The the function of the autonomic nervous system is critical for the health of the body. The autonomic system consists of two branches. 1. The sympathetic system which reacts to stress and dictates a fight or flight response. 2. The parasympathetic system which calms the body down for resting and digesting. […]
Dizziness attributed to the neck has historically been a sketchy diagnosis. For a long time, many ENTs and neurologists denied that it even existed because there weren’t any tests that can confirm as a diagnosis. It lead to a lot of dizzy patients getting normal inner ear/vestibular testing, and a 🤷🏻♂️ diagnosis defaulting […]
Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome or POTS is a form of #dysautonomia. It used to be a rare diagnosis that often left many patients (especially women in child bearing years) left with a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder or hysteria. Thanks to increased awareness of the phenomenon and accessible ways to test for it at […]
The Beautiful Brainstem The brainstem is arguably the most important area of the brain in terms of keeping us all alive. Most medically educated people know that the Brainstem is tied heavily towards our ability to breathe and maintain heart rate. But the Brainstem does so much more! It’s a bottleneck point for […]
Chronic Pain Structurally Changes our Brain Our brains are made up of gray matter and white matter. Gray matter is made up of pools of neurons that are responsible for specific tasks. White matter is made up of axons which carry the information from our neurons to another region of the brain […]
As a chiropractor, I encounter a lot of patients with a variety of pain issues. In school, we learned to recognize a lot of the skeletal changes that can happen in a patient with #rheumatoidarthritis and #ankylosingspondylitis so we had some training with autoimmune disease. However, it wasn’t until my wife was diagnosed with lupus where I really […]
Concussions and Helmets A lot of time and resources have gone into methods to reduce concussion in sports. There’s a lot of speculative stuff out there, but most of it has yet to be proven in a meaningful way. The biggest myth is that newer generation helmets can protect against concussion in football. The […]
This region of the brainstem and upper spinal cord is really important for our perception of our head, neck, and face. This is especially true in terms of pain. Pain experienced in the head/neck/face have strong and fast connections to areas of the brain associated with autonomic and limbic consequences. That means that pain […]
A lot of people have gotten into the stock market in the past year. In many ways, investing and trading can be similar to the healing process. We all wish that our healing and recovery would just go up in a straight line, but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that most of the […]
This month we have had a couple of dizzy patients who have been getting vestibular rehabilitation for a few months, but have continued to struggle with a sense of imbalance and dysequilibrium. They initially had a pretty bad vertigo attack from a likely viral infection, but they haven’t felt vertigo since their initial attack. […]
