Posts Tagged ‘New Fairfield Pain Relief’

Welcome to Chiropractic Life and Wellness Center's New Fairfield Pain Relief Archive. Here you can learn more about Chiropractic Life and Wellness Center, Chiropractic, and Dr. Brandon Chorney, today's choice for Chiropractors in New Fairfield, CT. Read Dr. Brandon Chorney's Chiropractic New Fairfield Pain Relief for the health of it.

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Speeding Up Recovery Time

by | Jun 18, 2013 | Health Articles

New Fairfield Nutrition Advice

Speeding Up Recovery Time

For most people, recovering from a broken bone is an exercise in patience. For an active person, being told that you have to significantly reduce or cease activity in order to let the bone heal is equivalent to torture. However, there are a few things you can do to help speed the healing process so you can get back to your normal activities as soon as possible.

Stop taking NSAIDs (Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) for Pain Relief

When cells are damaged in a fracture, large amounts of prostaglandins are released. Prostaglandins are a group of lipids made at sites of tissue damage or infection that are involved in dealing with injury and illness. They control processes such as inflammation, blood flow, the formation of blood clots and the induction of labor.   Although this is what causes you to feel the pain, the production of these lipids are also instrumental to the early stages of tissue repair.

Here is the catch.  In order to alleviate pain, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are prescribed to stop the action of prostaglandins, but the prostaglandins are quintessential to the healing process.   The best suggestion would be stop taking the NSAIDs as soon as possible after suffering a broken bone.  Alternatively, you could take a non-NSAID pain medication such as acetaminophen for pain relief, for it does not have the same effect on prostaglandins.

Stop Smoking

The broken bones of people who smoke take longer to heal. The smoke reduces blood flow, therefore reduces the amount of nutrients and oxygen getting to the injury site. The chemicals released in the blood from smoking damage the cells that form bone.   This process and significantly decrease healing time or prevent complete healing altogether.

Get more Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin D and Vitamin K

These vitamins and minerals are all integral to healthy bone growth. We have all heard about how important calcium is in the diet, but if you take a lot of calcium without accompanying it with magnesium and vitamins D and K, much of that calcium will not be absorbed by your bones. Dark green leafy vegetables such as spinach, kale, collard greens and Swiss chard are among the best sources of not only calcium, but magnesium and vitamin K as well. If you live in a sunny climate, you can get a good supply of vitamin D by sitting in the sun for 15-20 minutes a day with arms and legs exposed and using no sunblock. For those who live in less sun-drenched locations (and those of us waiting out the winter months), you can get vitamin D from fortified milk products or you can take a vitamin D supplement.

Reduce Your Sugar and Caffeine

Caffeine and sugar both increase the excretion of calcium from the bones by 25-50 percent. So try avoid the comfort foods!

Increase Your Intake of Protein Rich Foods

Nearly half of the compounds that make up your bones are comprised of protein. In order to give your bones the building blocks they need to speed healing and minimize further bone loss, incorporate more healthy protein into your diet, such as beans, nuts and fish or chicken.

Healing takes time but if you keep these simple tips in mind, you may find yourself up and about before you know it!

Understanding Steroid Injections

by | Jun 13, 2013 | Health Articles

exercise New Fairfield

Steroids are organic compounds that are produced naturally in the human body.  They’re also produced by other animals, plants and fungi.  Within humans, steroids are used to produce several different hormones that are important to the body’s proper functioning.

Outside of natural human physiology, there are also drugs called anabolic steroids, whose purpose is to increase muscle mass and improve athletic performance.  Athletes and trainers in high-level amateur and professional sports sometimes turn to steroids to get an unfair edge over the competition.  Most official sports organizations disapprove strongly of this practice (regarding it as cheating) and many maintain education and testing programs to discourage it.

Finally, steroids can also be manufactured for use in medicine.  Perhaps the most commonly used steroid injections are those used to treat pain—corticosteroids.

Natural corticosteroids are produced by the body’s adrenal glands and are responsible for governing the stress response (fight or flight).  They also play an important role in maintaining a healthy immune response and for the metabolism of protein and carbohydrates.  But the key condition it regulates is inflammation.  This is the reason why steroid injections are so popular among those suffering from chronic pain.

Corticosteroids are not actually painkillers. Their action is merely to reduce inflammation, which, in turn, usually helps to reduce pain for some weeks.  Two types of steroid injection are commonly used for pain relief: epidural and articular.  In an epidural steroid injection, the steroid is injected into the base of the spinal column between the dura (the protective covering of the spinal cord) and the vertebrae.

An articular steroid injection, as the name implies, is when the drug is injected into the shoulder, knee, hip or ankle.  It can also be injected into smaller joints such as those in the hand and foot.  This should be done at a frequency of once every two to four weeks for a period of up to three months only.  The effect can usually be felt within a few days, with relief lasting for a number of weeks.  With physical therapy such as chiropractic care, many people can experience a significant reduction in pain or be pain-free after a course of steroid injections.

The best candidates for receiving steroid injections are those patients who have had severe, persistent pain in the neck, back, arm or leg that has not responded to more conservative treatments (such as physical therapy, massage and anti-inflammatory drugs) for some weeks.  Epidural steroid injections have become more common in cases involving sciatica, herniated disc, spondylolysis, spinal stenosis and degenerative disc disease.  These injections can also be useful in treating cases of bursitis and tendonitis.

In cases of lower back pain, however, studies have found that steroids are often no better than a placebo.  Chiropractic spinal manipulation is a safer and likely more effective form of treatment.  If you do decide to give steroid injections a try in an attempt to manage your pain, you should at least consider combining it with chiropractic care.  If the steroids are able to reduce your pain in the short term, regular chiropractic adjustments can help to reduce the likelihood the pain will return again in the future.

When It Feels Like a Pinched Nerve But It Isn’t

by | May 21, 2013 | Health Articles

New Fairfield Pinched Nerve

Most people that have experienced this painful condition will call it a "pinched nerve", exclaiming, "it feels like I've pinched a nerve". However, the majority of the time there's a bit more going on! Between each of the bones of the spine there are a pair of openings, which are individually called the intervertebral foramen or ...

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