North Las Vegas Chiropractic Blog

Dietary Tips

A Good Diet Equals Healthy Living

In order to live a healthy lifestyle, there are some essential nutrients which need to be present in your diet. A good chiropractor will also include a diet plan in his treatments to reduce the risk of disease. Here are some dietary tips you can use to improve your health.

Avoid Junk Food

Avoid junk foods with low nutritional values and additives such as artificial flavoring and coloring, as most of them contain chemicals that your body isn’t familiar with and can cause certain problems such as abdominal pain, diarrhea and irritable bowel movements.

Eat Foods with Good Nutritional Values

Let’s suppose a person has a calorie requirement of 1600 calories a day. He can either get these calories from healthy foods with good nutritional values, such as beans, vegetables or salads, or he can get them through unhealthy foods such as bagels, donuts or junk food. The calorie requirement is the same but he would be getting a more nutritious diet by choosing the former option, thus making him healthier.

Add Unrefined and Uncooked Foods in Your Diet

Natural foods contain relatively more nutrients as compared to their refined counterparts. For example, refined flour lacks the fiber and other nutrients that whole grain contains. Cooking can also destroy many of the beneficial nutrients in food, so it is important to add some raw fruits and vegetables in your diet to balance out the nutrient requirement.

Avoid Fried Food Items

Though they may seem tempting, a high consumption of fried foods can directly lead to certain health problems such as high cholesterol and heart problems. If you live a busy lifestyle which doesn’t give you time to exercise, fried foods can also cause obesity.

Don’t Use Too Much Salt and Sugar

Too much salt results in high blood pressure, increasing the likelihood of developing health problems. High levels of sugar can also increase the risk of diabetes. Try to reduce the amount of salt or sugar you use in food items.

Ask Your Chiropractor for Advice

As most chiropractors have information on nutritional requirements, you can ask your chiropractor to advise you further on what you should include and what you should exclude from your diet. A chiropractor can also formulate you a proper diet plan which you can follow to stay healthy.

Image used under Creative Commons Licensing: A Matched Set by Tony Alter

Chiropractor Las Vegas shares shoulder exercises for beginners.

Body: Here is a simple exercise that you can do at home with no equipment.

It works the areas related to the shoulder such as deltoid – anterior, deltoid – lateral, pec major – clavical head, and coracobrachialis muscles.

The purpose of this exercise is to Increase shoulder strength and muscular endurance. By doing this exercise you can have the benefits of Improved stability, functional strength and injury p

Begin on floor on hands and knees.

Hips should be above knees and shoulders above hands. Attain a straight spine position.

Activate core muscles. While maintaining a straight spine, reach forward until arm is at shoulder level. Slowly return to start position.

Repeat for prescribed repetitions and sets.

Closer to the Community

In our office, we have decided that being an insulated little office does nothing to help our community and the Las Vegas valley at large. Along with helping people regain their true health, we also feel we need to be active members of our community. One of the things we do to achieve this is to take part in as many Las Vegas and North Las Vegas events as possible. Over the next two weeks, we will be taking part in two such events. This coming Saturday, the third, we will be at the Women’s Health Fair being held at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino. The following Saturday, we will also be participating in a health fair at the Aliante Hotel and Casino. I am personally inviting everybody to come to these two events. Many businesses in our community will be taking part as well. It is a powerful thing to support Las Vegas and North Las Vegas this way.

Barry Stanley, D.C. C.I.C.E.

Non-Specific Neck Pain and Chiropractic

What is Non Specific Neck Pain?

Everyone feels a certain amount of pain in the neck at some point in their life. There might be a sudden onset of sharp pain where you find yourself massaging your neck and wondering what exactly caused the sudden stinging neck pain. Mostly the underlying cause is not a disease or a degenerative story; rather it is either bad posture or prolonged strain to the neck.

Symptoms of Non-Specific Neck Pain

Always remember that your neck supplies nerves to the shoulders, arms and hands. This means that any disruption in the neck can cause an equal amount of disruption in the areas that it transfers messages to. Analogically, when a route becomes dysfunctional on the road, it affects every trade that takes place via that route.

With stiffness in the neck, the pain is carried along to the aforementioned parts and can cause weakness, numbness and the like. These symptoms can hamper your everyday functioning. When the passageway for nerves is irritated, the messages carried forward to other parts of the body are distorted with painful signals. Hence, even though non-specific in nature, neck pain requires special attention.

Dealing with the Issue

Wondering why you should visit a chiropractic practitioner for a condition that is harmless? Well. The answer is that such sudden onset of pain can be dealt with under this practice. Under chiropractics, the purpose is not alleviation of neck pain but also providing guidance for preventing neck pain in future. The fact that posture and pain in neck are well connected in nature, your doctor can guide you to maintaining a good posture which will protect you against non specific neck pain.

Without the use of medicine, you can quickly be on the road to recovery with this method. Utilizing the techniques of spine manipulation, a chiropractic practitioner will first locate the area of concern followed by a careful application of force on the spinal joints.

Why a Chiropractic Practitioner?

Several people believe that chiropractic is a pseudoscience and does not result in successful healing of your neck pain. On the contrary these doctors, if they feel you need attention from doctor with a different medical background, will recommend you further to another professional for proper treatment. Additionally, these doctors make you undergo thorough examinations before application of any spine related techniques.

Image used under Creative Commons Licensing: sore neck? by Aidan Jones

How I Became A Chiropractor

My name is Dr. Joshua K. Purcell. I am a chiropractor in Las Vegas, NV. I work at Active Life Health & Wellness. I would like to share my own personal experience with chiropractic. Several years ago I was deciding what I want to do with my life. I looked into many different health care fields. I ended up choosing chiropractic. I really loved the idea of being able to help people with neck pain, back pain, sciatica, disc problems, arm and leg pain, headaches, etc. without having to use drugs and surgery. So I decided that was what I was going to do. My wife was pregnant with our first child at the time. We moved to St. Louis, MO, where I was going to attend Logan College of Chiropractic. It was Christmas time and school was starting in January. My daughter was a couple of months old at this time. I was sitting on the floor wrapping a gift. I leaned over to grab the scissors and it felt like someone stabbed me in the lower back. It was a sharp, stabbing, shooting pain in my back that took my breath away. I could hardly move. I had to use the entertainment center to pull myself up. I didn’t know what just happened to me. I has always thought that I was healthy and didn’t have any problems. I had been doing lots of activities such as playing racquetball and riding my bike. I couldn’t stand straight, I was in severe pain. I started seeing the chiropractors at my school. They started adjusting my spine and it would feel better for awhile, but just come back. This process went on for several months and was progressively getting worse and worse. Finally the school doctors said that I needed to get a MRI and see a Neurosurgeon, that I may need surgery. I started going into deep depression and was feeling like chiropractic was failing me. I just dedicated my life to this type of health care and it wasn’t working for me!

Finally, I met another student that had been watching me hobble around for months and he told me that I should check out his chiropractor. He felt that this new approach that he used was something that could really help me. I was willing to try anything at this point, I knew that surgery wasn’t going to be an option. This new doctor took some x-rays of my neck. I didn’t understand why, my neck wasn’t hurting, it was my low back. He looked at the x-rays of my neck and pointed to my top two bones and said that’s where my problem was. He started to fix my neck and my health began to return. It was absolutely amazing. I started to get better and start to get my life back. What I learned through this process has truly helped me with taking care of my patients. I learned that just because someone hurts in one place, doesn’t mean that is where the problem is. In fact we have been able to help many people where other chiropractic systems have failed. The best part of this entire experience was I was able to pick up and hold my beautiful little girl again. I was able to have my faith restored that chiropractic really works!

I have had the opportunity to have helped people all over the Las Vegas area get their health back. We have implemented the latest, state of the art therapy in our clinic. We are often able to help people return to optimum health in a relatively short period of time, with the least amount of expense. We have helped people with disc problems, headaches, numbness and tingling in their arms and legs, sciatica, neck pain, back pain, digestive problems, sleep problems, fibromyalgia, asthma and wheezing, etc.

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