If a medication helps your headache, or back pain, or knee pain, but your pain comes back, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Not getting immediate relief (or relief that lasts) from pain medication can be frustrating for sure, but it doesn’t mean that nothing can help you. It just means that your problem isn’t the result of a medication deficiency.

Sure, lots of rest and ice packs will make an acute sprain feel better temporarily, but by babying a new injury on the front end, we can actually delay your recovery and make it difficult to regain full mobility and strength. We think there’s a much better way.

Just like nutrient deficiencies, many of us often have movement deficiencies. A whole-food-based diet will keep your body feeling its best, and a full-spectrum movement practice will keep your muscles and joints feeling their best. Our joints were not made to stay in one position — they were made to move! — so if we spend most of our time, day after day in the same position, our joints can become deficient in a particular movement, and they let us know by feeling stiff and signaling pain.

Much like a scab forming on our skin, our backs are constantly trying to patch and heal themselves. We, however, by continuing to repeat harmful movement patterns in our daily lives cause re-injury. We are essentially “picking the scab.” It is unreasonable to expect the body to heal if we continue to provoke it in the same way that led to the original injury.

Treatment will usually start by focusing on pain relief and releasing trigger points in the surrounding muscles. We do this with dry needling or muscle release, or a combination of the two. Because the TMJ is so unstable (remember — it partially dislocates when you open your mouth all the way), chiropractic adjusting of the jaw is usually not indicated.

Have you ever picked up a box, a child, or even something as light as a pencil off the ground and then had immediate low back pain? It’s more common than you might think, but just because it happens to a lot of people doesn’t mean that it makes it any easier when it happens to you. Here’s why the way you’re (probably) currently picking things off the ground isn’t helping your low back pain.

Age is inevitable, but the way you feel is NOT!

This is a pretty common thought of the public. Although adjustments (or manipulation) to the spine and other joints is one of our most effective tools, it is not all that we are trained in or our license allows us to do.

Is my posture bad? Is it the reason I have pain? Should I buy this thing from the internet to correct my posture? 

“My last chiropractor only adjusted me — why don’t you do that?” “Why do you want me to move so much during appointments?” “Why does it matter if I don’t do the exercises at home?” We hear all the time that we’re different, and patients frequently ask us questions like the ones above. We talk about movement a lot, and that’s because…