Earth Hour and Bob Dylan
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Bob Dylan said that the way we treat the planet is a reflection of the way we treat ourselves, and it is with this paraphrased quote in mind that I reflect about Earth Hour this past Saturday evening.
With great media hype, many of us turned our lights off for one hour. I took that opportunity, while rocking my infant son to sleep, to reflect on what the hour meant to me, and what I could do once the lights came back on at 9:00.
In my city, apparently the power consumption fell by about 5%. Now this is clearly not a gigantic amount, especially compared to New Zealand, who dropped by over 10%. However, as the Japanese principle of Kaizan says, the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. And we must ask ourselves what the next simplest step is to saving the planet. In my opinion, Earth hour served to start creating the habit of turing the electricity off, as well as showing us that we can mobilize together for a good reason to make a difference.
I created a principle called “3 minutes on the floor” to help people create the habit of doing something good for themselves. Many people tell me that they want to stretch, or meditate, or do yoga, or eat better, but they don’t have time. My advice begins by getting them to make a commitment to spending 3 minutes every day lying on the ground. During that time they can do something active, reflect on life, or do nothing.
Why 3 minutes? Because everybody has 3 minutes. It’s not about quantity, it’s about building the habit of breaking yourself away from the TV, or computer, or kitchen, or desk and focusing on yourself.
People who do this consistently are so proud of themselves for sticking to something, even if it is only 3 minutes on the floor, and invariably end up increasing the time to 4, 5, or even 10 minutes.
I know that I felt good about myself for not turning the lights on, and not even listening to my iPod. I increased my level of awareness of how much I consume, thought about where I could cut back, and ways I’d like to be more environmentally conscious. And I also spent an hour in silence, clearing my own head without the hum of the TV. There’s currently a miniseries on HBO about John Adams and the founding fathers, and I found myself wondering if they would have gotten as much accomplished if there had been 3 TVs in every house.
So doing something for the planet also meant doing something for me. I think often about Dylan’s quote, and think that as more people become conscious of wellness and Naturally Savvy living, they invariably become more environmentally conscious. Bob’s a pretty smart guy.
What can you do for yourself and the environment?
Dr. Sidenberg
Do You Have a Wellness Team?
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Every major corporation has a board of directors, who work together to bring individual responsibilities and areas expertise together in a way that creates group wisdom. It is as a board that big decisions can be made for the health, profitability, and vitality of a corporation.
When it comes to your wellness, do you have a team? A board of directors for your health?
Who do you look to for decisions about wellness? Well, many people look to their family physician for such information and help. The problem, however, is that physicians are not specialists in wellness. They instead excel in areas of pathology and emergency. Crisis management is what medicine does best. But what can a physician do for you if your eyes, ears, and nose all appear normal, there is no irregularity in your heart or lung sounds, and all laboratory tests on your blood and urine are within normal levels?
This is what medicine often refers to as “the picture of health”—health as the absence of sickness. But if you look at my previous blog postings on the definition of health, it is optimal function and not merely the absence of disease. It is in this realm that medicine tends to lack.
Medical doctors get very minimal training in optimal nutrition (not just deficiency treatment), and in the wellness arts. Chiropractors, on the other hand, have a similar education to medical doctors, but spend their time on nutrition, adjusting procedures, wellness philosophy and exercise, and optimizing physical function rather than on topics like pharmacology, surgical techniques, and chronic disease management.
Chiropractors are ideally suited through education and practice to be the board of directors of your wellness team, just as your family physician is ideally suited to do the same as the board of directors of your sickness or crisis management team. When you look at what each of your practitioners specializes and knows best, you may find yourself looking for a team of experts rather than a jack of all trades.
Dr. Sidenberg
Do You Know the Medical Definition of Health?
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Do you know what health is? When I ask this question, most people tell me that health is feeling good. If they have pain, they have a problem, and if they have no pain, they figure they must not have a problem.
But simply feeling good has little to do with how healthy you are. Think about someone you may have known or heard about who never had any indications of illness and simply dropped dead of a heart attack. (The number one symptom of heart disease is in fact sudden death, and not chest pain.)
Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines health as a condition of optimal physical, social, and mental well-being—not merely the absense of diseases or infirmities. Webster’s dictionary defines health as a condition of wholeness in which the organs are functioning 100% all the time.
So what if you’re only functioning at 80%? By this definition, are you healthy? Do you think you’d know the difference? What about 60%? Maybe.
In many cases, there needs to be substantial damage or destruction—say 50%—before a problem is detectable.
Will you wait for this and be reactive, or will you be proactive with your health?
A chiropractic checkup is one of the best ways to find out your level of spinal health so you can deal with any problems before they become permanent, or more expensive, costly and time-consuming to fix.
Contact me and I’ll be happy to refer you to someone in your area.
Yours in good health,
Dr. Sidenberg
Early Detection vs. Wellness
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Wellness is optimum expression of health at each stage of development, from conception to death. Early detection, while being presented today as wellness, is in fact care based on “get sick first, then we’ll treat you”. Wellness is focused on your body’s ability to stay healthy.
Which type of care do you think is more beneficial?
Which type of care do you prefer?
Chiropractic works to improve the innate healing capacity of the body through the spine and nervous system, and chiropractors are commited to helping your body to heal itself better. That’s wellness.
Illness can exist for a long time before it’s detectable, either through pain or even through sophisticated medical tests.
Wellness is a way of life, and chiropractic aims to help you get there.
Dr. Sidenberg
Why Would Someone Want to Have a Chiropractic Adjustment?
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This is a common question—especially for skeptics who say they feel fine.
To answer this question, let me ask:
Do you want to be healthy, or just not sick? If you don’t feel bad, does that mean you couldn’t feel better? If you feel fine, why would you exercise? Or take vitamins or supplements? Or eat organic produce? Or meditate, or do yoga?
If you’re like me (and I assume that since you’re reading this blog, you probably are), you understand that by taking some or all of these actions, you can feel better than you’ve ever felt, function better than ever, and live a more active, vital, long and healthy life.
Chiropractic fits in with exercise, good nutrition, positive mental attitude, and rest (just to name a few), as critical components of the wellness lifestyle. Why? Because chiropractic focuses on the proper alignment and function of the spine and nervous system, which controls every aspect of how the rest of your body works.
Do you want to survive or thrive? Health is a continuum, with symptom-free being pretty much right in the middle.
Here’s the problem with making decisions and taking action based on the presence (or absence) of pain. Pain is very subjective, and incredibly inaccurate. Just because you don’t have pain doesn’t mean you don’t have a problem. Many of the degenerative processes in the body don’t register pain until there has been a significant, and sometimes irreversible damage.
Is that what you are waiting for? There’s no question that if you feel pain, you should take action. It’s been said that PAIN is an acronym that stands for “Pay Attention Inside Now”. But the pain going away is just the first stage of the healing process.
Not everyone needs the same amount of care, but if you’ve never been checked out then you
have no idea what the state of health of your spine or nervous system is. This is not what your family doctor is looking at or trained in. (Yes, it’s true, your GP is not trained to do everything.)
Some people are crisis-oriented, and wait until they can’t move before they take action on
their issues. But in the 21st century, many are wellness-oriented and understand that there are things they can do to prevent problems from happening in the first place.
Which type of person are you, and is it working for you?
Dr. Sidenberg
Chiropractors Don’t Increase Stroke Risk, New Study Says
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This is great news all around, and a great article to see in both the popular press and peer-reviewed journals.
A study conducted through the University of Toronto and the University Health Network found that the risk of a stroke following a chiropractic visit is no higher than a visit to a family doctor.
While this is what chiropractors have been telling their patients and all who would listen for years and years, it is always great to see a study that validates the safety of the leading alternative and complementary healing art in North America.
In my years in practice, I have come upon people who’ve said that they’d never get adjusted, or who thought that a chiropractor could even kill them! Will this article and study do anything to sway their opinion, or calm their nerves? Hopefully, but pre-conceived notions, beliefs and biases can run deep.
One woman has a stroke 12 days after an adjustment, and it’s plastered on the covers of the papers. But this? Likely buried inside. As they say, “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Consider this:
The risk of stroke related to a chiropractic adjustment (a rare type of stroke caused by damage to the vertebral artery) is estimated to occur 1 in 5 million times. Let me repeat that: 1 in 5 million!!!
My office is in a medical building, and I’ve realized that I am actually the safest doctor in the entire complex! There is no medical procedure or drug which has a safety profile that good. Doctors would love to trade malpractice premiums with me, because the reality is that what they do is far more dangerous and carries far higher intrinsic risks to their patients than any technique I would deliver in my (or any other chiropractors’) office.
Medicine is the third leading cause of death in North America (behind heart disease and cancer). Number Three.
Maybe we need to take a more realistic and less biased look at risk in healthcare.
Dr. Sidenberg
What Is Chiropractic?
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Chiropractic is a complementary medicine in which the doctor is an expert in the structure and function of the spine and nervous system. The doctor looks to misalignments of joints in the body, especially in the spine, as a cause of other disorders affecting the nerves, muscles and organs. The nervous system is responsible for the control and coordination of every tissue, organ, system, muscle and cell in the body.
One of the places where the nervous system is particularly vulnerable is where the nerves exit the spinal cord between the spinal bones, called vertebrae. Misalignments, fixations, or what chiropractors refer to as subluxations can irritate or inflame the nerves interfering with the body’s ability to adapt and heal itself properly.
In addition to making “adjustments” to the spine and other joints, many chiropractors use nutrition and supplementation, orthotic supports and other modalities such as acupuncture, soft tissue work, electrical muscle stimulation and laser, as well as others.
Dr. Sidenberg
Obesity
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This week I was watching my beloved television and I saw a commercial with an actress who talks about the obesity crisis in this country. She mentioned that in order to help curb it, we should exercise and encourage our children to exercise (great!), eat as a family (great! At this point my cynicism was starting to fade, as I thought this might actually be a public service message and not an ad for a packaged food) and substitute sugary juices and drinks with “milk”.
I was shocked. Milk is one potential solution to the obesity crisis? I’m not sure that is the answer. Milk has about 100 calories per serving - as much, if not more, calories than a serving of juice (depending on brand). So my first thought was “how does substituting milk for juice make any difference?” Here’s my solution - try water instead. Water has no calories, no fat or trans-fats and depending on its source - can be less costly than juice and milk.
Dr. Sidenberg
Health by Absence or Presence?
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Is the food you eat healthy because of what it has or because of what it doesn’t have? Some of the most famous diets have advertised being “low fat” or more recently “low carb”.
Likewise, when you think about your own health level, do you measure it by the problems you don’t have or by the ability to enjoy all that life has to offer you? Which type of health do you think is more valuable?
When the people from “The Secret” were on Oprah, one of the women said something that struck me. If you’re focused on losing weight you never will (consistently) but if you focus instead on being whole and healthy that that will lead you to where you want to be.
The law of attraction determines what type of choices and decisions we make, based on our thoughts and beliefs. So when your focus is on losing weight, you search out foods (often boxed and processed) that claim to be low in levels of sugar, fat, salt, and carbs.
While these foods may be low in certain nutrients, they are often heavily processed & preserved. As well, people will often eat more than one serving since the food often has higher levels of some other ingredient to make up for unnatural levels of something else.
If instead the focus is on becoming whole and healthy, foods that are boxed, canned, processed and which contain added sugar, fat, and salt are generally avoided or removed entirely from the diet. Whole food fills us up faster, as it doesn?t overwhelm our natural level of hunger and feelings of fullness. As a result we naturally eat less and often avoid the negative effects that junk food (synthetic food) can have on our metabolisms.
Dr. Sidenberg
Sesame Street Brought To You By Corporate America
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Like so many people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, some of my fondest and strongest memories of childhood surround watching Sesame Street. I trusted it. It was safe.
So how crazy is it that a show which preaches eating healthy food is now sponsored by McDonalds! Its viewers are forced to watch the ads, as they start the show off with a 30 second clip with Muppets before rolling through a series of advertisements.
What are the ads?
1) Sandals resorts- This I have no problem with.
2) McDonalds- Remember in Supersize me when they talk about Ronald McDonald and his effect on kids?
3) A website that gives you information about your kids Asthma.
4) An organic food company pitching organic baby formula. (Thank goodness they have an organic sponsor).
We just picked up a DVD set called “Sesame Street Old School”, which shows episodes, songs and clips from way back in the day. It’s a very refreshing change, and reminds me of what made Sesame Street so unique. Instead of corporate sponsors, the show was famously brought to you today by the letter “R” and the number “7″. Instead it’s being brought to you by big pharma and the fast food industry.
Dr. Sidenberg
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