Every day, millions of adults deal with chronic pain, or pain that lasts for a long time. Prescription medications are often effective for alleviating short-term pain, such as severe headaches or pain associated with muscle trauma. However, they may not work as well for chronic pain. In addition, these drugs may have so many side effects that people with chronic pain often avoid using them. If chronic pain is left untreated, though, it can cause sleep problems, anxiety, depression, difficulty doing everyday activities or other problems. Fortunately, functional medicine offers many treat methods that are drug-free alternatives to help people manage their pain. These may work for short-term pain, as well.
Before you undergo any alternative treatments, check with your chiropractic doctor or health care provider. They can tell you whether these drug-free options might interfere with your current treatments or cause unnecessary side effects. Please read on for more information on some of the treatment methods that can be used in functional medicine care.
Every five years or so a new fitness craze sweeps through the culture. Television news anchors blather on about the latest, greatest exercise programs. Newspapers and magazines publish features in their Sunday sections, filled with pictures of glistening, glowing, glamorous celebrities hard at work on
Which type of exercise is right for me? Is lifting weights going to give me the best result? Maybe I should concentrate on running - that will really help to strengthen my heart. What about yoga - everyone says yoga is good for flexibility. All of us, at one point or another, have had these conversations
While women are learning more and more about cervical cancer and its prevention, another "silent killer" remains relatively mysterious among doctors and patients alike. Ovarian cancer is only the seventh most common cancer among women, but it causes more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive
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Newsletter Library, Back, Body & Joint Pain
You're getting ready to launch your new business. And, being a savvy entrepreneur, you've been spending a lot of time doing research on the Internet. Entering searches, following links, cutting-and-pasting, typing, mouse-clicking, dragging-and-dropping. By the time you're ready to "go live" you've begun
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Newsletter Library, Back, Body & Joint Pain
Your mind has finally stopped racing and you've just nodded off, only to be rudely awakened by a deep knot of sudden pain in your thigh, calf or in the arch of your foot. Athletes and high heel wearers alike are often awakened from sleep by the infamous nocturnal leg cramp or "charley horse." And though
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Common Conditions Treated, Repetitive Use Injuries
Tennis elbow often gets better on its own, but the majority of people who have persistent pain show improvement through non-surgical treatment.
Tennis elbow is actually a misnomer in that it occurs in roughly only five percent of people who play tennis. Anatomically, the cause of tennis elbow is repetitive
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Common Conditions Treated, Herniated Discs
Discs do not actually "slip". Rather, they may herniate or bulge outward. A herniation is a displaced fragment of the center part of the disc.
You may have heard the term "slipped disc" used to describe a low back injury. Discs do not actually "slip." Rather, they may herniate or bulge out from between
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Common Conditions Treated, Herniated Discs
Pain that radiates from your lower (lumbar) spine to your buttock and down the back of your leg is the hallmark of sciatica. Occasionally, sciatic pain in men is caused by sitting on a wallet.
The sciatic nerve is the longest nerve in your body. It runs from your pelvis, through your hip area and buttocks
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Common Conditions Treated, Chronic Condition Relief, Headaches
Tension headaches are the most common type of headache. The pain usually spreads throughout the head so that sufferers feel like they’re wearing a tight band.
Doctors divide tension headaches into two types — episodic and chronic. The episodic variety lasts from half an hour to a week, and recurs
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Common Conditions Treated, Chronic Condition Relief, Headaches
About 36 million Americans suffer from the debilitating headaches known as migraines, according to the Migraine Research Foundation. Women between the ages of 25 and 55 are the likeliest victims. Migraine headaches can last anywhere from a few hours to three days, drastically compromising individuals’
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Common Conditions Treated, Chronic Condition Relief, Headaches
Headaches affect just about everyone at some point and they can present themselves in many different ways. Some people only experience pain in one part of their head or behind their eyes, some people experience a pounding sensation inside their whole head, and some people even experience nausea, while
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Common Conditions Treated, Chronic Condition Relief, Headaches
While no headache is pleasant, cluster headaches can be particularly uncomfortable. Sufferers liken the sensation to a hot poker being stuck in their eyes, and may even feel like their eyes are being shoved out of their sockets.
Cluster headaches get their name because they occur in a cyclical pattern.
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Common Conditions Treated, Back and Shoulder Pain
Chiropractors will always seek to treat shoulder pain with the most gentle and drug-free methods possible. The ultimate goal of chiropractic care for shoulder pain is to bring the patient's shoulder back to full function while reducing and eliminating the pain caused by the injury.
Shoulder pain can
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Common Conditions Treated, Back and Shoulder Pain
Most neck and upper back pain is caused by a combination of factors, including injury, poor posture, chiropractic subluxations, stress, and in some instances, disc problems.
Most people do not realize how much they move their neck during the day until they are unable to do so. The degree of flexibility
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Common Conditions Treated, Auto Accident Injuries
The term "whiplash" was first used in 1928 to define an injury mechanism of sudden hyperextension followed by an immediate hyperflexion of the neck that results in damage to the muscles, ligaments and tendons - especially those that support the head. Today, we know that whiplash injuries frequently do
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Common Conditions Treated, Back and Shoulder Pain
The low back can withstand tremendous forces without injury. However, if the low back is out of adjustment or has weakened supporting muscles, something as simple as taking a bag of groceries can cause a low back injury.
Eighty percent of people suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. Back