Correct Alignment Leads to Better Health

Hope Bentley

Talk of good posture often generates images of women walking in a circle with books balanced on their heads or soldiers standing at attention. But good posture does not have to be rigid or ridiculous. In fact, far from ridiculous, it may be the key to good health.

According to Patrick Wroblewski, a Boulder, Colorado-based structural integration practitioner, “Good posture is a dynamic, working awareness of how gravity is coming down through the body.” In other words, just as the body moves and changes throughout the day, so should posture.

Wroblewski explains that many people come in to his practice with complaints of lower back pain, and stiff necks and shoulders, most of which have a direct correlation to poor posture. If a person sits hunched in front of a computer screen all day, it’s likely the head hovers towards the screen, the lower back has collapsed and the tail bone is supporting the weight, and legs are crossed or splayed. Bad standing posture includes the same hunching or lateral misalignment, like standing with a hip cocked to one side. These common forms of less-than-perfect posture mean less-than-healthy consequences for the body.

Does Posture Matter?

Ever feel low on energy? Get sick often? Experience headaches or digestive upset, like constipation or diarrhea? Feel less agile than you used to be? Your postural habits may be behind these symptoms. Proper posture means (To read “The Rest of the Story”, please click here Summer2021Newsletter)

By Angie Parris-Raney, LMT, Chopra Center Certified

Technology has certainly put us in touch with important information on preventive measures for spreading the COVID-19 virus, such as washing our hands and avoiding contact with those who are sick. However, much of the information is ignoring an essential part to staying healthy—boosting our immune system.

 There is a part of our nervous system that hasn’t evolved far from our ancestors called the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Its purpose is for primal survival, equipping our mind/body to react to danger. When we are charged to respond to a stressor or danger, we are flooded with stress hormones. Our digestion shuts down, and we increase blood and oxygen to the heart, brain, and lungs to flee. Blood pressure rises and breathing becomes shallow. This is called the sympathetic part of the ANS, commonly known as the fight-or-flight response. Feeding the fear loop stimulates the fight-or-flight response and is known to suppress the immune system. Stress over time can begin shutting down other systems of the body.

Thankfully, there is another part to the ANS called the parasympathetic system, known as the rest-and-digest response. The largest cranial nerve of the body, the vagus nerve, innervates from the brain stem to the chest and abdomen. When we stimulate the vagus nerve, we tap into the rest-and-digest response. The heart rate decreases, blood pressure normalizes, breathing is deeper, stress hormones are reduced, and happy hormone production is initiated (promoting sleep, focus, and happier emotions). There are simple methods and lifestyle choices we can make to support our own immunity. We can consciously pull ourselves out of a state of reaction, take back our own power, and ask ourselves what our mind/body needs in this moment to support rest-and-digest.

If you’d like to read “the rest of the story”, please click here BS Spring 2020

According to findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Dermatology, people who eat foods containing high levels of vitamin A have a 17 percent risk reduction for getting cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma—the second-most common type of skin cancer among fair-skinned people. According to Eunyoung Cho, associate professor of dermatology and epidemiology at Brown University, “Skin cancer, including squamous cell carcinoma, is hard to prevent, but this study suggests that eating a healthy diet rich in vitamin A may be a way to reduce your risk, in addition to wearing sunscreen and reducing sun exposure.

Our study provides another reason to eat lots of fruits and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.” Vitamin A-rich foods include apricots, broccoli, carrots, kale, spinach, and tangerines, to name a few.

Read the full study at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190731125417.htm.

Test the Waters

Is Your Skin Dry, or Dehydrated?

By Alex Caspero

Chapped lips, itchy skin, redness, and peeling are all common dry-skin symptoms as winter’s brutal cold and sharp winds settle in for the season. And, while many assume these issues are related to dry skin, it may be more perennial dehydrated skin.

DRY SKIN VS. DEHYDRATED SKIN

As a general definition, dehydration means your body is taking in less water than it’s losing. Therefore, dehydrated skin lacks water—compared to dry skin, which typically lacks natural oil. More simply put, dry skin is a skin type, while dehydrated skin is a condition usually related to other lifestyle factors. Dehydrated skin can affect anyone, regardless of skin type, pore size, or genetics.

Unlike other factors that may contribute to dry skin, like psoriasis or eczema, these conditions don’t cause dehydrated skin. Dehydrated skin can also cause dullness, darker under-eye circles, increased appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, and shadows around the eyes.

LIFESTYLE FACTORS

The usual suspects of prematurely aged skin also play a role in dehydrated skin: smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and too much sun exposure. As both alcohol and caffeine are considered diuretics, reducing (or eliminating) these will benefit both skin appearance and hydration status.

A diet of high-sodium, processed foods and low-water plant-based foods is more likely to (If you’d like to read “the rest of the story”, please click here BS Winter 2020)

Cathy Ulrich

It started as a vague feeling of numbness in her thumb and first two fingers, then progressed slowly to a definite tingling that woke her several nights a week. “It’s not so bad on weekends when I have a chance to rest my arms, but it’s now getting in the way of things I like to do at home,” says Marie, who spends long hours during the work week typing at her computer keyboard. “I love to knit and cook, and I’ve had to curb these activities, as well.”

Diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, Marie displayed the classic symptoms: soreness in her forearms, pain in her hands at the end of a long day at the computer, and a feeling of tightness that had spread from hands and wrists all the way to her elbows. And recently, she’d been getting headaches.

Marie has a couple of different options for treating the problem. “My doctor tells me he can operate, but the surgery isn’t always successful,” she says. “He recommends I try bodywork first.”

Because Marie does the same motion in the same way many times a day over a long period of time, she has literally worn out the tissues involved in that motion. This type of injury — called a repetitive strain injury, or RSI — creates tiny tears in the fibers of the soft tissues of the body. While they don’t immediately cause loss of function, these micro-tears set up conditions for chronic inflammation that will eventually manifest as pain, soreness, tightness, tingling, and burning.

CTS

The hand and wrist combination work together as an amazing, mechanical anatomical wonder. Imagine a set of ropes and pulleys that travel from the…(To read the “rest of the Story”, please click here…) Summer 2019

We’re busier than ever with longer workdays, less leisure time, shorter lunch hours, longer commutes, and more demands than ever before. We may even be in a job that doesn’t fulfill us, yet we spend most of our time there. When the day ends, we have almost no energy left to do what we enjoy. How to find a healthy balance?

Plenty has been written about the therapeutic benefits of exercise. So, why aren’t more people reaping those benefits and moving toward health and well-being? We need to reexamine our notion of what exercise and movement are and consider what we’re moving toward or away from. Then we can begin to ask ourselves other questions: Not just are we fit, but are we physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthy? Are we happy? Do we enjoy how we’re moving through life? How can we integrate more healing movement into our days?

Exercise as “Medicine”
We sometimes see more barriers than options to exercise. But what if we reoriented our point of view to notice where the opportunities lie? We can begin by simply redefining exercise (with its sometimes negative connotation of obligation) to movement. Already opportunities arise: How do we want to move in our bodies and in our lives? How can we have fun doing that? How can we move more (or maybe less, if we need to slow down)? How does it feel to be still? How can we make time to move into pleasure, to move with pleasure? Already, the notion of movement takes on a more healing expression. Rather than simply being another item on our to do list, it becomes a way for us to examine our lives, to see where we can move toward health, and use physical activity as a way to support this.

“When most people think of medicine, they …(to read “the rest of the story”, please click here Fall 2018)

Hazel never remembered my name. She often seemed confused about why I had come to her home, but once I began the hands-on bodywork session, she responded to my touch as if it were familiar. Hazel was 90 years old when her daughter first contacted me, hoping that massage could alleviate the chronic pain her mother experienced as a result of an injury and subsequent surgery to her hip.

I visited Hazel regularly in her home to give her massage. Usually, I worked with her lying face-up in her bed, making ample use of pillows to help her get comfortable. Sometimes she sat back in her reclining chair, and I pulled up a stool beside her to sit on as I worked.

I felt her sense of trust, as she smiled faintly and closed her watery blue eyes. I noticed the steady quality of her breath as she relaxed, letting go of the tension in her body.

When I saw Hazel, I used the nurturing acupressure techniques I developed while working with hospice patients and other elderly clients in my practice years earlier. This approach has come to be called Comfort Touch—a safe, appropriate, and effective form of bodywork for use with special populations, including the elderly and the acute and chronically ill, both in medical settings and home care.

SAFE FOR ALL
Comfort Touch is a nurturing form of acupressure that promotes deep relaxation and relief from pain. For many people with compromised health, conventional massage (with gliding and kneading strokes) can cause discomfort or even injury. Fortunately, for those people with conditions such as arthritis, lymphedema, neuropathy, and fibromyalgia, Comfort Touch is not only safe, but its broad, encompassing compression is very calming to the nervous system. (To read more of this and other informative “quick read” articles, please click here BSspring-2018