We’re coming in for a landing this time. That is, in our last installment we talked about health care from a forty thousand foot view. We looked at conservative vs. aggressive care, and how chiropractic fits in (hint: on the conservative side).

Today we’re going to head down to ground level and get more specific about the approach I use to treat my patients. As I mentioned before, the type of work a doctor performs is frequently motivated by his (or her) interests. I’m no different in that regard.

How Did I Get Here?

Perhaps it’s just best to start with where I came from.

While I had always been interested in the study of how the body works, I’m not sure I really knew that for a long time. Spare time in my teenage and college years was spent pouring over books on training for athletic endeavors.

I thought I just wanted to figure out how to compete and win. Really, what I wanted was to understand what happened to my body when I used a certain training technique, be it physical, mental, or nutritional. The competition was just a bonus.

Shortly after my undergraduate training, though, my vehicle for exploring my passion had a breakdown. I had an injury that wouldn’t go away. Training was suddenly not a possibility. Not without pain, anyway.

While I could still read and learn about the body, it just wasn’t the same to me without the first-hand experience. So, I looked for help to fix the problem.

Eighteen months, two MDs, and three physical therapists later, I was still in pain, unable to exercise. It was somewhere in there that I realized that most doctors really aren’t like the ones you see in the evening medical drama on TV, where a brilliant diagnosis is followed by a creative treatment.

My experience was that most doctors spent no more than about 5 minutes of their time, frequently not even laying a hand on me — much less performing a full physical examination — after which point they wrote a prescription for pain-killer or anti-inflammatory medication.

This didn’t help me. The pain might be better while on the med, but it did nothing to fix the cause. As a result the pain came right back once I stopped taking the medication.

My limited understanding led me to believe that the only doctors really looking into the cause of conditions were the researchers in laboratories, and even then they tended to spend their time on new medications to treat the symptoms of a problem once it had already started.

My frustrations became clear: What happened to interacting directly with a patient? What happened to figuring out how to prevent a problem before it occurred? If that wasn’t possible, what about correcting the original thing that caused the damage in the first place, making a medication that merely covered up the symptom irrelevant?

A New Approach

I didn’t have any answers. I just knew that the care I had received thus far was frustratingly inadequate.

By happenstance I was referred to a doctor who did things differently. He used a system that, at its essence, allowed him to ask my body “questions” to determine what was wrong.

It was a way of working that melded the inquisitive, perhaps more cerebral process of diagnosis with in-depth interaction with the patient. In addition to what he could derive from my history and his own intellect, he also incorporated what my body could tell him from the result of simple, sequential muscle tests.

Muscle tests? Yes.

Consider for a moment that a great number of the standard tests you experience in a doctor’s office are already muscle tests.

Stick out your tongue and say “ahh”? A muscle test (of the muscles that are controlled by your Vagus nerve).

Shining a penlight in your eyes? A muscle test. (The ones that open and close your pupils.)

Hitting your knee with a hammer to see if you’ll kick? A muscle test. (That one I’m guessing you knew already.)

What these muscle tests have in common is that in each case the doctor isn’t usually looking for a problem with the muscle itself, but rather with the nerve that supplies it. The muscle tested is merely a window to what is happening with your nervous system.

Your nervous system is aware of far more than what occupies your thoughts. Try simultaneously coordinating your blood pressure, how much blood to send to your skin on a cold day, the balance of hydrochloric acid in your stomach, and the tone in deep spinal muscles that keep you from folding over like a cold french fry, just for kicks.

Since your nervous system is your interface to the world on so many levels, conscious and subconscious, it makes sense to find creative ways to tease information out of it that might not have bubbled up to the top of your everyday worries.

Outside of your nervous system, it is certainly possible that there could be a problem with the muscle itself — the nerve is sending and receiving a signal just fine, thank you very much — in which case it would be the doctor’s job to direct treatment to the problem in that muscle appropriately.

What the doctor does is determined largely by the group of “answers” received from the tests performed, and his ability to direct treatment based upon the available information.

Fast Forward to Now

This, in essence, is the system I use now. The grouping of tests and treatments that I use every day, with every patient, is called Applied Kinesiology (AK).

The tests employed are used not as a replacement of, but in addition to, standard diagnostic tests you would find in most doctors’ offices: basic physical examination, orthopedic tests, blood tests, and the like.

AK, while taught to any practitioner with a license to diagnose (e.g. medical doctors, chiropractors, and osteopaths), works from the holistic foundation of chiropractic: that disease is caused by mechanical, chemical, and psychological stressors (see this article for more on that idea).

As such it draws together the core elements of many complementary approaches to treatment, providing an interdisciplinary approach to your health. This is true holistic care.

In other words, you don’t just do structural work on a problem because it’s the only thing you know how to do. This is the “to a man with a hammer, everything is a nail” approach.

If there is a nutritional aspect to the problem, it comes up in the system and we address it. The same goes for mental or emotional stress that might be impacting the condition.

This means that a well-rounded knowledge of how bodies really work is required. We don’t pretend to know everything. Referral to outside experts is common when the need arises.

The Bug, Caught

What happened to me? I got better. After almost two years of floundering around, within 6 weeks of beginning treatment with AK methods I was back training again.

By then, though, I had had a true peek through a window of how the body really operates. I wanted more. That led to me becoming a doctor.

It’s pretty much impossible to unmake that omelet. Once introduced to this form of care, you don’t want to go back to a more narrow, single minded way of looking at things.

Like a rich, complex, and delicious piece of cake, though, you can’t really enjoy the creation just by reading the recipe. You have to be willing to give it a try, take a bite, and see what you might have been missing.

I invite each of you to come in for a taste, and experience what truly integrated, holistic care is all about!

I was recently having dinner with my father and brother, when my brother made the statement, “It seems like you do a lot more than the average chiropractor. Why is that?”

My father quickly indicated his agreement, curious as to why the things I do are seemingly not associated with many other chiropractors in the world.

While responding to their inquiry, I had a background question of my own running through my consciousness: If my own family isn’t totally clear about what I do, what about the rest of my patients?

There are really two questions that arise out of my father and brother’s inquiry. First, what are chiropractors trained and licensed to do? Second, what do I do that is different from other chiropractors?

In this article I’ll address the first question. I’ll save the second for the next installment of this newsletter.

Let’s start with some thoughts on health care in general.

Conservative vs. Aggressive Health Care

The first piece to understand is that there is conservative health care and there is aggressive health care. By this, I don’t mean one set of doctors who voted for Reagan and another group that happens to be pushy.

What I mean is that there is a full spectrum of care, from the least invasive to the most. From a treatment that is as natural as possible to one that radically alters your existence.

The most invasive care available today, generally speaking, is surgery.

If you think about it, what could possibly be more radical to your body than opening it up and physically altering it in some way. This is why surgery can sometimes bring about the most radical and rapid change for a condition, though it also carries with it the biggest risk.

On the other end of the spectrum would be the most gentle, least invasive treatment a doctor could prescribe to effect an improvement in your health. Minor lifestyle changes, like suggesting that you make a concerted effort to get more sleep, would fall into this category. They carry little to no risk of harm just from undertaking this kind of change.

In between these two extremes is where everything else falls. Dietary changes or adding basic vitamin and mineral supplementation definitely fall on the conservative side, while prescription drugs that alter your body’s natural physiological mechanisms are highly aggressive forms of treatment.

Aggressive treatments are characterized by a higher risk to your health from the treatment itself, usually in exchange for a more rapid or radical change. Conservative care encompasses treatments that are low risk and typically, low expense methods.

In general, it makes much more sense to start with a conservative method that is low cost and low risk, rather than jumping immediately to an aggressive, higher risk form of care.

If you had a weed problem in your back yard would you go straight to hiring a backhoe to completely replace the topsoil, or would you try to put on a pair of gloves and manually remove the offenders first?

And My Doctor?

Given the large number of treatments and procedures that a doctor might choose, what does your doctor do?

That’s largely determined by three things: what a doctor is trained to do, what that doctor is licensed to do, and what that doctor is actually interested in doing.

The first part, training, is governed by the doctor’s education, both in and out of school. The second, licensing, is largely determined by the laws of the state in which the doctor practices. The last part, or what the doctor actually chooses to do, is influenced by the interests and drive of the doctor, as well as real or perceived legal ramifications of performing certain procedures.

For example, an Ob/Gyn (Obstetrician/Gynecologist) was trained in basic examination of the eye while she was in medical school. She is licensed, as a medical doctor, to perform them on her patients. However, you won’t find her performing them on her patients on a regular basis.

This is true for many reasons.

First, this particular doctor most likely specialized in her field because she had an interest in it. Eye exams are not generally part of the routine examination you might receive from an Ob/Gyn, for obvious reasons.

Second, due to her known specialty, the patients that walk in the door of this Ob/Gyn are not typically going to be looking for an eye exam.

Third, our Ob/Gyn might be worried about the potential legal ramifications of taking on the maintenance and care of a patient’s eye health when an ophthalmologist, who specializes in eye care, might find a serious problem that she could miss due to the relative infrequency with which she performs eye exams.

Finally, the financial implications of choosing her specialty are very real indeed. The overhead of simply keeping an office running for a medical doctor can be at amazingly high levels.

If you’re a doctor who has a high-overhead practice, just making it will involve spending a good chunk of your time performing procedures that carry a higher price tag.

What About Chiropractic?

A doctor can also be influenced by the perception the public has about what he is actually trained to do. This happens frequently with chiropractors.

If your patient population thinks that a chiropractor simply “cracks backs and necks”, then most likely every patient that walks through the door will be looking for that service, while those who don’t will stay away.

In reality, chiropractors are trained to do much more.

All chiropractors go through the equivalent of 10 semesters (5 academic years) of training in chiropractic school, not counting undergraduate entrance requirements that essentially mirror a pre-med background.

The education of chiropractors is wide-ranging, extensively covering human anatomy and physiology, pathology (i.e. disease), neurology, hands on therapy techniques, and nutrition.

Generally speaking, the only way chiropractic school differs from medical school is the absence of in depth study of pharmacology — the study of prescription drugs and their effects (though chiropractic education does cover basic principles of pharmacology). In its place, chiropractors get much more study in hands on therapies, nutrition, and rehabilitation.

Chiropractors also receive more training in anatomy and physiology than any other health profession. Chiropractic study covers every joint, muscle, and nerve from head to toe. It covers every organ system from your brain and heart, to your kidneys and gastrointestinal system.

The licensing of chiropractors, like other health professions, is largely determined by the laws of your state. The state of Texas allows a chiropractor to apply a wide range of procedures, including manual therapy techniques, nutritional supplementation, lifestyle prescriptions, and even acupuncture with additional training.

What is excluded from the chiropractic repertoire are drugs and surgery. That is, a chiropractor in Texas is licensed to practice conservative health care.

Why Specialize?

The financial issues affecting other health professions place chiropractic in a unique position.

My malpractice insurance for an entire year is in the low four-figures. MDs typically have premiums that are ten times that amount.

If you combine that with a practice design that does not involve insurance paperwork (other than what the patient chooses to file), my low overhead uniquely places me in a position to spend much more time with each patient, and focus on straightforward, low-cost, conservative measures to improve my patients’ health.

Essentially, this allows me to focus on the entire health of the patient — that is, truly holistic care — in an age where doctors are increasingly shying away from more generalized, “family” practices for higher paying specialty fields.

Being a specialist might work better for the doctor who wants to do well in an age of increasingly high overhead and low insurance reimbursement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out so well for the patient, who is in desperate need of a generalist who can make recommendations about their complete health.

Even among doctors that have the ability and training to create a holistic practice, not all choose to follow this model, even other chiropractors. Their reasons are varied.

Lack of interest, the absence of an encouraging mentor, or following conventional practice models are just a few possibilities. It could also be due to the desire to simply have a more straightforward practice.

Honestly, specializing in one thing makes a practice a lot simpler. Patients often present with complaints that frequently affect more than one area in a seemingly unconnected manner. Correlating this varied data in order to diagnose the condition that is truly at the root of their complaint is a much more complicated process.

But the holistic model is one I have embraced as an opportunity afforded to me by a lucky combination of things. There is a large number of people in need. I have a passion for trying to understand the wondrous complexity of the human body. Finally, I’m lucky enough to be in a wonderful profession that allows me the freedom to be an expert in conservative care.

Next time, I’ll address where my interests have taken me in creating my own, unique approach to caring for patients.

You’re not alone. Ever. Every second of every day you’re accompanied by billions of other organisms that live within you, flourishing based upon the choices you make.

This is a good thing.

I’m talking primarily about your digestive tract. Specifically, the beneficial bacteria — frequently referred to as the normal flora — that exist in your intestines. While other parts of your body are also populated by friendly bugs, your gut is where their impact seems to be most frequently noticed.

We have what is termed a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in our gut. That is, both us humans and the bacteria that live inside us benefit from each other.

The bacteria get a nice, warm, moist, dark place through which food passes on a regular basis. Compared to trying to scrape it out on a counter top or a random doorknob, our guts are the bacterial equivalent of Club Med.

In return, these bacteria help us by breaking down food for easy absorption, producing vitamins, and protecting us from unwanted invaders. The unwanted variety can frequently come in the form of other bacteria or parasites that are pathogenic, or harmful.

Interestingly, some of the most beneficial bacterial strains in our gut, if allowed to overly proliferate, can also be harmful. Ever heard of people getting sick from an infection by E. Coli? It just so happens that E. Coli is a very useful bacterial strain that normally inhabits your intestinal tract, producing much needed Vitamin K as well as certain B vitamins.

When Bugs Go Bad

So what’s the problem? Everything should just go along without trouble, right? As long as you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.

Unfortunately, we’re usually the ones who start off the family feud. Antibiotics are the usual culprit.

Say you have a strong case of bacterial bronchitis and your doctor prescribes a round of antibiotics to make things right. Pretty soon, you’re breathing easier and coughing up less mucous.

Part of clearing out the bugs in your lungs involved some collateral damage to the ones in your gut, however. Generally speaking, antibiotics do not discriminate between “good” and “bad” (or nonpathogenic and pathogenic) varieties of bacteria.

So once you took those antibiotics to take care of your lung infection, you managed to kill off a good deal of the bacteria in your intestines, too.

This isn’t the only way we can upset our balance of normal flora.

For the little ones among us, simply being born by c-section reduces your chances of having a normally populated intestinal tract. Passing through the birth canal allows infants to pick up bacterial strains that help to populate the gut. Without that process, we start off at a relative disadvantage.

Consuming contaminated food or drink is also an obvious way to give potentially pathogenic bacteria a foot hold in your digestive tract. If one strain of bacteria populates your gut in large numbers, it can push out some other, healthy bacterial strains. Club Med can only handle so many customers at once.

Reading the Signs

Knowing when you have an imbalance is the first step to correcting it. Common signs are frequent gas, bloating, diarrhea, or constipation. Many will cycle on a regular basis through many of the above.

Symptoms can also be more subtle. Since our normal flora help us to assimilate nutrients, anything related to nutritional deficiencies is up for grabs. This can be as varied as skin dryness or irritation to unusual sensitivity to light.

If you suspect a problem with your flora, a good lab test involving a stool sample is key. Regular human labs don’t seem to be that great at finding tricky bacterial or parasitic problems related to the gut however. Being their bread and butter, vet labs are great at finding this kind of problem in pets.

However, in lieu of giving my patients a pseudonym of “Fido” and sending their sample off to the local vet lab, we’ve found a good lab that does a fantastic job of handling human samples. They also analyze the sample to determine specifically what bacterial strains are present or absent, as well as any varieties of pathogenic bugs that might be, well, bugging you.

Any lab that does this for you should be able to send you a list of natural and prescriptive agents to help you kill off the bad guys. If they don’t, ask around for one that does.

Now What?

Step two is to get rid of the bad guys and bring in the good.

What we have to do to get rid of bad bacteria or parasites is as varied as the bugs themselves. There are dozens of common herbs and prescriptive agents that handle the job nicely.

The good stuff is known as probiotics. These are supplements that contain beneficial bacterial strains in easily digestible powder, capsule, or liquid forms.

Since taking things by mouth involves having it pass through your stomach — an environment rich in hydrochloric acid — before it gets to your intestines, this is a bit like trying to get rid of all the weeds in your back yard and then repopulate it with healthy grass. The only catch is that you’re not allowed to leave your back porch!

We can’t directly access the intestinal tract. Anything we take has to pass through the stomach first. This makes repopulating your digestive tract like a war of attrition. If we send down enough numbers to make it through the stomach, with any luck they’ll take hold in the intestines and stay for good.

You can commonly find good bacteria in regular yogurt from the grocery store, but the bacteria are usually in insufficient numbers to really get the job done. Most commercial brands of yogurt contain live cultures measured in millions of organisms.

By contrast, with my patients I’ve found that repopulating the gut takes on the order of tens of billions of organisms a day to have a good chance at taking hold. Finding a good probiotic supplement that fulfills this requirement is usually what’s necessary.

You can find supplements that’ll do the trick at your local health food store. High quality, potent varieties can only be found at specialty pharmacies or a health care provider knowledgeable in natural remedies.

Going Forward

For most people, taking probiotics on a regular basis isn’t necessary. Some do find that taking regular probiotics in low doses helps them feel more regular, experience less bloating and flatulence, and have better energy throughout the day.

However, if you have to take antibiotics for any reason, it’s a good idea to follow that up with a round of probiotics. If you experience persistent problems, get in to see your local health care practitioner. Your friends in your gut, and the rest of you, will appreciate it!

I had a patient come in a few days ago who got up that morning, bent over to pick up an exercise mat, and was unable to come back up due to excruciating pain in her lower back. I hear this kind of story frequently.

People come in, bewildered, wondering how doing something that they’ve done hundreds of times before, on that particular day, could literally drop them to their knees in pain. How is it that picking up something as light as a fold-up exercise mat could make your back “seize up”?

Clearly, it wasn’t the mat that did it.

The Most Important Muscle in Your Back

To understand what the real culprit is, we need to go over some basic anatomy. Specifically, we need to get intimately acquainted with the psoas muscle (pronounced SO-UHS).

The psoas is a large muscle, deep in the core of your body. It originates from all of the vertebrae and discs (in between the vertebrae) in your lower back. It inserts deep in your groin area, on the inside of your femur, or thigh bone.

It’s a thick muscle. Well developed, it’s about as big around as your lower forearm.

Keep in mind that a muscle’s strength is directly proportional to it’s cross-sectional area. Roughly translated, that means the larger the muscle, the greater it’s ability to generate force.

A muscle with a diameter equal to the size of your forearm is pretty respectable. Most people’s bicep muscle in the upper arm isn’t near that size. This means the psoas has power. Power to move, and power to do damage.

If you take a look at the illustration (click on the thumbnail to get a larger view), the psoas is the muscle that originates in strands from all of the vertebrae in the lower back, then travels deep through the pelvic opening, inserting on the inside of the femur below the hip joint.

If you’ve ever seen a sailboat mast you’ve probably noticed that the mast doesn’t just stick up out of the boat with no other support. There are usually wires, called “stays”, that run from the mast to the front, back, and sides of the boat to provide stability.

Your spine needs similar help. Your back would not be stable if your spine simply stuck straight up from your pelvis with no assistance from other structures. Your psoas muscles provide a great deal of this support.

Without healthy, strong psoas function, your back just isn’t happy.

In addition, the psoas is one of your primary hip flexors. This means one of it’s main jobs is to bring your knees closer to your chest. Anytime you’re bent over, sitting, doing sit-ups, or performing your best cannonball into the pool, the psoas is potentially in a contracted, or shortened, position.

So What Happened?

This is significant for our exercise-mat-retrieving victim above. The psoas, just like any other muscle, can cramp or spasm.

If you’ve ever had a cramp in your calf or the back of your thigh, you might have noticed that these muscles tend to cramp when the muscle is shortened, not when it’s stretched out. You also probably intuitively stood up to stretch out the muscle to relieve the cramp.

Take a look at the illustration of the psoas again. The psoas runs down the front of your spine. It’s main job is to bend you forward or bring your knees closer to your chest. This means that the only way to really stretch it out well is to bend over backwards.

Most of us don’t do this very well.

So if you happen to be bending over to pick up a pencil, and your psoas decides to go into full blown spasm, you don’t have an easy remedy! It’s exactly like having a cramp in your calf but not having any way to relieve it.

If you can imagine this, you now know why a psoas spasm can be so debilitating.

In Practice

In my practice, for anyone with back pain this means the psoas gets a lot of attention. Muscles tend to “shut off” when our bodies are under stress, just like an overloaded circuit in your house (see http://collinsdc.com/blog/2007/06/26/why-you-have-an-athletic-injury for more on this concept).

I thoroughly test these muscles to make sure my patient is getting the support they need around their core and lower back. On most people, psoas muscles that aren’t working well are usually (painfully) obvious.

For someone who’s had a psoas spasm, the muscle will usually test very weak after a sustained contraction. I then use techniques that help to lengthen and relax the muscle without forcing them into yoga-like moves to bend over backwards.

Adjustments of the lower back and addressing pelvic torque are also key to reducing the propensity for this muscle to seize up again.

As with any muscle cramp, dehydration can be a key factor inducing the psoas to spasm. Many of the stories I hear of people who’s back suddenly “grabbed” on them start out with a description of a long day spent gardening, out in the sun, or working out.

So put yourself in that same scenario, but this time with a new approach. You bend down to pick something up. All of a sudden, a sharp pain hits you in your lower back.

Don’t ask yourself what was different about the way you reached down this time. Ask yourself what is different in you that caused you to not have the muscular support to do something you’ve done hundreds of times.

Is it dehydration? Have you had other lower back “twinges” or discomfort that might have been your body’s way of telling you that everything wasn’t quite perfect? Do you feel “twisted”, with one hip or shoulder higher than the other?

If you can’t clearly answer questions like those and address the problem, get some help to do just that. Your body will thank you, and seemingly innocuous exercise mats will no longer be your nemesis!

I want to talk to you today about a really insidious little substance that may be significantly affecting your health. Here are some hints: It’s not just in Chinese food, it causes more than just headaches, and there’s a really good chance that you had some today.

Yep, I’m talking about MSG, also known as monosodium glutamate. What’s the big deal? Well, glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter that can have effects in areas much more far reaching than just your taste buds.

Excitatory neuro-whatever, you say? I know it sounds like mumbo jumbo, but allow me to explain…

A Little Physiology

A neurotransmitter is a substance that your nervous system uses to transmit a signal from one nerve, or neuron, to another. Your brain, and the rest of your nervous system, is made up of literally billions of neurons, and they each use various kinds of neurotransmitters to convey different signals to each other.

Glutamate is excitatory in that it stimulates any nerve that it acts upon, causing it to have a higher propensity to stimulate other neurons to perform functions that are as widely varying as your nervous system itself. This could be anything from causing a muscle to contract to getting your heart to beat a little faster.

Conversely, an inhibitory neurotransmitter is one that would cause the neuron it acts upon to be less likely to fire. It’s this balance of excitatory and inhibitory signals that determines what nerves fire, what signals are received, and the balance of your brain chemistry.

The actual molecule glutamate is an amino acid. Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Put a bunch of them together and you have a strand of protein, which might be a muscle fiber or a pigment that makes your eyes a certain color. Individually, however, amino acids have varying roles and functions in the body.

The sodium part of monosodium glutamate is added to make the entire MSG molecule more stable, so that the effects of glutamate are more long lasting.

So What’s the Problem?

MSG stimulates the nerve endings in your taste buds, making the food you eat seem to have a more intense flavor. If you were part of a food study, being asked to rate the taste of a food on a scale of 1 to 10, you’d say the MSG-laced food might rate a 7 or 8, while the one without it would be down around 3 or 4.

The problem is that the effects are not confined to your taste buds. After you swallow it, MSG can go on to stimulate neurons all over your body, causing anything from headaches and heart palpitations, to numbness and shortness of breath.

Being a basic amino acid, glutamate obviously exists in nature, so you might think it’d be a relatively harmless substance. The form of glutamate we get with MSG is not the same as what you find in nature, however.

The processed MSG you consume actually ends up having a high percentage of molecules that have a geometric shape that is a mirror image of that found in nature. This is problematic for the body in much the same way that left-handed people have trouble from time to time working in a world that is dominated by right-handers.

Even though our two hands are identical in design and function, trying to use your left hand on a device designed for the other can be an exercise in frustration.

This simple difference in the MSG created in the food lab can make a big difference in how our bodies react to and process the substance. Additionally, there are many contaminants that come along in the typical MSG creation process that are known carcinogens.

The Labeling Game

On your average food label, you don’t see the phrase “monosodium glutamate” on too many things. This is because that particular phrase is reserved by the FDA for use by a product that has at least 99% processed freeglutamic acid (PFGA). PFGA is a term used to describe the processed, synthetic variety of glutamate mentioned above.

This means that a product can be 98% PFGA, with essentially all of the problems and side effects of MSG, without ever being listed as such on a food label. Instead, what you get are label names like “yeast extract”, “yeast nutrient”, “textured protein”, “hydrolyzed protein”, “gelatin”, and dozens of others. Additionally, labels like “flavor”, “flavoring”, and “natural flavors” may also contain high amounts of processed glutamate.

Regardless of the reason for its use, these products most likely carry all the inherent problems and sensitivity issues of run-of-the-mill MSG. (There is a much more comprehensive list of all the names under which processed glutamate might be hidden at http://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html.)

Furthermore, any item on a food label that you know has ingredients, but does not list them, should be suspect. A classic example is a from a popular brand of canned tuna. The ingredients listed are “tuna, water, vegetable broth, salt”.

We know “vegetable broth” has ingredients. In this case, the “vegetable broth” is simply “hydrolyzed vegetable protein” (see our list above) and water. In other words, the only reason “vegetable broth” is added is to get MSG (orPFGA) into the product.

The intent of most of these products is the same: to enhance flavor based upon the properties of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate. There is also a percentage of products that add in PFGA or MSG for their preservative and stabilizing properties, making foods or chemicals less susceptible to the effects of things like heat, light, or acidity.

The common flu vaccine FluMist, according to the CDC, includes MSG as a stabilizer. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not shoot something into my nostrils, to be absorbed by blood vessels just inches from my brain, that includes anything like MSG in it.

The Effects

By far the most common symptom I see in the office from MSG is headaches, particularly migraines. If I mention the possibility of MSG, the usual response I get is, “But I haven’t had any Chinese food recently!” Education about just how many places you can find MSG then begins.

Rashes, redness, stomach discomfort, or “brain fog” are examples of just a few, varied symptoms patients notice that they stop having once they make a concerted effort to eliminate their MSG intake. Once you know MSG is the problem, anytime your particular symptom crops up again, the question to ask isn’t so much “why am I having this headache?”, but rather “what new thing did I eat recently?”

Taking this approach allows you to get better and better at keeping MSG out of your system, keeping you where you want to be: pain free.

Regardless of whether you experience clear symptoms from MSG exposure, my recommendation is to stay away from the stuff. The health of your brain and nervous system isn’t worth a food company’s experiment to try and make their snacks tastier!

If we ignore the current trend in professional sports to seek external, pharmacological help, there really aren’t any magic fixes for athletic performance enhancement. If our training techniques are optimal — and that’s a big “if” — then the methods available to try and take yourself to the next level are limited.

As usual, the trick is to get more fitness while preserving your health. Check out some earlier articles in this space to understand how the drive to improve our fitness can potentially negatively impact our health (see http://collinsdc.com/blog/2007/07/23/french-fries-count-too/).

So, within these constraints, how do you get an edge? There are several techniques that have been used by both Olympic teams and weekend-warriors. Some are more available to the amateur athlete than others.

We’ll explore a few, break down the basic concept behind them all, and then finish off with a technique that can be used by anyone in day-to-day training.

More Air Please

Not too long ago the US Olympic Speedskating team was rumoured to have used supplemental oxygen to train its athletes. Team members put on masks that supplied oxygen at levels above normal atmospheric concentrations while they performed their usual workouts.

The idea was to provide “extra” oxygen to the athletes’ muscles, allowing them to engage a higher percentage of muscle fibers than they would otherwise. In so doing, the thinking went, they would be able to more effectively train a larger percentage of their muscle fibers than they would without supplemental oxygen.

Given the phenomenal success US Speedskaters had at the 2002 games in Salt Lake, many believe the technique is effective. It was an idea born out of the now popular “live high, train low” approach of having an athlete perform workouts at a lower elevation, enabling him to work out harder, while living at a higher elevation, reaping the benefits of the increased ability of his blood to carry oxygen after acclimatization.

Cool Down First

Everyone knows that you tend to get warmer when you exercise. In particular, the harder you workout the hotter you seem to get. It should come as no surprise then, to learn that world records in endurance sports are routinely set in cooler conditions.

Well, what would happen if you had a way to keep your body temperature cool, or even pre-cool it prior to exercise? This is exactly what the Australians did prior to the 1996 Olympics, with the development of a special ice jacket for their athletes.

The jacket was supposed to keep an athlete’s body temperature down in hot and humid conditions. With the body working under artificially cooler climes, it might be able to produce performances akin to the world record results seen when the mercury drops well below a normally comfortable 72 degrees.

Suspend Your Activity

When the media covered the amazing story of the thoroughbred Barbaro’s win at the Kentucky Derby and subsequent on-the-track injury, we were bombarded by video and photos of the horse suspended by a special pulley system to facilitate his movement and recovery (see http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0605/gallery.barbaro/content.1.html).

Similar contraptions exist for humans, too, when recovering from injuries that render us unable to support our full weight when we walk.

These devices support the pelvis, effectively reducing the weight that our legs have to bear while we walk on a treadmill. We can thereby retrain muscles that have lost strength due to trauma.

Instead of being used after an accident, what if we used such a device in training for competition? By removing a mere 10 lbs. of the load our legs have to bear under normal circumstances (and if you don’t think that’s a lot, try heading out for a 30 minute run carrying a 10 lb. weight next time), we’d be able to perform workouts at a much higher intensity, engaging, and thus training, a higher percentage of our muscle fibers.

And the Connection Is?

What do all these things have in common? Reduced stress. The technique applied reduces the stress from gravity, heat, or lack of oxygen.

In all cases an attempt is made to free the body of what is a common stressor, one that under normal circumstances would be considered unavoidable. In so doing, physiological resources become available to be applied to a not-so-common variable: the stress of training.

Unfortunately, all of these require specialized equipment and training to employ. So how can you and I get in on the action?

Go Downhill

Dr. Phil Maffetone, coach of six-time Ironman World Championship winner Mark Allen, recommends using a normal training tool: hills. Only this time, you’re not concentrating on going up the hill for its physiological benefit, but down the hill. The very thing that makes going downhill easy — lack of gravity stress — is what will allow you to push your muscles that little bit extra for an added training effect.

Whether doing this on the bike or on two feet, choose a long, gradual downhill section that will allow you to do some moderate intervals for at least 3-4 minutes. The longer the better.

Your pace should be right at the edge of your aerobic threshold (see http://collinsdc.com/blog/2007/12/07/slow-weigh-down/ to find out how to determine this). If you’re coming up on racing season and you’ve spent a few months steadily building your aerobic base, doing anaerobic threshold intervals downhill are appropriate too.

Play it safe, though. You can pick up a lot of steam headed downhill on the bike, so stay aware and keep your hands close to the brakes.

Improper form running downhill is also a great way to pick up a case of plantar fasciitis. The repetitive pounding on your calcaneus, or heal bone, is a common way to knock that bone out of position and inflame the connective tissue on the sole of your foot, the plantar fascia. Shorten your stride and stay off your heals, which is a good plan no matter what your running terrain.

Remember, it’s the downhill portion of the interval that’s important, so take it easy headed back to the top, spinning in a light gear on the bike, and jogging lightly, or even walking, when on foot.

This isn’t all to say that working the uphill portion of your terrain is useless. The strength-building benefits of uphill intervals are well known. Using the other side of the rise is a great way to change up your training and add a little extra to your routine, with little added stress.

Finding ways to effectively lower your total stress and still achieve good training adaptation will keep you healthy long enough to get optimally fit! Have fun!

How to exercise for maximum weight loss — and health preservation — over the holidays

So here you are, caught in the weight loss abyss somewhere between the the culinary onslaught that was Thanksgiving, and the approaching diet-destroying duo of the Christmas and New Year’s celebrations.

Time for exercise is in short supply. You figure that your best bet is to workout even harder than ever for the little time you have in order to maximize your calorie-burning hours.

Losing weight is all about burning more calories than you take in, right?

Well, no. It’s not quite that simple.

That idea leaves a lot unsaid about the overall effects of exercise on our bodies. There are lots of technical details involving fats, carbohydrates, and number crunching to illustrate why this doesn’t completely add up.

For now, though, I’ll spare you the mumbo-jumbo so we can get right down to understanding how different exercise intensities can impact our ability to get rid of those unwanted pounds. We can also use this knowledge to exercise in a way that helps you become more fit and stay healthy in the process.

Got energy?

We exercise because it takes more energy than just sitting on the couch. The energy comes from calories we burn, and the calories themselves are burned off from stores of fat and sugar in our bodies. (We burn protein, too, but since consuming protein for energy typically happens far less than the amount of fat and sugar we burn, we’re going to leave it out for the purposes of simplifying this explanation.)

Generally speaking, our bodies have two ways of producing energy — one with oxygen, and one without. Given that we’re oxygen breathing mammals you can probably guess which one is more common, and which one our bodies prefer.

Physiologists refer to energy production in the presence of oxygen as aerobic energy, and energy production without oxygen as anaerobic energy. Anaerobic energy is the kind we rely on when we’re running hard and gasping for air. That need to breathe hard is our body’s not-so-subtle way of catching us up on the oxygen “debt” we put ourselves into by pushing ourselves harder than we’re able to go for a long period of time.

At lower levels of exertion we rely primarily on aerobic energy, and at higher levels we rely more and more on anaerobic energy.

The aerobic system is a fat burning machine. With plenty of oxygen and stored fat, you can exert yourself for hours at a time.

Without enough oxygen for higher intensity efforts, the body’s chemistry changes to burning more stored sugars. The available energy in the form of sugar is far, far less than what’s available in our fat stores, so the amount of time you can exercise at a higher, anaerobic intensity level is typically measured in minutes.

As you might guess, our bodies like oxygen, so anaerobic energy production is significantly more stressful than aerobic energy production.

Like all other forms of stress, this means that we have to treat anaerobic energy production — and the level of exertion that it requires — with some reverence. Guyton’s Textbook of Medical Physiology — the bible of the physiological field if ever there were one — refers to exercise as the biggest stressor of our bodies, bar none.

This means that when we choose to exercise, and in particular, when we choose to exercise anaerobically, we should do so carefully, with planning, and a healthy amount of respect.

Burn The Right Stuff

From a weight loss perspective, exercising at high intensities burns proportionally more sugar than it does fat. So to burn fat, you have to slow down and work at a more moderate intensity.

Yes, you will burn more total calories with that advanced “aerobics” class (you now know why they should really be called anaerobics classes!), but you’ll pay the price in many ways.

Bodies get better at tasks with repetition, and energy production is no exception. This means that the more time you spend with sugar-burning high intensity exercise, the more efficient you’ll become at it, and the more likely your body will be to rely on this source for future energy needs.

Conversely, if you spend your time in a fat-burning zone of intensity, you’ll be more likely to engage that particular energy system for other tasks as well.

Now which would you rather have, a body that leaves all that extra weight you’ve packed on untouched while you’re kicking back after the Christmas feast, or one that gets to work right away on burning off the excess fuel? Consistently exercising at a lower intensity, aerobic effort will prime your body to use fats instead of sugars as its energy source.

Additionally, with anaerobic work being more stressful, the chances of you surviving constant high intensity work without getting sick or injured are far, far less. All that excess stress induces our bodies to produce high amounts of the stress hormone cortisol, too. Cortisol is the prime culprit when it comes to feelings of being burnt out and fatigued.

If you’re a high-intensity exercise addict, ask yourself how many times you’ve been sick or injured over the last year. If your answer is more than two or three, you’re probably exercising too hard, too much, or some combination thereof.

This is why most New Year’s Resolution exercise plans don’t last much beyond February or March. Most people work out too hard, too much, too soon. After 6 or 8 weeks they’re typically sick, injured, burnt out, or all of the above.

The Remedy

The fix is to take it down a notch. Run slower. Cycle slower. Swim slower. Don’t push quite as much in the weight room.

Exercise at that oft-heard “conversational pace”. Even better, wear a heart rate monitor. Get a knowledgeable coach or doctor to prescribe an exercise test so you can figure out your personal exercise intensity that keeps your workouts in that aerobic range.

I do this frequently with patients and it does wonders to help people get more from their workouts. More weight loss. More fitness. More health and exercise longevity.

If you can’t get someone to help you figure out your personal exercise zone, take an educated guess. The best kind is the 180-formula advocated by Phil Maffetone.

Here’s how it works. Subtract your age from 180. Next, choose one of the following categories:
-If you’re on regular medication or are recovering from a serious illness, subtract 10.
-If you’re new to exercise, you’ve been injured, or you’re frequently sick, subtract 5.
-If you’ve been exercising without problems for 2 years and you don’t get sick more than a couple of time a year, make no adjustments.
-If you’ve been exercising without problems for 2 years and are making regular progress, add 5.

So, if you’re 40 years old and you get a cold a few times a year, your number is 135. This is your maximum aerobic heart rate. That is, any efforts at a heart rate above this number are considered anaerobic, and are above the intensity at which you should be exercising.

Using this formula obviously requires a heart rate monitor, but it is a minor investment when it comes to being able to workout in a way that not only helps you lose weight, but also keeps you healthy in the process.

In short, feel free not to have to work so hard all the time. It’ll help you lose weight, feel better, and enjoy the holiday season that much more!

Referred Pain Can Be A Pain In The Neck

How many times have you awakened some morning in the not-too-distant past to find that you have a new ache or pain? Trouble turning your neck. Pain around your shoulder blade. An uncomfortable lower back.

Where does this pain come from? Did you “sleep wrong”? Was the bed too hard? Too soft? Why, of all mornings, is it bothering you on this one?

The sensations we have in our bodies are not random. The perhaps unimaginable complexity of the human system can make what we experience seem random. But just because the pattern is too difficult for us to figure out doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.

So when we wake up with pain in a muscle, a common assumption is that the problem is right there with that muscle. This may seem self-evident, but it’s not quite so easy. Let me explain.

If your phone keeps ringing over and over from an annoying prank caller, the “symptom” you experience is your discomfort from the phone constantly ringing, disturbing your peace. The problem doesn’t start with the phone, though. It started with the prank caller on the other end of the line.

Bodies have a similar mechanism, where a problem in one area can send a signal that shows up elsewhere.

Take heart attacks, for example. You might have heard that a common symptom experienced during a heart attack is pain in your chest that can spread into your left arm and shoulder.

What does your arm and shoulder have to do with your heart? Not much, except that they share part of their nerve supply from similar levels in your spinal cord.

A common explanation for the shoulder and arm pain experienced by heart attack sufferers is that your brain misinterprets the flood of information it receives from an organ in trouble.

Instead of having us perceive this influx of information as a problem with the organ itself, our brains interpret the signals as pain and discomfort in a part of our bodies that are much more accustomed to those sensations. This kind of discomfort is called referred pain, since the pain is originating one place, but showing up in another.

What makes things interesting is that just about every organ we have seems to have a referred pain pattern.

You might have gotten up one morning, for example, with a “crick in your neck”. Pain into one side of the neck — typically, but not always, the right side — that might radiate down around your shoulder blade.

Patients come in from time to time with this kind of pain. The usual explanation goes something like, “Well, I must have slept wrong or something.” In many cases they’re surprised to find out that the source of their pain has little to do with how they slept, and a lot to do with their gall bladder!

The gall bladder has a referred pain area that usually covers the right side of the neck and shoulder, down around the shoulder blade. As such we have to rule out gall bladder trouble as a source of their pain anytime a patient presents with this kind of pattern.

It’s likely that the crick in your neck is more highly correlated with what you ate the night before than the position in which you happened to fall asleep. Fatty foods, spicy foods, or foods to which you may be allergic can frequently irritate the gall bladder.

After a good physical exam, if gall bladder irritation turns out to be the source of the problem, I have to advise the patient to avoid re-irritating the area with the foods mentioned above. Bile salts and pancreatic enzymes can also be helpful to reduce the load on the gall bladder while it recovers from the episode.

In short, if pain around the shoulder and neck turns out to be referred from the gall bladder, no amount of soft-tissue work will resolve the problem alone.

Since most organs appear to have a referred pain pattern, the gall bladder example used above is just one scenario where a visceral, or organ-related, source must be considered for what might appear to be a structural problem.

Seemingly structural problems can have visceral components. Likewise, a structural problem can have a very direct impact on our organ function.

The job of a truly holistic practitioner is to evaluate all facets of your well-being to help you improve your complete health.

Your Body is Not Trying to Heal

Why we honor the drive to survive before trying to heal ourselves

Stress is used as an explanation to cover everything from an outbreak of cold sores to a full blown heart attack. But how do we get from a nebulous concept like stress to a symptom that’s not at all subtle, like a headache in the middle of the night?

Last time we explored the varied forms of stress and we got a broad view of how it leads to illness. In this article, I’ll go over how our bodies actually respond to the varied stresses it is placed under. Understanding this will leave you much more prepared to handle health decisions and challenges you’re faced with every day.

I’ll start with an example that I use with a lot of my patients.

Let’s say a person — we’ll call her Jane — has recently twisted her ankle. As a result, she’s walking more towards the inside of her foot to avoid the pain she experiences when she gets too much weight on the outside.

Jane does this for a week or so, and the pain in her ankle seems to resolve.

A couple of weeks go by with her ankle feeling pretty good, though perhaps just a bit stiff from time to time. However, now the inside of her knee is hurting.

She doesn’t know why this started, but she’s found that, without really even thinking about it, if she just shifts her weight a little bit to the outside of her hips her knee stops hurting.

Jane continues to hold herself this way and six or eight weeks go by without her knee or her ankle hurting. The problem she has now is that her hip has started to bother her.

No change in position or amount of time resting make the discomfort go away.

This is the state she is in when she walks into my office, complaining of hip pain. So put yourself in the doctor’s shoes for a moment, and tell me: where is Jane’s problem?

From experience, I can tell you that if we just address the spot where she’s having discomfort — around her hip — we won’t get very far. She’ll either have no relief at all, or the pain will be back in short order.

Our fictitious patient has essentially layered herself into a problem that won’t go away until we remove the layers in the order that they came about. That is, we have to address the hip, knee, and foot — and typically in that order — to provide our patient with complete relief and optimal healing.

We tend to layer problems on top of each other, and it’s only when we’ve layered so much that our bodies have nowhere to go that we then have pain, discomfort, or some other symptom that won’t go away. Addressing these issues in order is a process that doctors for over one hundred years have referred to as “peeling the layers of the onion”.

The question you might ask at this point is: why wouldn’t the body just heal the original problem and be done with it?

The big concept to get here is that, contrary to popular belief, the body’s main priority when it is hurt is not to heal. The body first and foremost is trying to survive.

Let’s use an analogy.

Imagine you’re sitting in a house somewhere and all of a sudden you feel a huge earthquake begin. You look up and see the ceiling cracking. It seems like the whole house could come down on top of you at any minute, so you start to run to the door to get outside.

Before you make it to the door, though, you find a big bookcase that you had in the hallway has fallen over. It and the dozens of books that were placed upon it are now strewn on the floor in front of you, blocking your path out of the house and away from imminent danger.

Given this scenario, would you take the time to carefully stand the bookcase back upright, and then proceed to neatly place all the books back on their proper shelves in the appropriate order?

I would guess not.

Chances are, you’d use whatever strength you had to quickly push the bookcase out of the way, and throw the pile of books in whatever direction was most convenient so you could get out the door fast.

You’re not worried about what the mess looks like right now, as you have survival as your first priority. You know there will be plenty of time later to come back and pick up the mess.

You hope so anyway. But what happens if you come back, and instead of having time to clean up, you now have to deal with a tornado, or a fire, or a family crisis?

The books might just get pushed to the side somewhere, maybe even preventing you from getting easily to the kitchen, bathroom, or bedroom.

Our bodies work very much along the same sorts of principles. Systemically we deal with problems in order of priority, stacking things on top of each other without necessarily having fixed the last thing.

Basically, we adapt to the problem at hand in order to remain functional and survive against the onslaught of stresses that each of us encounters every day. True healing is something else entirely.

Healing, like an orderly cleaning of our traumatized house above, requires time and energy. If that time or energy is concentrated on something else, problems will pile up, and it will require additional, focused energy to neatly clear out the adaptational mess that has developed.

My time as a doctor is spent helping people find their way out of the maze, frequently addressing issues that people might have thought they had completely dealt with ages ago.

What they didn’t realize is that they simply adapted to whatever problem they had, without really healing from it.

Jane never really healed from her twisted ankle. The pain stopped, yes. But she never addressed the altered gait or lack of muscular support that she had from the original trauma.

Each adaptation we layer on top of a problem requires energy. Having to walk over or around the pile of books that used to be on the bookcase takes more energy than simply walking the straight path that used to exist before things fell over.

Every additional adaptation that gets added on requires more energy, until it becomes all we can do just to navigate our little mess of a house.

The effort it takes to clean up the mess (or “heal” from the problem) will take an additional, one-time expenditure of energy. But over the long haul the energy saved in having a clear path will be far greater.

Knowing this along the way can save lots of time, energy, and discomfort. Just like addressing small messes along the way is a lot easier than a complete house cleaning, getting aches, pains, or injuries you might experience evaluated before they become unmanageable will keep your physical, mental, and emotional house in order.

French Fries Count, Too

The Many Faces of Stress and Its Not-So-Subtle Effects

Stress comes in many forms. Most of us understand this intuitively. For example, we know that we feel “stressed” when we have a hard day at work or when we’re carrying a heavy load.

We use the word to describe an intense emotional event, and to convey what is happening to a wooden board bent to the point of breaking.

While the concept seems very natural to all of us, the actual term “stress” hasn’t been around very long. It wasn’t coined until a researcher by the name of Hans Selye came along in the 1950s.

On the other hand, the idea that people and things could be subjected to environmental irritants has been around for a long time. D.D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, made this observation back in the late 1800s.

Palmer divided these irritants, or forms of stress, into mechanical, chemical, and psychological forms – or what he called “traumatism”, “poison”, and “auto-suggestion”, respectively.

A mechanical stress could be in the form of an uncomfortable pair of shoes worn all day long.

Chemical stress could come from a food allergy or a toxin from unfriendly bacteria.

Psychological stress is perhaps the most well known, and might arise via a fight with your spouse or dealing with an unreasonable boss.

An important thing to understand about all forms of stress is that they’re cumulative. That is, you can’t separate the different varieties of stress and somehow recover from them independently.

If you spend the weekend playing touch football (mechanical stress) and then have a big deadline looming at work early in the week (psychological stress), and as a result of your time crunch at work you scarf down some fast food filled with lots of sugar and hydrogenated fats (chemical stress), then it won’t be any wonder when you’re worn down and sick by Friday!

Selye actually determined this half a century ago, when he would stress lab rats in various ways and then see how their bodies responded. No matter what form the stress, the eventual breakdown always followed the same pattern.

Humans also follow this pattern, and if we don’t make an effort to relieve the various forms of stress placed upon us, we end up sick, injured, or both.

So if various forms of stress can make us sick, then what exactly is health? It is pretty easy for us all to understand that we feel good until mechanical, chemical, and psychological stressors (or “MCP” for short) add up and we break down.

But then what about that point in between, when we have a fair amount of MCP, but we’re not yet sick or injured in any noticeable way (i.e. we don’t have any symptoms)?

That space in between the level of stress we’re currently under, and the level we have where we start experiencing symptoms is called “resistance”.

These ideas are best demonstrated with a stress chart, devised by Dr. John Bandy of Austin, Texas. Take a look:

The chart is read like a thermometer, with our total exposure to environmental stress (or MCP), reflected by the “Now” point on the chart. Various stresses can contribute to our total stress, as already discussed. Anything from marital strife to fatty foods to, yes, exercise, can add to the total level of stress we experience.

The point “D” on the chart is the Disease point. That is the point at which we begin to exhibit symptoms. “R” then, is a graphical representation of resistance. If the next big stress we are subjected to happens to exceed our current supply of resistance (“R”), then we experience symptoms of illness or disease.

At any given point in time we have varying amounts of resistance. It varies within and between individuals based upon how good our diet is, what our job is like, how much exercise we do, whether a loved one recently passed away, and whether we’ve just been exposed to a “bug”, to name a few.

That is, it varies based upon how much MCP we’re experiencing.

So health, then, is that state where we still have some resistance, keeping the level of environmental irritants that we are experiencing from producing symptoms. We are “unhealthy” (or experiencing “disease”), when MCP exceeds our resistance.

From this it follows that any stressor reduces the amount of resistance you have, bringing you closer to a state of disease. These concepts are well described in Dr. W.D. Harper’s book, Anything Can Cause Anything. The title gets to the crux of the idea: just like any expense — be it business or pleasure — will deplete your bank account, so too will any stressor deplete your overall reserve of health.

Next time, we’ll explore these ideas more to understand how we survive and adapt to all the stress that is around us!