Lifting the Head Off the Spine

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neck_alignmentYears ago my (Carol) first qigong teacher made the provocative statement that the world would be a different place if everyone’s heads were correctly held, in the proper position.

What did he mean by this? Most of us have the bad habit of letting our heads fall back, with the chin lifted, or forward, in a slouched position. First of all, the average human head is 8 to 12 pounds! That’s a lot of weight to carry around, and we’re too distracted, between work and other stressors, to notice.

This mal-positioning creates a constant blockage, leading to headaches, neck strain, shoulder strain, and worse, nerve impingement leading to numbness and tingling down the arms, to the fingers.

Ready to give it a try? Lift your sternum (the bony area at the center of your chest), tuck your chin in slightly, and lift the crown of the head center skywards, giving a slight tug to the muscles at the back of the neck. At the same time, let your shoulders drop. You are now lifting your head off the spine! Practice: hold it for several seconds at a time, any time, and soon your body will crave the correct position. Some examples of practice are when waiting (for a red light to turn green, for the water to boil, when listening to someone speak, or when you’re on hold), meditating, or during your daily peregrinations when you are called upon to be still for a moment.

soft_palateA related area to this is inside the mouth, where there are a number of muscles no one ever thinks of. These are: Tensor veli palatini, Levator veli palatini, Palato glossus, Palato pharyngeus, and Musculus uvulae. When you practice lifting your head off the spine, think of softening the muscles of the soft palate. This will create more space to free up the components of the jaw and neck.

Lifting the head off the spine is really a qi gong practice in that the focus is on the bones, allowing the surrounding tissue to lengthen, become stronger, and relax all at once. When you hit the “sweet spot,” you’ll know it, and with practice, will be able to hold the position for longer moments, then periods, of time.

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/lifting-the-head-off-the-spine

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Health Tips, Philosophy, Stress Busters, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Keep Moving!

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millet_the_gleanersWhen I (Carol) took the Memorial Sloan Kettering online oncology course for acupuncturists, the recommendation for healthy people to exercise 30-60 minutes a day was the standout detail from the entire, 30+ hours of lectures.

That’s 30-60 minutes, seven days a week of formal exercise, not including the time you may spend traveling, changing, or cleaning up. And movement for our daily peregrinations, though better than nothing, doesn’t count.

Why, I wondered, did they advocate 30-60 minutes a day, and then it hit me: our DNA is programmed to move a lot more than we do in the 21st Century. It’s only been about 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, and many conveniences we take for granted didn’t exist before then. For our ancestors, chores and travel demanded constant physical effort; physiological evolution doesn’t change as quickly as our world has, so we have to accommodate our body’s needs by moving more.

Moving is one of the main ways to reduce your risk of getting cancer, because where there is blood flow, free radicals cannot pile up. When you regularly engage in steady, sustained movement, blood perfuses throughout your body.

Once I grasped this fact, I took up the challenge, and found it easy to justify the time spent, because being cancer-free is a compelling motivator. Viewed in this light, choosing to move is as simple as standing on one side of a line and stepping over it to the other side.

Regular exercise has many benefits, including leveling out the stresses encountered in a day.

If you are new to exercise, begin slowly and build up to it. You will find the body grows stronger exponentially, for it’s designed to do this. Expect some aches and pains as you make progress, but pay attention to the quality of pain to avoid injury (so you can continue working out!). If you overdo it, don’t give up, just take a break and get some acupuncture or a massage to speed the healing.

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/keep-moving

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Health Tips, Stress Busters, Theory, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Joint Pain in a Nutshell

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Joint Pain in a Nutshell

joint pain

Most people think of muscles when they think of being flexible, but our bones equally give us mobility. Without our bones, our muscles would enable us to move like worms, but with our bones we become erect and perform a myriad of functional activities. Our joints are the articulations between bones, and vary depending on what kind of movement is required.

Types of Joints

Joint structures allow range of motion and accentuate a specific movement. There are three basic types of articulations: fibrous, cartilaginous, and synovial joints.

1. Fibrous joints have no joint cavity so the two bones must form a tight fit, and this achieved with fibrous connective tissue, that holds the bones together. This type of joint allows for very little movement. Sutures that connect the cranial bones and allow enough movement for the pulsing of the cerebral spinal fluid is an example of a fibrous joint.

2. Cartilaginous joints don’t have a joint cavity either, and the bones are held together by cartilage. The vertebrae of the spinal column and the pubic symphysis are examples of cartilaginous joints.

3. The synovial joint has a joint cavity, which allows for greater movement. Protective tissue surrounds the bone to cushion it for a lifetime of wear-and-tear: hyaline cartilage, a wrapping of ligaments, bursa sacs, and synovial fluid inside the joint reduce friction and maintain proper range of motion. Synovial joints are in the major articulations of the body: the knee, elbow, hip, and shoulders.

Directions of Synovial Joint

 

The synovial joint can move in many directions.

Gliding back-and-forth (ankles, wrists)

Rotation turns bone along its axis (flip hand palm up palm down)

Circumduction (rotate whole arm)

Angular increases (i) or decreases (d) between the two bones involved:

Flexion- bends  (d)

Extension- straightens (i)

Abduction- away from midline (i)

Adduction- towards and crossing midline (d)

The Injury and Healing of Joints

High-quality nutrition and regular exercise are the key ingredients for healthy joints. Our joints are susceptible to normal wear-and-tear, with age and gravity adding further stress on the tissue. The ligaments, tendons, and cartilage in the joint spaces get little or no blood supply, and it is for this reason that injuries seem to linger.

Studies have shown that acupuncture can speed healing in a wide variety of joint problems, both chronic and acute. From a Chinese medicine perspective, joints are places where things can get stuck, creating the sensation of tightness and pain. Acupuncture and its modalities facilitate local activity at the site of injury.

It is our recommendation that to keep your joints healthy and pliable, eat the best possible nutrition, keep moving by including stretch  and strengthening qi gong exercises in your routine, and when needed, decompress the joints when possible, and finally get some acupuncture to correct the problem before it gets worse.

Joint Pain in a Nutshell

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Conditions Treated, Health Tips, Integrative Medicine, Nourishing You, Stress Busters, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Functions of the Liver

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your liver is a tireless marathoner

your liver is a tireless marathoner

The liver is a multi-tasker: it produces, purifies, and converts many substances essential to life. It plays a role in the digestion, hematology (blood), immune and inflammatory response, and endocrine systems.

1) The liver’s digestive function is simple: it manufactures bile, which is stored in the gallbladder. The gallbladder then secretes the bile as needed into the small and large intestines to emulsify and absorb the fats we eat.

2) The liver also transforms excess simple sugars and converts them into glycogen or fats for storage. When you need that extra boost of energy, the liver can take that stored fat and glycogen and converts it into the energy you need. It can also transform proteins into energy as a last resort.

3) The liver stores fat-soluble vitamins and minerals and distributes them where and when they are needed.

4) The liver is also an organ of detoxification: it takes toxins and poisons from medications, alcohol, and metabolic waste and transforms them into less harmful substances. It also stores toxins that can’t be broken down and eliminated, including some chemicals and other poisons.

5) The liver synthesizes the proteins that regulate blood clotting and molecule transporters in the blood.

6) The liver makes the cholesterol that is used in hormone production.

7) The liver produces proteins that affect the inflammatory response and manufactures some antigens for immunity.

8) The liver has cells that specifically destroy bacteria and breakdown old worn-out red blood cells.

With so much activity to accomplish, you can imagine the liver is prone to diseases such as viral infections, inflammatory diseases, toxicity, vascular disorders, metabolic diseases, and cancers.

In order to keep your liver healthy, choose pesticide-free foods and wash your vegetables, consume plenty of antioxidants , avoid taking medications you don’t really need, and limit alcohol consumption. Ways to nourish your liver include having lemon juice regularly, and engaging in some form(s) of exercise.

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/functions-of-the-liver

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: All Things Exercise, Health Tips, Integrative Medicine, Stress Busters, Uncategorized, You Are What You Eat Tagged With: , , , ,

The Limbic System: Emotions, Learning, & Memory

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skull_1

Neural Connections Grow and Change

While we experience emotions and memories as ephemeral and therefore not concrete, the fact is they are processed in a distinct region of the brain named the Limbic System, and they are made up of molecules that interact with nerves.

The Limbic System (LS) is a network of neurons that links the hypothalamus and pituitary gland to the cerebrum. The LS has a direct effect on the Nervous and Endocrine Systems.

Memory and memorization is reinforced through repetition, which strengthens the connections into neural pathways. Emotions and sensory components (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) enhance memory; the input of more than one sensory component and/or the stronger the emotion experienced, the greater our ability with be to recall that memory.

The LS could be called the conscience, because it processes the emotional aspects of behavior. In a perfect world, behavior and emotions that accompany it are rational and are in sync with each other, for example, eating when hungry, working for money, and resting in the evening.

When symptoms arise that elude diagnostic testing and are classified “psychosomatic,” medical science has suggested these disorders may originate in the Limbic System. Because the LS influences the nervous and endocrine systems, emotions of stress (fear, anxiety, anger) could affect the delicate balance in those systems and manifest as an identifiable symptom.

On a purely physical level, when we learn and practice a new task, these new neural connections become permanently part of us. First they are stored in the motor cortex region of the brain (receives and sends signals pertaining to voluntary movement), later they dropped down to the basal nuclei (deeper in the brain), and eventually they are stored in the spinal cord once the task no longer requires conscious effort. Neural memory exists in physical space and can be built upon.

This explains how, after a lapse of many years, a skill can be re-learned quickly, based on that stored knowledge. For example, if you took ballet or piano lessons in grade school and decided twenty years later to take classes, the stored memory would help you come up to speed more quickly than if you had to learn from scratch.

Similarly, emotional memory is thought to first to be stored first in a specific area of the LS, the amygdala, and then moved to the pre-frontal cortex. These neural connections have nutrient substances that make them up – proteins and minerals. They exist in physical space as distinct components, like physical memory, perhaps as malleable, to be built upon and changed.

http://mountaintopacupuncture.com/the-limbic-system-emotions-learning-memory

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At Mountaintop Acupuncture, we have over 30 years experience. To read more, please click here.

If you have questions and concerns about acupuncture treatment, we offer a free 20-minute phone session: click here for contact information to call or e-mail us. We practice at The Highlands Ranch Medical Pavilion in Littleton, Colorado.

Insurance is welcome and accepted.

Filed Under: Integrative Medicine, Stress Busters, Uncategorized, You Are What You Eat Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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