is hell to sufferers. Sleeping, sitting, walking, bending, turning or standing up may be difficult or impossible. Typically, there are very limited positions to keep out of pain and very limited movement without pain.

Chiropractic is a blessing to millions of sciatica and leg pain sufferers. Dramatic relief has been seen after a single chiropractic adjustment, but depending on the severity of the injury most find great relief within a few visits. Often, patients do not realize, the problem is not typically in the leg itself but due to nerve pressure and irritation in the low back. Luckily, the low back is a chiropractor’s specialty. Chiropractic can have a profound effect even on those who have been through the “medical runaround.” Chiropractic can provide excellent results from those suffering from sciatic nerve pain as well as numerous other conditions.

Are headaches holding you back?

If you have a headache, you’re not alone. It is believed that 1 out of 6 Americans suffer from headaches. Some are occasional, some frequent, some are dull and throbbing, and some cause debilitating pain and nausea. What do you do when you suffer from a pounding headache?

Do you grit your teeth and carry on? Lie down? Pop a pill and hope the pain goes away? There is a better alternative! Research shows that spinal manipulation, the primary form of care provided by doctors of chiropractic, may be an effective treatment option for tension headaches and headaches that originate in the neck.

A report released in 2001 by researchers at the Duke University Evidence-Based Practice Center in Durham, NC, found that spinal manipulation resulted in almost immediate improvement for those headaches that originate in the neck, and had significantly fewer side effects and longer-lasting relief of a tension-type headache than a commonly prescribed medication.

Chiropractic adjustments are used to improve spinal alignment, reduce nerve irritation, relax muscle tension, and improve vascular flow to break the cycle of pain. Chiropractic care can provide a natural, safe, and comprehensive treatment plan for conditions like chronic headaches, neck pain, back pain, or muscle tightness to name a few. Patients are provided with an opportunity to put an end to what can be a very disabling aspect to their life and add a considerable improvement in their quality of life.

Knee pain is a very common complaint we see in our office. The knee is a high risk location for injury due to its complex structure. Unfortunately, the source of pain can be difficult to determine. The true cause of knee pain often does not arise in the knee but other areas like the low back, hips, pelvis, foot or ankle. With this in mind it takes a highly skilled professional to assess the condition and develop a treatment plan to not only treat the pain, but the root cause of why the pain occurred.

While pain relievers and muscle relaxers can provide temporary relief they will never help treat the cause of your knee pain or any injury for that matter. Often, they cause further injury and damage down the road due to more activity on an already weak and damaged area. In many cases, patients who feared they would need knee surgery were able to resolve their mobility and pain issues through chiropractic care.

At Natural Balance Wellness Center, we understand the domino effect knee pain can have, triggering other problem areas of pain and tightness as your body attempts to compensate for the knee weakness, pain and stiffness. Through chiropractic adjustments, stretching, exercises, and possible soft-tissue treatments, we can address multiple body structures at the same time. Our goals are to eliminate pain, decrease inflammation, and restore proper joint motion in the knee and other surrounding joints helping to restore balance to the whole body. The result is lasting relief, more activity, and a pain free life.

In healthy conditions, the fascia is a relaxed and wavy muscle covering that has the ability to stretch and move without restriction. Physical trauma, scarring, stress, repetitive micro trauma, poor posture or inflammation cause the fascia to lose its pliability and this causes restriction and tension to the rest of the body.

Myofascial pain can have two sources. Pain can be generated from the skeletal muscle or connective tissues that are ‘bound down’ by tight fascia. In addition, pain can also be generated from damaged myofascial tissue itself, sometimes at a ‘trigger point’ where a contraction of muscle fibers has occurred. In either case, the restriction or contraction inhibits blood flow to the affected structures, thus accentuating the contraction process further unless the area is treated.

Myofascial pain and trigger points can be very painful, stressful, and fatiguing conditions. The chronic tightness and ache from these conditions can actually cause pain in other areas to occur over time. It can affect how you work, your attitude with loved ones, and even limit exercise and recreational activities.

Through chiropractic adjustments the spine and/or extremities of the affected area can be realigned into proper position. Once in proper alignment, often patients notice a decrease in tension and pain from only their adjustments. More moderate or severe cases of this condition may require the use of soft-tissue massage techniques to loosen up the muscle and connective tissue in the injured area. We also, have great success through our cupping method which you can read more about on our site.

Many patients enter the office not knowing what caused their pain. They just know that when they twist their back or move in certain directions, the region between their shoulder blades hurts. Upon examination it is very common to find a thoracic misalignment, or in some cases, a lower neck misalignment that has caused the mid back pain.

Posture and muscle imbalances can also be a major component in causing pain of the mid and upper back. Posture with rolled shoulders and a forward leaning neck is very common in our society due to increased sitting activities. How many hours of the day do you spend seated? (Driving to and from work, sitting at a work desk, eating meals, or at home on the couch to name a few) This can cause severe muscle tension and weakness in your neck and upper back and if left untreated overtime lead to pain as well.

Another cause of mid back pain is rib involvement. Anatomically, the thoracic spine (middle back) attaches to the ribs. If a force affects the ribs, even if the force occurred in the front part of the body, mid back symptoms may be felt because the muscles between the ribs were irritated. Sometimes this can occur when the patient has twisted and bent sideways while lifting or pushing something. Often, patients will remark that they have difficulty with full breaths.

Upper and mid back pain or muscle tightness are common conditions treated in our office. We use chiropractic adjustments, postural exercises, and trigger point therapy to relieve your current pain as well as limit future pain and discomfort. Just remember, muscle relaxers and pain pills won’t fix the cause of your pain only mask the symptoms leading to more injury and pain down the road.