Posture is the shadow of your brain's health

Did you know your posture can be a leading cause to brain stress.  on this week's ask the chiropractor we talk about the effects of bad posture and what it could be doing to your brain.   Spinal fluid flow, arthritis, and venous flow are all discusses.  #healthy815

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- Hello and welcome to another edition of"Ask The Chiropractor." Recently, here in the chiropractic clinic, we were asked a question about posture. It says, "Chiropractors, how important is posture?". So we always encourage people to go ahead and ask us questions, leave us questions and we do our best to get back to you as soon as we can and this what this segment is here, it's called "Ask The Chiropractor." So the patient comes in and ask us a question that we feel would be just a good question to share with everybody, or when someone emails a question we try to address it here. We've always said if you have a question for a chiropractor you should ask a chiropractor. So this is "Ask The Chiropractor." So back to the posture. So people ask me, "How important is posture?". When I see somebody walking, a lot of times I'll look at my friend and say,"Oh, that person has an L4 problem, or that person, look at the way they're leaning, that person has a really swollen spot on their neck.". So somebody at one time told me that posture is the shadow to the health of your brain. So it's really interesting how important posture is. The one thing we do here with posture is, when we bring you into the clinic, we have you stand on a platform. The tables gently lowers you down, and as you lowers it down, we look at you as you're lying down and we see a high shoulder, we see a low shoulder, we see a hip that's up in the air, or maybe a foot that's having a hard time hitting the table, or even a leg that's maybe.... Maybe your hips are totally shifted to the left side of the table not the right side of the table. It gives us great clues of where to adjust you especially based on your x-ray films. We put those two things together and give you a really, really good adjustment. But posture does other things too. Posture has a way to accelerate the arthritis in the spine. Especially in the neck, the cervical spine. What happens is, the human head weighs the same as a bowling ball, and whenever we sit, we roll our shoulders forward, our head comes out like this, and what that does is, it increases the stress in the bottom two vertebraes. See normally, your neck has a nice round shape to it which acts like a shock absorber, in taking the weight and everything, but when you lose that and it's a straight up and down curve and your head goes forward with the weight of a bowling ball, all that weight translates into the bottom two vertebraes. That's a lot of stress on those two. And what happens is, those two will start to lock up'cause of the extra stress. And we've talked so many times before about the key to discount this motion. So when you move around and you bend and twist like that, the muscles around there are contracting and pushing nutrients into that joint space. But with the bad posture, that's not happening and those discs are drying up. And as they dry up, that's when the arthritis kicks in. So people with really really bad posture tend to accelerate the onset of osteoarthritis in their necks, especially in their necks. The lower backs too, but today's world is more and much more of the neck. Let me talk about one more thing here too. It talks about posture. You see that we are upright. We stand upright on two legs, we have curves to our spine, and this all keeps the spinal cord right where it's supposed to be. And the spinal cord comes down, and as it goes down, it has nerves that exit it in different levels. The other thing that the spinal cord has is things called dentate ligaments. And the dentate ligaments, they shoot out and they attach the spine. They anchor the spine down inside the spinal canal, inside the bones, and the dentate ligaments right there. The problem we see is that, when we lose our posture we go forward, and now what happens there's a tugging on the spinal cord because we've altered our posture. And if we add a twist and turn on top of that, there's just so much tugging and yanking on the spinal cord now'cause it's started at bad posture, bad position that just increases the stress to it. And these dentate ligaments they're not gonna reform or regrow, they're gonna stay right where they are. So as you increase the stress you increase the pulling on the spinal cord. Literally the pulling on the spinal cord. And this could create all kinds of havoc, especially when you remember what the spinal cord's attached to. It's attached to the brain, right?'Cause it directly touches the brain. In the bottom of our skull, we have a thing called the foramen magnum. It's a big hole where the spinal cord comes out, part of the membrane. And what happens is as we go forward like that, the dentate ligaments, they stay ahold, they don't let go, and as we go forward, the spinal cord it could do one of two things. It could pull up from the bottom or it could pull down from the top. And because we're all the way near the top, it's gonna pull down more from the top. That's just the pull on our midbrains, that's the pull on some of our mechanisms that we have at the base of our skull. And one of the really areas that we've seen recently chiropractic research that it really affects, is the spinal fluid flow. There was a time when we had basically analysis on how the spinal fluid work and how it doesn't work, and today we've updated that tremendously. It has a lot to do with the inner strain, the blood coming outta your head. It uses those channels too and goes through filters. And that's kinda how it gets rid of the toxins around the brain so... And also the spinal fluid will pump nutrients into the brain. So if we have a problem with our spinal fluid, we have a problem with the overall health of our brain. So we see is that when we go forward like that, those dentate ligaments pull on the spinal cord, they pull on the midbrain coming through the foramen magnum, there could be all kinds of problems with getting nutrients in and out of the brain. We've (indistinct) the work of Scott Rosa; he's a famous chiropractor that helped Jim McMahon go back to being Jim McMahon. He actually has a motion MRI machine and he can actually see the spinal fluid come and go. And he sees that when the top bones in the neck are under so much stress from posture issues, that the spinal fluid flow actually stops. And so what he did with Jim McMahon... And you can look this up this is a "30 by 30" about '85 Bears where he does this whole breakdown on this. He has a special adjustment to that he does way up inside the right and base of the skull. And he was able to do that adjustment. He was able to get the spinal fluid flowing again. Jim MCMahon described it like having his brain flushed like a toilet bowl flushes. All the old spinal food came out, all the new stuff came rushing right back in, and he started to finally get relief of his headaches and his injuries he had from all those head shots he took. So it's real interesting for us to watch this. So posture's very important when it comes to spinal fluid flow. When you lean the head flow like that can really, really choke it off. Not only that, but now we're also putting pressure on the veins, in the arteries coming in and outta the neck too.'Cause look they get moved around, shoved around too. And so now we have a blood deficit going up and this drainage flow problem coming out, and we're getting a lot of stuff backed up in the brain. And now today we're seeing more and more people with brain health issues, mental health issues, Alzheimer's, dementia and stuff like that. Maybe there's a correlation between your posture and that stuff. So what here in the clinic what we'll do is, when we take a look at your films we'll get a really good idea of your posture, and we're actually gonna send you home with exercises and stretches to work on. My simple, favorite one, if you wanna know two easy ones to do to make your neck better real quick; one, to go up against the flat surface, the floor, the wall, have everything touch the flat surface and look out, your face is up, and with your hands, and your shoulders, and your head, and your hips and everything touching, give 25 big snow angels every day. And that helps change the fact that we all day hunched over looking at screens, or driving, or looking in front of us as we work. So 25 big snow angels every day is huge. The other thing I ask everyone to do, is stand up from time to time and bringing your chin retracted. Not like looking down the ground, just straight back. Make sure you straight back, then what you do is, you squeeze your shoulder blades together, so like you're wanna hold the grape fruit behind your shoulder blades, and then when you... While you got 'em there and while you're holding 'em together, try to slide 'em down like you gonna put 'em in your back pockets, and hold that for a good 10 count. And I always tell everybody that I knew a world we would do that every 30 minutes of sitting, you stand, pull down and then hold 'em down. So some of the neat things I'd seen here over the years and I talked about your posture being a shadow to the health of your brain. When I first started working here, I was also working with my father, and he had many many years of experience, and we had a patient come in. And this is a patient that used to come quite a bit, but for whatever reason we didn't see her for a couple years. And she came back in and the one thing I noticed about her was, I said,"Wow, look at how bad her posture got." Cause she used to keep her ears above her shoulders the way you supposed to, but when she came in her chin was all the way forward. It looked like she was about ready to fall on her face. Her neck posture was so forward I thought she was gonna fall down. So this is what happened is, she had left us and she started going out and getting tons and tons working with medical doctors neuro kinds of stuff, all kinds of medicine and psychiatric drugs and stuff like that. And those things are pretty toxic stuff. And there's a place for 'em, but they're really, really really toxic stuff that goes on there. So what happens is that forehead posture is just going out more, more and more, it weighs on a more and more, more, it pulls in that brain more and more, more. My father looked at me'cause that's too bad. So what's the matter. He said that she's got so much drugs, and so damage was done to her spine"Look at what it has done to her posture looks like she's gonna fall over." He goes, "I don't think she'll live for another month." And just by looking at her posture, he was able to predict that. Unfortunately she passed away within two weeks. It's just amazing to me now that I've been in practice for almost 20 years, I see the same stuff. I see people walking around, I see their posture and stuff like that. When I haven't seen the patient in a really long time and when they come in the office and I see em like that, I know that they're in crisis mode and I know it's time to get real aggressive. So I'm not saying everyone's that leans forward like this is gonna have a problem like that, I talking about somebody who never leaned forward like that and now all of a sudden they're totally like that, now's the reason to be concerned. And there's other reasons it happens too. Maybe they got a car accident, they just have a swollen joint... So don't read too much into that. But yeah. I heard this quote over the weekend,"That your posture is a shadow to your brain's health." That's immediately who I thought of. I thought about that story from 18 years ago, whatever it was 19 years ago with my father. It was pretty neat to see that... Actually, not neat to see somebody pass away, but it was neat to see his intuition was actually right, judging at their posture. So yeah, posture is huge to us. So if you know someone that spends way too much time hunched over with their chin out in front of them, or their shoulders rule forward, that's a great reason to go see a chiropractor and get your spine checked.'Cause it could be ... Long term it could have some serious effects with the spinal fluid flow, the arterial venous flow in and outta the brain, and just the overall pulling on the brain. Just imagine that that brain stem being pulled down, that hole's only so big, and what happens, the brain stem it's narrow as it comes out. But if you're pulling on it like this coming straight down, you're gonna clog that. So it's gonna actually literally clog it. But there are chiropractic adjustments that can help with that. Some of what we can do here, some of them I know as specialists in Chicago that can help you if that's the case. So those dentate ligaments are really strong and are not gonna give up their fight. If you have a question about chiropractic or a question for the chiropractor, go ahead and leave a comment below. We'll get back to you, answer your question as soon as we can. I see some friends of mine have joined us on our little live here. If you're watching live with me, my friends, other chiropractors across the world joining us, watching us... I was to spend the weekend with the chiropractors from all over the world working on legislative matters, political matters in the future of our profession. So it's always fun. But if you have a question about chiropractic about the chiropractic care for you or somebody you know, ask a chiropractor, don't ask a dentist, don't ask your family doctor, ask a chiropractor. Go and leave a message below, I'll see your message below and I'll be happy to give back to you and hey, maybe next week I'll be answering your question, Until then stay at one piece, if you have any issues, let us know, talk to you real soon. Bye-bye.