Joint pain can stop your activities and depress you, or at the very least make them a lot less enjoyable. Many people in the U.S. experience joint pain on a daily basis. In 2006, the CDC reported that 30% of adults experienced some type of joint pain.

Joint pain doesn’t have to be so prevalent; in fact there are simple ways to combat joint pain that many people don’t take advantage of.

Many people don’t realize that posture, body positioning, and undiagnosed but controllable joint swelling that cause stiffness and pain can be helped naturally. Often medications only mask the problem by dulling the pain sensing nerves or temporarily bringing the swelling down…but there’s a reason your body’s not comfortable or the joints are inflamed. These reasons can be easily spotted by a chiropractor.

To start naturally loosening your joints so you are pain-free, energetic and mobile, you can just look at what Kayla, a chiropractic patient did…

Kayla was suffering from extensive joint pain; so bad that it drained all of her energy on some days. She worked long hours on the computer during most days and thought she was doing well by running regularly almost every evening. She thought that she should be feeling great because of her fitness routine.

However, even though she was fit, many of her joints were still very painful and achy.

She was diagnosed with having rheumatoid arthritis and would regularly pay attention to her blood work and the high inflammation markers seen in the tests.

After following a natural therapy regiment from her chiropractor she finally started feeling pain-free during her days and her amazing energy came back again. She said that the inflammation markers found in her blood work were lower than ever. “My goodness I have never seen it this low since my pain started…” she exclaimed.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to see if you have joint pain that can be helped naturally:

1. Does your body feel worse after sitting for a long time?
2. Do your feet, ankles, knees or hips feel worse after wearing certain shoes? Do they feel better with others?
3. Does your body feel worse after sleeping? After working? After eating bad meals?
4. Do you have aches and pains that stick around and you don’t know what caused them?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, there is a good chance your aches and pains can be resolved by properly balancing your body.

Here are a couple of body balancing tips you can use to feel better quickly:

• Increase your water intake to balance the electrolytes in your body. Water flushes out the toxins that can irritate your muscles and joints and more water will help you think, feel and breathe better…there’s no better joint lubrication for your entire body.

• Get moving; do not let sore joints stop you. Your joints need to move to keep lubricated and healthy. And when you keep moving you also help to maintain a healthy weight. Both of these are beneficial to decrease your joint pain.

• It’s all interconnected…identify and stop food allergies for pain-free joints. If you find that your whole body feels bad after certain meals, you may have a food intolerance or mild allergy that can lead to inflammation (or swelling) in your joints. Be sure to pay attention to how you feel after meals.

• Get examined and treated by a chiropractor. We use “adjustments” to the bones, ligaments, and muscles of your body to move them to what is known as a “homeostatic” state – or a condition where the body is comfortable and moves and functions at its best. We can locate where your body is out of homeostasis and perform the correct adjustment to relax the joints and muscles.

• Consider using glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate supplementation if you have severe joint pain. According to a two year study conducted by the University of Utah in 2010, a dose of 1500 mg glucosamine and 1200 mg chondroitin sulfate daily can help decrease severe joint pain.

• Take care of your back, neck, shoulder, and pelvis posture. This is a tough one to assess on your own, and we do this for many of our clients. It is extremely important that your posture is correct (or very close to it) in order for every area of your body to feel great. If your shoulders are slouched and your neck and head are projected forward, the pain you feel could be in a completely different area of your body – from your back, to your hands, or shooting pain down your legs. Make sure to keep your posture in check.

I love to recommend tips and techniques that help your body feel energized, strong and pain-free. For more great tips and to learn how to evaluate your own posture, check out my free report “10 Questions to See if You are Heading towards a Foot, Ankle or Knee Injury…And How to Prevent it”.

Unknown to many, some foods are the culprits of body pains. Certain foods can cause a mild to moderate allergic reaction in your gut that causes inflammation throughout your body. You may feel this inflammation as pain in your muscles or other areas but most often you feel it in your ankles, knees, wrists, elbows and shoulders.

Decrease Your Joint Pain:

As a chiropractor I can tell if you have an imbalance in the joints of your body that is causing you to feel joint pain. I can recommend tips and techniques that help your body feel energized, strong, and pain-free. Often this involves decreasing the levels of inflammation in your body so your joints move properly.

One effective way to decrease your pain is to figure out whether you are eating some of the major inflammation-causing foods we list below and determine if they are affecting you.

Foods that can cause joint pain:

There are foods that cause sensitivities such as mild to moderate acid reflux disease, hives, itching, trouble with breathing and achiness in your joints…often at low levels. We are not talking about major food allergies where you swell up and can’t breathe, but mild symptoms that are often easy to overlook when you’re busy or distracted, but enough to bring you down.

The sensitivities that your body may have to these foods are as unique as your fingerprint. While you might feel symptoms to some of these foods, your friends or relatives are untouched when they eat the same thing.

You may feel low levels of body pain or other disturbing symptoms. Sometimes these symptoms are so mild that you just think your energy is off or your joints are acting up for the day, but underneath it all is chronic inflammation which can lead to pain and issues over time. Studies have even linked chronic inflammation to heart disease. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC27435/)

By looking at your food choices and comparing them to how you feel, you can test the levels of inflammation that the following foods may cause you.

Here’s a list of some of the top inflammation causing foods:

• Gluten (wheat products)
• Milk
• Eggs
• Peanuts
• Refined sugar
• Vegetables of the Tuber Family: Potatoes, beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, and yams. Unless they are cooked and peeled thoroughly, they can be toxic to your body. They contain glycoalkaloids which can initiate pain and produce headaches or stomach cramping when these vegetables are not prepared correctly.
• Processed foods (which may contain hidden elements of the foods above or other chemicals your body doesn’t handle well)

Test these foods yourself:

You can systematically test your body’s reaction to these foods by keeping a journal and jotting down how you feel up to 12 hours after you eat them. Do this test with one inflammatory food at a time. Some symptoms you may have and want to take note of are: muscle tension, headaches, joint aches, joints are cracking a lot, stomach pain or bloating, skin rashes, a decrease in mood, or an increase in anxiety.

When you notice that one symptom keeps reoccurring after eating a certain food, try eliminating that food for up to two weeks and record how you feel in your journal during that time.

Some of the notes you can make are whether your joints feel strong and less “crack-y” or “achy”, if your moods have improved, if you have more energy, if you feel lean and bloat-free in your stomach, or how your normal aches and pains are now feeling (Are you still having headaches? …swelling in joints? …muscle tension or other pains?).

You can have more happy and pain-free days when you get to the bottom of what’s been dragging you down, deflating your energy, or decreasing the strength and balance of your body. With our help you can stop feeling pain and fatigue because of your achy joints. One easy visit with us can get you on track to clearing your body of joint imbalances so you feel exquisitely pain-free.

Call us at (610)216-0790.

Have you been craving some unhealthy foods lately?

It happens to the best of us, even the seasoned runners and athletes. We sometimes feel like we deserve to eat what we want because we exercise regularly.

Unfortunately, a poor diet can drive your leg and even back muscles into spasm with piercing pain.
Our bad food cravings can drive us to eat a poor diet because nature is telling you that you need certain nutrients while your instincts are telling you that you are just really hungry. Because of this, you can often find yourself choosing the worst foods because they make you feel full and satisfied for the moment, but they don’t cover the nutritional requirements that healthier foods would meet.

In our office we see people who get horrible cramps and piercing pain in their muscles. We often find that there are two things happening, their body is imbalanced and they need some body work and light joint adjustments to get their feet, knees and back feeling better again. They also need better nutrition and consistent hydration to support their muscles so their bodies are stronger. When both of these causes of muscle pain and cramping are addressed, our clients get better very quickly.

Here are some of the foods you may be craving right now that can actually worsen your muscle cramps:
 Chocolate

 Alcohol

 Carbonated Drinks

 Oily, fatty foods

 Acidic foods

If you look at the list above and find that you are craving some of these foods, you are likely doing so because you are lacking at least two major nutrients in your daily diet – “calcium” and “magnesium”.
Here are some of the food sources that are good for you and can help stop your muscle cramps:

• Raw sesame seeds
• Raw pumpkin seeds
• Yogurt
• Milk
• Sardines
• Chinook Salmon
• Kale
• Broccoli
• Cooked soy beans
• Boiled Swiss chard
• Boiled spinach

Buy some of the groceries above and create a plan to get a lot more of these foods on your menu each day to settle your muscles and make your body feel better.

If you’re running or doing a lot of strenuous activity for a longer period of time, there is one major reason you get cramps during activity. This is, you are losing a lot of water and sodium in your sweat, make sure you rehydrate regularly with electrolyte and sodium-infused beverages to keep muscle cramps away.

These tips can be one key ingredient to putting an end to your muscle cramps. Having us check your body over to create balance in your muscles, joints and posture so they move and feel better is the other most important choice you can make. We can help you feel better quicker.

Call us at (610) 216-0790 to take advantage of our “Athletes Foot, Ankle and Knee Evaluation” or for other body aches and pains you are experiencing.

Body pain and tension are what you feel when you get cramps in your legs, pain in your feet, knees and hips or pain in your back and neck during the day.

Often you don’t know why you feel the pain, it kind of sneaks up on you. But you feel it most when you’re relaxing and not doing anything else, like at night or while you’re sitting.

Many of my clients have found relief at our office and quickly learn how to decrease the pain on their own with what we teach them. With our help, they are able to take care of some of their major body imbalances.

These imbalances are from:
• muscles pulling
• bones stuck and not moving smoothly within the joints that surround them
• nerve irritation
• or joints not providing the proper cushioning because of lack of proper movement

There are things you can do on your own to manage some of these painful body imbalances.

Take a look at one of my body tension stretches. I love to share these tips to help you deal with many of the common pain symptoms I hear about.

The “Back and Hip Pain Relief Move”

Start in a standing position. We’re going to stretch the core postural muscles, called the Psoas muscles, which connect your legs and back and allow you to raise your leg at the hip joint. This muscle can tighten up when you sit too long which leads to pain in your hip and lower back, especially at night.
Action Step: Get into a lunge position with one foot forward and one back while you face forward. Lean your body back to fully stretch the muscle. Hold this stretch for 10 deep breaths. Do the same on the other side

For those suffering from achy and painful legs, take a look at how knee problems can lead to future pain. To find out the surprising information about what your body’s secretly up to, take our free quiz: “10 Questions to See if a Major Foot, Ankle, or Knee Injury will Stop Your Activity (and How to Prevent It)”.

One rough experience I had years ago caused me to decide on a career as a chiropractor.

It all started after high school when I was trying to decide what college to attend and major to pursue. I didn’t have a specific school in mind but all required a wellness physical as part of the application process. So to get things started I decided to get my entry physical and vaccines completed.
When I took this innocent step, I didn’t know what I was in for; a whole summer of pain and the worry that this was “it”.

I received a vaccination that most people get without any side effects. For me however, it ended up causing a severe and violent reaction. As it turned out I was allergic to a dye in the vaccine.
I lost lots of weight, had no appetite, suffered from dizziness, breathing problems and a high fever and couldn’t get the symptoms to go away. Doctors seemed to give up on me and could offer no solutions.

When I was at my worst, my friend suggested I go along with her to the chiropractor. After some time watching them and learning about how a properly working and balanced body can heal itself, I let him treat me too.

I am so lucky that I found this chiropractor. He didn’t give up on me and offered the solution of freeing my body from the tensions, imbalances and pain that ultimately led to my recovery.

This was quite an experience for me, and is why I’m a chiropractor today.

Have you ever thought about what your body has been dealing with lately? Why it might be achy, painful and unhappy?

I often see clients who experience pain that prevents them from accomplishing even normal activities. Over time this can also take a mental and emotional toll.

Just the other day, one of my clients was so relieved to learn that I deal with sports related injuries and not just back pain. For me, I know it’s all important. If you or someone you know is suffering from similar ailments, give us a call – a chiropractic evaluation and treatment may be just what you need.