Posture Braces

Ask the Chiropractor- Do those posture braces actually help correct forward head posture?  Dr Hulsebus shares his thoughts.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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- Hi, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, and welcome to another edition of "Ask The Chiropractor." The last couple weeks, I've been putting up some research to validate some of the questions I've been getting and to show you why the answer I gave you, where it comes from. This week, I'm not gonna do that, this week it's a little different question. Often, I get asked a question about posture, and I get asked these questions about these straps that people are selling now, that are designed to pull your shoulders back and lock you into good posture. And a lot of people wanna know,"Hey, you told me I got bad posture, I have what you call forward head posture. My shoulders are rolled forward. Is this strap a good idea for me to change my posture?" So let's talk a little bit about the posture first, how does one get that forward head posture, and what do I mean by forward head posture? Well, the human head weight is the same as about as a bowling ball. So if your head's out over your, forward like this all the time, leaning in front of your shoulders, that weight gets to be heavy after a time and what happens is we lose our good neck posture, our neck's curve, nice neck curve, nice neck curve, say that three times. You get a nice round neck curve like this that holds your posture, and what happens is when your neck has a nice curve to it the human head weighing 10 pounds, or whatever, eight pounds, that weight gets distributed evenly amongst all the vertebraes, but when your head starts to stick out forward your neck goes straight, and when your neck goes straight all that weight crash on the bottom of your, the bottom couple cervical vertebraes instead of being distributed evenly, and that starts to make the base of your neck have problems. The nerves that come out the base of your neck go into your hands and your fingertips and they innervate that area, so a lot of people can develop shoulder pain, arm pain, hand pain, all from the head coming forward and the shoulders rolling forward with them. Again, every time I sit down to type or drive a car, or read a book, or use my phone, I stick my head out forward and roll my shoulders forward. So here as chiropractors, we always talk about standing up, squeezing your shoulder blades together, count to 10, trying to help your posture and fix your posture. Again, these are things that we're gonna do all day long, driving a car, reading a book, sleeping on your side. All these things create this really, really bad posture, so we always have to fight back against it. Now, when I talk about this bad posture building up and causing these problems, I wanna kind of do a little parody here of like relate to something else, analogy. Does it take, when you smoke one cigarette you don't get lung cancer, when you smoke the cigarettes your whole life you get lung cancer, right? So sitting behind a desk one day isn't gonna cause your neck and shoulders to roll forward and create this problem, it's doing it over and over and over again, day after day after day, wether at home, at work, driving to home, driving to work, sitting all day in school, using, reading books all the time. These things all add up over time and we see a slow migration of your posture going from a nice round neck curve, ears above your shoulders, to your head sticking forward and your shoulder is rolling forward. And then this leaves you in a vulnerable position, this in itself usually doesn't create massive amount of discomfort or pain, but it trains you to stay in a vulnerable position. So now what happens is, now I sleep wrong, now I turn my head quickly, now I get an accident, now I grab a heavy bag, now I brush my teeth, now I get neck pain. A lot of people say,"I can't believe just by brushing my teeth or lifting that bag, I'm having this pain." No, what happened was months and months or years and years of having bad posture left you a vulnerable position, and lifting the heavy items, sleeping the wrong way, doing the thing, that created neck and shoulder problems. So, but this, everyone's trying to understand what chiropractors are saying about this now and someone's created a product that like wraps around your shoulder blades and hooks up behind you, and it tries to have you maintain good posture all the time. Well these are an interesting idea and I kinda like the thinking, the logic behind it, but unfortunately what happens is, let's say I break my leg and I put my leg in the cast and I wear the cast for six weeks. When they take the cast off my leg the bones healed but is my leg stronger or weaker? Well, my leg is significantly weaker because it hasn't done any work, the cast has been doing everything and my muscles atrophied or shrunk, or reduced, because the cast has been doing the work my leg has not had to, and that makes me like weaker and this is why we have to do physical therapy and stuff after we go through a process like this. So if I was to put a strap on that, maybe maintain my posture and I take the strap off am I strong enough for having the strap do all the work, kinda like to cast it for the leg? No, I'm usually weaker, I usually get more forwardness when I take it off now, because I haven't actually worked on the muscles that maintain my posture, I haven't really done the muscle reeducation to change my muscle memory to maintain good posture. So am I a fan of these braces and harnesses? Not really, because they don't really train you to do anything. When I was a kid a lot of the kids had scoliosis braces, where they'd put these giant plastic things going from their waist up to their armpits,'cause they had the scoliosis and they wanted to make their scoliosis, tried to straighten it or support it. Well, the problem was when they turned 18 they're like,"Okay, now you can get rid of that ugly brace." And the kids just couldn't wait to rip those braces off and get rid of 'em, but what happened was when they got rid of the braces the scoliosis actually got worse, because when you were wearing the brace they didn't make the muscle up to maintain the posture and keep it strong, they actually didn't have to use those muscles at all and those muscles got weaker and atrophied more, and the scoliosis curves got worse. And that's why you don't really see these big braces anybody wear anymore, because we kinda learned maybe those weren't the best thing, maybe just making your back stronger was a better idea, or doing some better stretches and exercises, and visiting your chiropractor. So these whole braces they're wearing now with the posture, they're real hot item right now, I get asked about them all the time and I'm just gonna say I'm not a fan of them, I'm more of a fan of doing the exercises and stretches that maintain your posture. So if you feel like you have forward head posture, ask your chiropractor, your chiropractor can answer that question for you. And for the rule of thumb, you know, when I go lecture at the schools I tell all the kids, you know, after 30 minutes of sitting,"Stop, retract your chin, don't bring your chin looking down just bring it straight over your shoulders then stand up and squeeze your shoulder blades together really tight for 10 seconds." This is the opposite of the sitting posture. Now when I see a lot of people instinctually wanna do is they want to bring their arm across their chest and like pull on their shoulder, try to stretch it out a little bit, but unfortunately that's actually encouraging the bad posture that we already had. So that's actually the last thing you wanna do, you actually wanna do more about pulling it backwards, just the opposite. I don't know why instinctually we all do that, but we all do it, but that's a really bad stretch to do because you're actually encouraging the bad posture by doing it, so you wanna stand up and squeeze your shoulder blades together and count the 10. So do I like the braces? I like the idea behind the braces but the actual practice of it doesn't really work. So if you have a question about, you know, if this is an area that bothers you a lot, the way I describe this slide is either your hands are going numb, you've got some shoulder pain, reduced range of motion, sometimes up between your shoulder blade and your neck it kind of feels like a knuckle on the inside trying to dig its way out. There's a lot of ways different people explain this pain and discomfort. Another thing that's common with this is headaches, so if you have this and you have headaches, you go see the chiropractor, the chiropractor will take some x-rays of your spine, see what's going on, evaluate your posture through the x-ray exam. Then they'll do some chiropractic adjustments, try to loosen up your neck, make it move a little bit better. Then the chiropractor should introduce you to some posture exercises to help maintain your posture and hold onto it. Unfortunately, it's ongoing, right, because you're always gonna be sitting, you're always gonna be driving a car, so this isn't something you can just like go and do a little bit and then quit and say,"Okay, I'm done now." It's something you have to do the rest of your life, unless, you know, I tease, unless you become a park ranger and you're on your feet all day walking around, then you don't have to worry about it. But if you decide to sit down and write your memoirs, you better do it a lot. So the chiropractor will walk you through all this stuff, so are these little tricks, this little sling thing a good idea? I'm gonna pass on this one right now, unless somebody can teach me something different. I don't like the idea of the machine, the brace doing the work and not you because then when you take it off you forget how to do it. So there you go, I hope that answers your question. So if this is something you have going on, go find your local chiropractor, have them take a look and see what's going on, they should be able to come up with an exercise program for you. Well, this has been another edition of "Ask The Chiropractor", this time somebody emailed me or texted me a question about something and I wanted to come on here and answer it. Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, you should always ask a chiropractor, we're the only ones that really know what chiropractic is. A lot of people ask their family doctor but unfortunately a family doctor has very little education on what chiropractors do, and they're probably not a very good source to ask. If you have a question about your feet you ask a podiatrist, if you have a question about your teeth you ask a dentist, if you have a question about chiropractic ask a chiropractor. If you wanna ask me your question, you can. Go to my website, rockforddc.com, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com Hit the contact us, that'll come straight to me, I'll get that question, I'll answer the best I can for you. Maybe next time if you have a question, you know, next week you'll be the video and we'll talk about your question. Other than that, I hope everyone stays healthy, stay strong and, remember, ask the chiropractor if you have a question about chiropractic. Thanks, everybody.