chiropractic Archives - Center for Holistic Medicine

As you age, the likelihood of your knee joints causing pain and discomfort will only increase. Often, this is a result of osteoarthritis — the natural wear and tear of the cartilage between your knees causes it to wear away, decreasing the protective space between your bones. However, many other factors can lead to the chronic pain and stiffness that prompts knee surgery, including overuse, an injury, or a poor diet.

Luckily, many natural remedies exist to increase your mobility, reduce pain and swelling, and build your knee strength. In many cases patients who opt for natural solutions can avoid knee surgery entirely or significantly delay it.

Here are some natural treatments you can try for your knee pain at the Center for Holistic Medicine:

1. Cold Laser Therapy

Cold lasers are non-thermal lasers that are powerful enough to affect the structures of the cells beneath your skin. FDA-approved, cold laser therapy is a non-invasive knee treatment option that involves sending photons of light to tissue cells up to five centimeters below the surface of your skin.

The photons from cold lasers cause a chemical reaction in the injured cells of your knee that helps restore their mitochondrial function. This reduces your knee pain and inflammation in just a few minutes, and the procedure is painless!

Dr. Richard Bisceglie, a naprapathic practitioner at the Center for Holistic Medicine, has seen great results with cold laser therapy. “Laser therapies will reduce inflammation, increase blood flow, and increase lymphatic drainage,” he says. Bisceglie says cold lasers can also cause an increase in the growth of new soft tissue cells in muscles and ligaments, as well as the growth of new bone and joint cells.

2. Chiropractic Adjustments

You might think that chiropractic adjustments are only good for helping your back, but in fact, adjustments to your ankle and hip joints can do wonders to relieve knee pain as well. That’s overuse, poor posture, and injuries can cause your ankle and hip joints to get out of alignment, which can cause pain in your knees.

“Any dysfunction in the hip or the foot can transpose right into the knee,” says Dr. Mitchell Katz, a chiropractor at the Center for Holistic Medicine. “For knee pain, there is a protocol where we use the decompression table to apply gentle traction to the knee joint to separate the bones a bit, creating more space and allowing nutrients to be absorbed to nourish the disk and the cartilage,” he adds.

However, another cause of your knee pain may in fact be your feet. “Before we do anything, I look at the structure of the foot for flat-footedness, to make orthotics if appropriate,” Dr. Katz says. “If the foot is flat, it can cause some bones to rotate as a result. If the structure is not right, everything else you look at is an illusion before you fit the foot with some arch support.”

3. Anti-Inflammation Diet

Eating foods that reduce your inflammation is an effective and affordable treatment option for knee pain as well. “Awareness of inflammatory foods is important for people with arthritis,” says Patricia DeAngelis, a functional medicine practitioner at the Center for Holistic Medicine.

A diet of fresh vegetables high in foods containing omega 3 fats will provide the best benefits. “Eat organic as much as possible,” DeAngelis notes. Patients can check out the Environmental Working Group’s Clean Fifteen and Dirty Dozen guides when shopping for produce.

Foods to incorporate into your diet if you are experiencing knee pain include:

Salmon, tuna, cod, and sardines
Leafy green vegetables
Olives and extra virgin olive oil
Walnuts and almonds
Spices: cayenne, cinnamon, garlic, ginger, and oregano

4. Supplements

In addition to changes in your diet, consider adding these daily supplements to ease knee pain.

Glucosamine & chondroitin sulfate: Dr. Bisceglie advises taking this supplement “to provide more ‘food’ for the joint” if you have osteoarthritis, along with a specialized bone formula.
Omega 3 & turmeric: “We do an omega 3 or fish oil supplement along with a turmeric supplement for inflammation,” Dr. Bisceglie says. Turmeric is a popular spice that contains curcumin as an active ingredient, which possesses anti-inflammatory properties. Omega 3 fatty acids, found in fish oils and walnuts, also have a proven track record of reducing inflammation.
Magnesium: When your joints are injured, your body will induce muscle spasms to contract the muscles around the joint. While this stabilizes the joint, it also blocks blood flow to your knee joints. Magnesium supplements naturally relax your muscles to get the blood flowing again. Dr. Bisceglie recommends patients “use supplements related to the modeling of the bone and soft tissue” in addition to supplements for inflammation to target both the joints and bone simultaneously.

Before you take any supplements, however, it’s best to check with your doctor for specific recommendations.

5. Gentle Exercise
Although you might think exercise will exacerbate your knee pain, in fact, Dr. Bisceglie says doing the right kind of exercise can actually strengthen the muscles that support your knee and lessen your pain.

“Movement has an amazing healing property because it keeps the joint fluid flowing and the joints a little more free, reducing the pain,” he says.

Dr. Bisceglie recommends using ellipticals and bicycling. “Bracing while doing those exercises helps additionally support your knee so you can do the exercises with less pain,” he says.

6. Naprapathy

Naprapathy is a natural method of relieving compression on your joints. When your leg muscles and soft tissues become tight from overuse, that resulting tension puts an additional strain on your knee joints and can cause your bones to rub together. Naprapathy is a technique that involves manually manipulating the soft tissue around your joints to relieve tension, bring blood flow back to the joint, and improve your mobility.

Dr. Bisceglie, who practices naprapathy at the Center for Holistic Medicine, says he also gives patients suggestions for stretches and exercises they can do at home to help relieve pain, too.

7. Acupuncture

Acupuncture has been practiced for over 5,000 years, and the ancient Chinese technique can provide serious relief for patients with osteoarthritis and knee joint pain. Kenji Aoki, a licensed acupuncturist at the Center for Holistic Medicine, says by opening up your meridians and balancing your energy at specific acupuncture points, acupuncturists can alleviate much of the pain associated with common knee joint issues.

In fact, multiple studies in the last ten years have found that acupuncture was more effective than non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs, such as ibuprofen) for treating chronic knee pain and inflammation.

A combination of several holistic treatments can alleviate your knee pain and treat inflammation and tension without the need for surgery. Schedule an appointment with our functional medicine practitioner, Patricia DeAngelis, who can assess your symptoms and refer you to our specialists who can help you heal naturally.

If you’ve ever suffered from chronic headaches, you know that the pain can sometimes be unbearable. The pressure in your head, in the back of your neck or behind your eyes can be enough to make you want to crawl back into bed and call it quits for the day.

When headaches strike, most people try to power through and take some Advil or Tylenol to deal with the pain. But taking too many NSAIDs (non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) over time can lead to serious side-effects, including gastrointestinal issues, heartburn, liver and kidney problems, and even, you guessed it, headaches.

Luckily, there are many integrative treatments that can help you improve your headaches without relying on medication. Here are five holistic treatments you can try.

Drink water
Did you know that one of the most common causes of headaches is simply dehydration? When we’re dehydrated, the brain can temporarily shrink due to loss of fluid, and that can cause the brain to pull away from the skull, causing a headache.

Dehydration can also increase tension in our muscles, and when the muscles around the spine are tense, it can cause tension in our neck and bring on a headache.

That’s why Dr. Richard Bisceglie, a doctor of naprapathy at the Center for Holistic Medicine, says the very first thing he recommends people do when they have headaches is to drink more water.

“People are often walking around in a dehydrated state,” says Bisceglie says.

According to Dr. Gore, founder of the Center for Holistic Medicine, you should aim to drink half of your body weight in ounces per day.

Go to the chiropractor
Another cause of headaches? Muscle tension. If you often work at a computer or do another activity over a long period of time (such as driving), you may be tensing up your shoulders, causing your neck muscles to compensate in the wrong way, which can cause a headache.

“The whole theory behind chiropractic is if you have restricted mobility in one area of the neck, the muscles compensate to that lack of mobility, and when they do that, they don’t work properly,” says Dr. Mitchell Katz, a chiropractor at the Center for Holistic Medicine. “Chiropractic can potentially help with that if you restore function to the spine or the neck.”

Try naprapathy
If you are more comfortable with a long treatment, and your pain is mostly in the muscles and fascia, naprapathy can release muscle tension in your neck and shoulders. Naprapathy involves gentle manipulation of your connective tissue, which runs throughout your body and supports and connects all of your joints, muscles, ligaments and more. When your connective tissue is constricted, it can limit your blood and lymph circulation and interfere with your nerve pathways, causing pain in your head.

“I work on the connective tissue (muscles, tendons and ligaments) to rebalance them to address those tightness patterns in the upper back, back, neck, shoulders and cranium,” explains Dr. Richard Bisceglie.

Try acupuncture
If your headache is due to emotional as well as physical stress, you might want to try acupuncture. Kenji Aoki, a licensed acupuncturist at the Center for Holistic Medicine, says long-term stress can affect blood circulation to the brain, which triggers migraine headaches.

Acupuncture works to affect the way that energy flows through meridians in your body, clearing away blocked energy in some meridians and restoring energy to meridians that are deficient.

Aoki says acupuncture is especially effective in treating headaches. “Usually the success rate is 90 percent. That’s higher than medication,” he says.

Long-term emotional stress can also require behavior therapy, and our integrative approach includes the physical and emotional treatment.

Adjust your diet
Sometimes, headaches can be caused by chemical, rather than physical symptoms. Recently, several studies have suggested that migraines could be caused by our gut bacteria, and that those who suffer from migraines may be more sensitive to certain foods, especially ones that are high in nitrate preservatives, such as hot dogs, bacon, lunch meats, pepperoni and ham. Other foods, such as those high in MSG (such as soy sauce), and sulfates (such as in red wine), have also been known to cause headaches.

In fact, our gut is often referred to as our “second brain” because it is where many of our neurons and hormones are produced, which affect our mood and our brain function. For example, our gut produces the majority of our serotonin, and those who suffer from migraines often have low serotonin levels.

If you’re interested in having your gut bacteria levels checked, schedule an appointment with Patricia DeAngelis, MS, APRN, a functional medicine practitioner and nurse practitioner, at the Center, who can make recommendations about what foods to add or eliminate from your diet to balance out your good and bad bacteria.

An often and overlooked cause of lower back and neck pain is gravity. As strange as that might seem, gravity can be your friend or your foe. The friendly aspects of gravity keep us, and everything on the earth, grounded. It gives weight to objects and and causes physical objects to fall toward the ground when dropped from a height. Without our gravity, the earth and everything within it would be in a state of total chaos. However, because of this weight and the constant downward forces, an unfriendly consequence that gravity will give rise to is compression.

Compression is defined as the application of balanced inward (pushing) forces to different points on a material or structure, which forces, with no net sum or torque directed, so as to reduce its size in one or more directions. When applied to the body, specifically the spine, it can increase or decrease in various positions or postures.

Alf Nachemson illustrated the amount of pressure exerted on the spinal discs in standing, sitting and carrying as opposed to lying. As you can see in the chart below, as soon as we go from lying to standing, the pressure on the discs is 400 percent higher and continues to increase in bending and sitting. Doing other activities such as sitting in a car, running, lugging around a back pack, and carrying a briefcase, to name a few, certainly would see the numbers skyrocket. No wonder back pain is so prevalent!

When the stress of compression exceeds the ability of the body to dissipate these forces, pain will ensue. At this point we diagnosis patients with Spinal Compression Syndrome (SCS). Unfortunately, there are no specific tests to help determine if this is the source of your pain. However, based on symptoms and a comprehensive examination, we can “rule out” other conditions, which by process of elimination, will “rule in” SCS.

There are a few simple tests you can do that can be very helpful in self-determining if you have SCS. Please note that if you are unsure if you are doing the tests correctly, call our office and we would be happy to either talk you through it and/or have you come in for a complimentary consultation.

Test #1
Assume the position of pain and then have someone gently lift your lower ribcage in an axial direction (up towards the ceiling). This is an example of pain when bending to the right side.

Test #2
Sit off the edge of a bench or a bed while supporting your torso on your fully extended arms. Alternatively, you may sit on a chair and support yourself on the armrests.

Test #3
Assume the position of pain and then have someone gently lift your head towards the ceiling.

What treatment can be done to help Spinal Compression Syndrome?

While there are many types of treatment that are effective, which we readily used in our office, such as spinal manipulation, electric muscle stimulation, ultrasound and spinal exercises, it is not our intent list all of them but simply to introduce you to a safe, comfortable and very effective type of treatment that you may not be aware of.

Spinal Decompression Therapy (STD)

SDT is used for the treatment of chronic back and neck pain, spinal stenosis, herniated discs, arthritis. It is a traction based therapy and by proper positioning, spinal discs can be isolated causing a vacuum effect within it, drawing it back from its herniated position. STD will have the effect of creating more space within each individual vertebra which can alleviate the pain of spinal stenosis. Regardless of the cause of your pain, SDT will, by its very unique and specific nature, “decompress” compressed joints, thus alleviating the pain associated with Spinal Compression Syndrome.

Do You Know?

You are shrinking right now. Because the spinal discs absorb water when in a non-weight bearing position, as in sleeping, you are about a ½” taller when you wake up. By the end of the day, the compression caused from standing and sitting, will cause the same discs to lose that water and thus, you are a ½” shorter.

If you’ve ever suffered a serious long-term injury, you know that your natural response is to focus on the area of pain. That seems obvious. But what if the injury is a result of damaged cells in a different area of your body? And what if zeroing in on pre-existing disruptions, or “hot spots,” could reduce recovery time by as much as half?

Dr. Robert Priebe uses Accelerated Recovery Performance (ARP) technology in his chiropractic practice to detect and treat injuries or chronic pain in a surprising way. Rather than approaching injuries as physical breakdowns, ARP Wave technology treats them as electrical failures. And often the areas of breakdown are discovered away from the place of discomfort.

One patient described this seeming disconnect on the ARP Wave website. He writes, “My pain was in the hip joint, but that was only the area of symptom. The true culprit was from several areas in my upper legs and buttocks where there was years of built up scar tissue. In layman’s terms, ARP Wave Neuro Therapy successfully blasted the scar tissue, allowing good blood flow, thus giving my body the ability to heal itself!”

According to Dr. Priebe, ARP Wave therapy is unique in that it’s always done while moving. The first four visits are called “search and destroy.” The machine—which is about the size of a toaster—locates soft tissue areas that are malfunctioning. As the patient does a type of movement that has been bothering him, the machine delivers rapid fire impulses to the muscles through electrical stimulation pads, dispersing or reducing negative functions in damaged cells.

Initially, patients can be afraid to move in the way that’s been causing pain.

“Patients have to understand that they’ll have to fight to regain what their bodies have lost over time,” Dr. Priebe says. “It can work very quickly, but can be intense.”

The treatment, which lasts approximately 15 minutes, causes a strong “pins-and-needles” sensation. The second phase of the treatment is strength building, and phase three is the neurological retraining phrase.

It’s an approach that was developed in the late 1990s by an exercise physiologist named Denis Thompson and became popular with injured athletes who were under pressure to get back in the game.

Pro football players Brandon Marshall, Dwight Feeney, and Jay Cutler have been high-profile advocates of ARP technology, but its use is not limited to athletic injuries. Dr. Priebe uses the FDA-approved ARP Wave machine for detection, recovery, and strengthening the connection between the muscles and the nervous system in patients with many different types of injuries. It’s an excellent option for pinpointing the root of a problem and quickly achieving movement without pain.

“Even after day one you can expect 25 percent improvement, plus improvement in symptoms,” Dr. Priebe says.

He offers a free demo to give a snapshot of what patients will feel during a treatment.

Tag: chiropractic

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Suffering from headaches? Try these holistic approaches

Are you suffering from Spinal Compression Syndrome?

The Surprising Way ARP Wave Therapy Heals Injuries Faster