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How to Reduce the Risk of Snow Shoveling Injuries

How to Reduce the Risk of Snow Shoveling Injuries

shoveling-snow-at-night

When the snow starts to fly, your trusty shovel is often the only thing between you and a day spent snowed in. If used improperly, however, that same shovel could leave you with a painful (and maybe even debilitating) injury. Statistics from emergency room and primary care visits provide plenty of evidence that it happens to lots of people every year. That said, it is certainly possible to remove snow from your sidewalk and driveway safely. Here are a few techniques that will help you reduce your risk of snow shoveling injuries. 

How to Reduce Your Risk of Snow Shoveling Injuries 

The first thing to do when facing the cold is to make sure your body is nice and warm – warmed up, that is. Snow shoveling is an aerobic activity, so it’s wise to treat it the same way you would a jog or a swim. Walk briskly for five minutes, do 100 jumping jacks, or simply march in place. Stretch your lower back, hamstrings, and arms to make sure they’re limber and flexible. Your chiropractor can show you specific stretches that will help get your muscles and joints in shoveling shape. 

Next, consider your tools. Having the right ergonomic shovel is a great help when it comes to removing stress on the spine. Choose a shovel that has a curved handle for better ergonomics. A shovel with a small, plastic blade limits the amount of weight you’ll end up lifting, reducing the risk of strain and injuries. Choose your clothing carefully as well. Good quality boots with plenty of traction will keep your feet warm and dry while reducing the risk of slipping. 

Once you’re prepared, it’s time to shovel. Push the snow to the side rather than lifting it whenever possible. When you do have to lift, the key word is “straight.” Face the snow straight on, with your hips square. Bend at the knees, take on a small load, and lift with your legs while tightening your stomach muscles. Keep your back straight: don’t twist to toss the snow to the side. Instead, move your feet.  

Proper pacing is another effective way to avoid injuries. If you are dealing with a foot of snow, don’t try to get all of it in a single scoop. Instead, remove it in layers from the top a few inches at a time. Take a break every fifteen minutes, or if you start to feel overworked. Stretch your arms, switch out your gloves or hat if they’ve gotten soaked, and remember to drink plenty of water.  

The number one way to avoid shoveling injuries is to let something (or someone) else do the work. A snow blower is a great investment if you live in a snowy area or have lots of ground to cover. If you suffer from back pain or have a previous injury, consider hiring someone else to do the job. 

If you tend to have back pain after shoveling, consider checking in with a chiropractor about it. Your chiropractor can help you identify areas where your technique could be changed for better safety and effectiveness. He or she can also suggest specific exercises and stretches that will improve your core strength and flexibility. With a little caution and know-how, you and your shovel can handle any winter challenge that comes your way. 

Raking Leaves and a Pain-Free Fall

Raking Leaves and a Pain-Free Fall

With summer becoming a distant memory, the leaves will soon be turning colors and falling from the trees, blowing about your yard, driveway and sidewalk. So it’s only natural that your thoughts are turning to the day you’ll need to get the rake out and start to work. However—as with all maintenance and household tasks that require some physical exertion—it‘s very important for you to take a few common-sense precautions against accident and injury.

Fall yard work, leaf raking and other outdoor activities carry numerous risks, including upper and lower back strain, neck strain, and shoulder pain. Just like sports, this type of physical activity can increase your chances of getting hurt if your body isn’t properly prepared for it. You can avoid these types of injuries by warming up, stretching and maintaining good posture as you go about your work.

Athletes are able to reduce the risk of injury by warming up and stretching. You can use this approach too. The American Chiropractic Association (ACA) recommends 10-15 minutes of stretching exercises such as trunk rotations, side-bends and knee-to-chest pulls. When these are combined with a short walk or some jumping jacks (which help to stimulate circulation) and followed by additional stretches, the body is ready for the sort of manual labor associated with raking and yard work.

While raking your yard, good posture can also prevent back problems—make sure you keep your back straight and your head up! Use common sense while working: lift with your legs and bend with your knees, taking care that you don’t strain your back while picking up bundles of leaves and grass. If you’re likely to carry heavy items, hold them close to your body to help prevent back strain. In order to take the pressure off your back, rake using the “scissors” stance: put your right foot forward and the left one back, then reverse after a few minutes. When using a lawn mower, try to use your core body weight to move it as opposed to your arms and back.

Also, remember that it’s important to pace yourself and take frequent breaks. This is particularly important when the weather is hot. If this is the case, also be sure to drink lots of water and wear sun-protection such as a hat, sunblock and sunglasses. Switching tasks regularly can help prevent repetitive motion injuries in vulnerable muscle groups—change body positions, or simply move onto another job for a short period of time before returning to the previous one.

Investing in extra protective gear (maybe some gloves to prevent blisters, a mask if you’re prone to allergies and protective eyewear) can make life easier while taking on outdoor chores. Ergonomic tools with extra padding, larger or curved handles are less tiring to use over a long time period.

One of the most useful things you can do to help prevent accidents and injuries is to have a plan for what you want to accomplish and to make sure that you have realistic expectations about how much you can get done in the time available. If you’re unaccustomed to physical labor, chances are pretty good that you’ll feel a bit stiff or possibly sore the next day. If this happens, you can use ice to soothe the discomfort. Of course, chiropractic care is always available if you need it.

As chiropractic physicians, we’re experts in diagnosing and treating a wide variety of conditions that affect the musculoskeletal and nervous system. We know from experience how easy it is for fall clean-up to unexpectedly go wrong. Please be smart and take reasonable precautions!

Teens, Back Pain and Chiropractic Care

Teens, Back Pain and Chiropractic Care

Looking at the big picture, low back pain is a big problem. The condition affects more than 600 million people worldwide, including over one-third of all Americans—more than the number of people affected by diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined. The financial burden (medical care plus lost productivity) caused by chronic lower back pain in America exceeds $550 billion annually.

That said, one of the saddest aspects of chronic lower back pain is that it doesn’t discriminate between adults and children. And in an era when teens’ musculoskeletal systems are particularly at risk because of reduced physical activity and poor posture (thanks to heavy school backpacks, improper sitting ergonomics and lots of time spent on mobile devices), this problem is only growing larger. In addition, a number of studies have already indicated that lower back pain in adolescents is strongly associated with the development of chronic lower back pain later in life. That’s the bad news for teens. However, the good news is that those adolescents who have been successfully treated to eliminate lower back pain in their youth have a lower risk of developing chronic lower back pain as they grow older.

So it’s natural that the medical community is keenly interested in learning which treatments are most successful in terms of eliminating the lower back pain itself and in preventing it from recurring later in life. This interest led to a recent study. The aim of the study was to determine which of the commonly-available treatment methodologies were most effective. To determine this, researchers performed a meta-analysis of existing studies published in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese to measure which of the treatments used in these studies produced the most consistently positive outcomes in terms of pain, disability, flexibility, endurance, and mental health. The researchers found studies that produced data for 11 treatment groups and 5 control groups involving a total of 334 children and adolescents, and then compared the data.

Their findings were both strong and definitive. Of all the treatment methodologies used in the individual studies, the ones most effective in producing short-term and long-term positive outcomes in the five areas studied were those that involved therapeutic physical conditioning and manual therapy. That is, treatments provided by “hands on” practitioners such as chiropractors, osteopaths, and physical therapists.

These therapies, commonly involving joint and spinal manipulation and ultrasound treatment to reduce pain, were subjectively found to be more effective by the patients than other treatments. The patients’ subjective analysis was confirmed in most of the studies by clinician assessments. Naturally, these “manual therapy” treatment options were preferable in many other ways as well, because they avoided reliance on potentially addictive painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin, epidural steroid injections, and surgery.

These findings confirm what Doctors of Chiropractic have observed in their own clinics. Over the years, we have seen many patients (of all ages) benefit from the manual therapies we use to provide relief for their lower back pain. So if you (or your children) experience lower back pain—whether occasional or chronic—contact your chiropractor and ask him or her to explain to you the treatment options available, and what they can do to relieve your symptoms and allow you to enjoy life free from pain once again.

Why Does Back Pain Tend to Recur?

Why Does Back Pain Tend to Recur?

In a recent Consumer Reports survey, 88% of more than 14,000 subscribers who had lower back pain indicated that it had recurred during the prior 12 months. While other academic studies suggest that recurrence may be somewhat less widespread—perhaps affecting between a third and half of all back pain sufferers—it’s very clear that many people experience back pain as a recurring problem.

Professor Doune Macdonald and fellow researchers at the University of Queensland in Brisbane were interested in learning why some people experienced a recurrence of their back pain while others did not. Their investigation found an association between recurrence of low back pain and altered muscle activity in the deep muscle fibers of the lumbar spine. These muscles are also referred to as your “core” muscles, the ones that are most targeted in Pilates training. Your core muscles give strength, balance and stability to the back, and consist of muscles in the lower back, abdomen and pelvis.

The most important of the core muscles for the stability of your back are the multifidus. These run along the length of the spine and help to take some of the pressure off the vertebral discs so that weight is more evenly distributed along the length of the back. When working properly, the multifidus muscles are activated even before any movement takes place, so as to protect the spine against injury from a sudden load of weight (such as when lifting a heavy box or bending over to tie your shoes).

According to a study published in the journal Painin 2009, Macdonald and colleagues found that the multifidus muscles showed later activation in those with recurrent low back pain than in the backs of healthy subjects. Any delay in muscle activation can be a potential problem, as a sudden loading of weight on the spine when it is unprepared can lead to abnormal bending and twisting of the spine, increasing the risk of injury.

Possessing strong multifidus muscles is one of the obvious solutions to preventing the occurrence of low back pain. However, part of the problem is that once this set of muscles has been injured, the multifidus tends to atrophy due to disuse while the patient is healing. Prolonged bed rest is one of the worst ways to recover from low back pain because it encourages the multifidus to atrophy even further.

Chiropractic care that includes rehabilitation exercises and spinal adjustments has been shown to improve the function of the multifidus muscles. Your chiropractor can suggest exercises you can do at home that will strengthen your core muscles in between adjustments. The adjustments themselves will align your spine so that it functions properly and will not put excess strain on the supporting multifidus, thus reducing the likelihood of a recurrence of low back pain.

How Do Chiropractors Measure Pain?

How Do Chiropractors Measure Pain?

Measuring the amount of pain being experienced by a patient is an essential part of chiropractic assessment prior to treatment. However, unlike objective measures such as the degree of spinal curvature or the range of joint movement, the amount of pain cannot be determined directly, but is instead inferred from the patient themselves or from signs usually associated with it.  These two methods—patient self-reporting and inference by examination—are the basic tools chiropractors will use to assess a patient’s pain level.

While the degree of discomfort reported by a patient is an important guide, the subjective experience of pain means that each person will have a different level at which they call pain mild, moderate or extreme.  Likewise, patients will all have varying degrees of verbal and physical reactions to different levels of soreness.  Taken together, however, self-reporting and examination provide a combination of evidence which can be used to determine pain levels with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Most chiropractors treating a patient will use an assessment form that asks about the kind of problem that the patient is currently experiencing and the amount of pain it is causing.  A basic diagram of the body may also be used to mark locations and levels of pain.  Further questions, either in the form of a questionnaire or through a patient interview, may be asked to ascertain the frequency of pain and the nature of movements and activities that may trigger pain or worsen it.

The level of perceived discomfort is often assessed using a pain scale in which the patient is asked to assign a figure to their experience such as from 0 (no pain) to 10 (extreme pain). Although such a scale will be subjective, most patients demonstrate a good deal of internal consistency when it comes to reporting relative pain levels.  This means that patient-reporting using this type of pain scale can be useful in determining whether a condition is responding to treatment over time or getting worse, as well as in determining how pain levels fluctuate over the course of a day or in response to certain kinds of activity.  In addition to the simple pain scale, there are several specially designed questionnaires that are also used to assess the degree of pain and disability associated with spinal injuries, such as the Quebec Back Pain Disability Scale.

Chiropractic assessment of a patient actually begins the moment the patient walks in the door.  A skilled chiropractor can tell much about a condition and how much pain someone is in by their overall posture, how they walk, facial expressions of discomfort and involuntary verbalization.  While being examined, palpation and movement of problem areas will often give rise to further articulation and tensing against painful movement, which provide further clues both to the location and degree of soreness.  A chiropractor may use pain scales during the examination so that patients can communicate in a more focused way how much a certain movement or palpation hurts.  Marking these pain levels on a chart provides a baseline measurement that a chiropractor can use to judge the effectiveness of treatment over time.

Although pain measurement is only one method of assessing both the degree of injury and success of treatment, it is an important one.  Pain is both a clear sign that something is wrong and an impediment to normal daily activity.  In contrast, a reduction in pain following chiropractic therapy increases feelings of wellbeing and provides subjective evidence of improvement.  For the chiropractor too, this is an essential indication that they are doing something right.  Together with other signs such as increased strength, range of movement and endurance, reduced pain is a welcome indicator that a patient is making progress.

Spinal Health During Pregnancy: What Mothers-to-Be Should Know

Spinal Health During Pregnancy: What Mothers-to-Be Should Know

It’s no secret that having a child (especially for the first time) means big changes in the lives of the new parents. But even before the baby arrives, big changes are already underway in the pregnant mother’s body—changes that usually make it possible for her to carry her developing child for nine months and to give birth safely when the time comes.

As a woman’s pregnancy progresses, the combined effects of these physical changes become clearer. Some may simply be awkward, inconvenient or uncomfortable while others can be very painful and even debilitating.

Since no two women experience pregnancy in quite the same way (and no two pregnancies are exactly alike), it’s impossible to create a comprehensive, one-size-fits-all guidebook. However, it is possible to describe in more general terms many of the physical changes that occur and to recommend ways that expectant mothers can help protect their health and maintain their quality of life. The remainder of this article will highlight some issues related specifically to spinal health during pregnancy and offer some useful suggestions.

Pregnancy is hard on a woman’s entire musculoskeletal system, but it’s particularly hard on her back. This is because of a combination of changes that adds to the stress placed on her muscles, bones, and joints while at the same time changing her posture and making her less stable on her feet.

  • WEIGHT GAIN is one of the most obvious changes associated with pregnancy. While the amount of weight a woman actually gains can vary substantially, a woman with a normal BMI prior to becoming pregnant can expect to be carrying 25 to 35 additional pounds by the time she gives birth. This means that a typical woman (her average weight in the U.S. is 156 pounds) will be about 20% heavier when she delivers her child. That’s 20% more weight for her back to support.
  • POSTURE also changes significantly as a woman’s pregnancy progresses. So not only is she carrying more weight over time, she’s also carrying it differently as her center of gravity moves forward. This shift places additional strain on the muscles and connective tissues of the woman’s lower back.
  • PELVIC STRESS increases along with the baby’s weight throughout a woman’s pregnancy and often becomes more intense during the third trimester as the baby drops in anticipation of labor. This can trigger sensations ranging from general heaviness and pressure to debilitating pain. It can also result in additional postural changes and reduced activity.
  • HORMONES that are released during pregnancy (including one appropriately called “relaxin”) make cartilage, ligaments and other soft tissues more flexible in preparation for childbirth. While this additional flexibility is critical when the big day comes, it can affect a woman’s stability when standing or walking and can also cause her joints—including those in her back—to feel “loose” or “wobbly”.

If you’re pregnant and experiencing pain in your back or pelvis, you should know that you’re far from alone. Between 57% and 69% of women complain of lower back pain during pregnancy and roughly 80% report pelvic pain of some sort. However, you should also know that there are some things you can do. Maintaining a healthy weight, paying attention to your posture and staying active can all contribute to a healthy, more comfortable pregnancy and an easier delivery. Consult your healthcare provider to find out which types of exercises might be most helpful to you in maintaining your strength and mobility at each stage of your pregnancy. A growing number of health clubs offer low-impact yoga and in-pool fitness programs designed especially for expectant mothers.

Managing the discomfort and aches and pains of pregnancy is important. However, many women (and too many healthcare providers) assume that these things are just part of the experience. Perhaps that’s why only about 32% of women report these types of symptoms to their primary doctor and only about 25% of primary doctors recommend seeking treatment for the pain.

The good news is that larger numbers of healthcare professionals are starting to recognize the value of chiropractic care and massage therapy in addressing pregnancy-related symptoms both before and after childbirth. Chiropractic treatments can be particularly effective for pregnancy-related back pain, with the majority of women reporting immediate relief or relief after just a few visits. In a small study of 17 women:

  • Sixteen of 17 (94%) saw clinically important improvements in low back pain with chiropractic care.
  • The average pain rating went down from 5.9 to 1.5 (on a scale of 0 to 10).
  • It took an average of 1.8 visits and 4.5 days to get clinically significant relief.
4 Best Exercises for Improved Posture

4 Best Exercises for Improved Posture

Let’s face it. Good posture isn’t exactly a high priority for many Americans. Like most things related to our health and wellness, we don’t notice it until it’s gone. 

Most of us live in a sitting culture—we sit at work, we sit at school, and we sit at home. The hard truth is that most of us sit too much and sit incorrectly. Beyond this, our love affair with mobile devices is amplifying the post problem by encouraging us to bend over, hunch our shoulders and crane our necks to look at small screens. Given our lifestyle choices, poor posture may seem almost inevitable. But it doesn’t have to be that way. For anyone with a bit of mobility, motivation and time, there are exercises you can do to improve poor posture. Here are four of the best types of exercises to help you improve your posture. 

Exercises to Strengthen Your Core

A strong core is essential for good posture. Your core includes your abdominals, lower back, obliques, and hips. Strong core muscles don’t just give you an attractive “six-pack” to show off at the beach. In fact, they help hold your body up straight, improve your balance, and provide you with greater muscle control and efficiency. They’re also critical to maintaining back health and provide some measure of protection against injury. When your core muscles aren’t strong, other muscles have to compensate, which results in reduced mobility as well as weakness and even pain. So, to help avoid or reduce low back pain, try regular core training. Some core training exercises include basic crunches (but not full sit-ups), side planks, crunches with a twist, standing side bends, and plank holds. Doing Pilates is another great way to work out your core muscles, as are back extensions and slow swimming. 

Exercises to Correct Your Rounded Shoulders

Because so many people spend their day hunched over while driving, sitting at a desk while working, using a laptop, or even watching television, rounded shoulders are extremely common—but they are in fact a postural abnormality. When you spend a lot of time in these forward-reaching positions, the muscles in your chest, shoulders, and hips become shortened and tight, and at the same time, your upper and middle back muscles lose strength. In order to help avoid and ease rounded shoulders, you can do exercises that strengthen the weak upper back muscles and stretch the tight muscles in the chest, shoulders, lats, and hips. As the upper back becomes stronger and the chest becomes more flexible, the shoulders naturally pull back, which improves your posture significantly. You can strengthen the upper back with exercises such as reverse dumbbell flys as well as rows with a resistance band, while you can stretch your tight muscles by doing standing chest stretches, torso stretches, and standing quad stretches. 

Exercises to Neutralize Your Tilted Hips

Hips should be neutral and level when viewed from the side—however, some people have postural abnormalities stemming from their hips’ tendency to slant forward. This is called the anterior pelvic tilt, and it negatively affects posture. Lordosis (also known as “swayback”) is a common indication of this tilt. Seen very often in people who sit for hours every day with their legs bent, this abnormality is caused by weakness in the hamstrings, glutes, and abs as well as tightness in the hip flexors and thighs. Exercises to correct this tilt include the core exercises mentioned above as well as bridges, leg curls with a ball, and single leg hamstring flexions with a ball. Exercises that stretch tight hip and quad muscles include standing quad stretches and kneeling quad and hip stretches. 

Exercises to Retract a Forward Head

Unfortunately, you can easily develop poor posture by tilting your head forward for hours every day. This happens when you drive, when you use a laptop or tablet, or when you watch television. When you fail to retract your head while performing everyday tasks, this tightens the front and side neck muscles and weakens the deep and rear muscles of the neck. The muscles at the front of your neck have to be strong enough to hold your head directly above—not forward of—the shoulders. Not only does this abnormality contribute to poor posture, but it also causes chronic neck pain. In order to retract a forward head, elongate the back of your neck by gently pulling your chin straight in. The highest point of your body should be the top back of your head. This works against the penchant to slip into a forward head posture. You can also work on this issue while driving: practice pulling your chin in and pushing your head into the headrest behind you for a few seconds at a time, then releasing. If you have a high-backed chair that you sit in at work, you can do this at your desk as well.  

Chiropractic Care and Your Sympathetic Nervous System

Chiropractic Care and Your Sympathetic Nervous System

While chiropractic physicians are generally thought of as experts in diagnosing and treating musculoskeletal problems (particularly those related to back and neck pain), chiropractic treatments can also help the body’s nervous system function more effectively. From freeing pinched nerves and relieving generalized pain to regulating the immune system and stimulating healing, chiropractic care can achieve a wide range of long-lasting health benefits. 

To understand how chiropractic care can have these broader benefits, it’s useful to know a little bit about how your nervous system works. Doctors use a few different frameworks for describing the structure and function of the nervous system. One of the most basic frameworks distinguishes between your autonomic nervous system (ANS) or “involuntary” nervous system and your somatic nervous system (SoNS) or “voluntary” nervous system. The remainder of this article is about the two main branches of the ANS, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. 

The body’s autonomic nervous system is actually made up of three parts—the sympathetic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system and the enteric nervous system. All of these parts work together to act as a control system that regulates the functions of the internal organs, such as the heart, stomach and intestines. From a structural point of view, the ANS operates as a complex network of neurons that originates inside the spinal cord and extends throughout the body via a series of interconnected hubs (called “ganglia” or “trunks”).   

The ANS is active at all times and is responsible for unconscious regulation of our glands and organs. In very general terms, the sympathetic nervous system regulates the “fight or flight” responses during times of stress or anxiety, including increased awareness, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate and sweating. In contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system coordinates processes associated with the “rest and recover” or “rest and digest” responses, such as salivation, tears, sexual arousal and digestion. 

The sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems have a complementary, push-pull relationship that allows the body to respond very swiftly when necessary (through the sympathetic nervous system’s quick mobilization) and to slow down to perform other, less urgent activities in the background when appropriate (through the parasympathetic nervous system’s more gradual dampening). Together, these systems act a bit like an accelerator and a brake for our bodies and also help to maintain balance, or “homeostasis.”   

During the fight or flight response, your body slows or shuts down many of the rest and repair processes so that more energy is available for the processes necessary for near-term survival. In nonemergency situations, the parasympathetic nervous system is supposed to go to work, conserving energy and directing it to rest and repair responses, including healing. This is where chiropractic care can be very helpful. 

While stress hormones and the physiological changes they trigger can be helpful (maybe even life-saving) when we’re facing real physical threats, they can do significant damage to our health over the long term if they’re switched on all the time. Certain types of chiropractic adjustments have been shown to affect the autonomic nervous system by helping to down-regulate the sympathetic nervous system and stimulate parasympathetic activity. Quieting the fight or flight responses in turn promotes healing, bolsters the immune system and helps relieve the immediate sensation of pain. 

There’s no doubt that chiropractors can help patients find relief from acute injuries and chronic musculoskeletal conditions. But we may also be able to help you address neurological problems. If you’re interested in learning more, we encourage you to call or visit the office today! 

 

Additional Resources 

Sympathetic and parasympathetic responses to specific diversified adjustments to chiropractic vertebral subluxations of the cervical and thoracic spine. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686395/ 

Short-term effects of cervical manipulation on edge light pupil cycle time: A pilot study. http://www.jmptonline.org/article/S0161-4754%2800%2981597-3/abstract 

Hormones: Chemical Messengers and the Chiropractic Link. http://www.theamericanchiropractor.com/articles-integrative-healthcare/4895-hormones-chemical-messengers-and-the-chiropractic-link.html 

Good Workplace Ergonomics Matter! Lessons from Medical Lab Technicians

Good Workplace Ergonomics Matter! Lessons from Medical Lab Technicians

Are the bad ergonomics of your workplace causing you chronic back or neck pain? If so, you’re not alone. Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSDs) are one of the leading causes of occupational injuries and disability throughout the world. In the United States, WRMSDs cause over 647,000 days of lost work every year and result in workman’s compensation claims costing anywhere from $45 billion to $60 billion. They also account for 34% of all work-related injuries and illnesses. Examples of WRMSDs include chronic back and neck pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, sprains, and hernias. While you might assume that these types of injuries are the result of unrelated incidents or isolated situations playing out in many different environments across the country on any given day, there is actually a pattern. Many of them are caused by badly designed workplaces.

This pattern became evident in a study recently published in the Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation. The researchers wanted to analyze the postures of workers in a high-tech medical laboratory to determine the prevalence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders and to investigate the relationship of these musculoskeletal disorders to workers’ individual factors, their work characteristics, and their working postures.

They gathered data from the medical lab technicians, using the Nordic Musculoskeletal Questionnaire (NMQ, a standardized scale for measuring musculoskeletal disorders and occupational health), the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS, a type of self-reporting measurement), and RULA (Rapid Upper Limb Assessment, a self-reported scale by which workers assess the postures that most accurately reflect their working positions). They then assessed the positions that the technicians’ lab workstations and equipment forced them to adopt for long periods of time each day and compared them with the technicians’ medical problems.

What they found was that poor lab workstation design was causing musculoskeletal problems in 73.3% of the workers. The poorer their posture was on the VAS and RULA scales, the more musculoskeletal problems they had. In addition, there was a significant difference between pre-work and post-shift reports of neck, lower back, and knee pain. In summation, the workplace design was definitely causing the WRMSDs.

There is a very real possibility that your own workplace is just as likely to put you at an increased risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders. Symptoms of WRMSDs are not limited to back and neck pain—they also include joint discomfort, muscle tightening and swelling, stiffness, and feelings of numbness or “pins and needles.”

If you or your fellow workers have noticed such symptoms, you should report them to your employer and expect that they will take steps to correct any problem-causing ergonomics. In the interim, you can take some steps on your own to protect yourself from WRMSDs. You don’t have to sit at a desk that is too high or low or in a chair that puts you in an uncomfortable and unhealthy position. Modern desks and their accompanying desk chairs have controls that can be used to lower or raise them. The same applies to computers or other equipment you use every day—you can put your monitor on top of some books so that it’s more in your line of sight or make other changes to help make your workspace more ergonomic. A good place to start looking for tips on how to improve the ergonomics of your office workspace is the Occupational Safety & Health Administration Computer Workstations guide. OSHA also has similar guides for other types of work environments.

 

Chiropractic Patients Recover Faster, Spend Less Money

Chiropractic Patients Recover Faster, Spend Less Money

Back pain is an expensive health problem for both patients and businesses. A 2012 study reported that we spend about $635 billion on pain every year, with a significant amount of that spent on back pain. Over the years, quite a few studies have shown that chiropractic care is more effective for back pain than medical care, plus chiropractic patients spend less money on their care than medical patients do.

Because back pain is such a common problem, a group of Canadian researchers recently investigated the role that the type of primary caregiver has on financial compensation.

This was a large study of 5,511 patients who experienced a work-related back injury in Ontario, Canada. The patients saw the following providers for their first visit:

  • 85.3% saw a medical doctor
  • 11.4% saw a chiropractor
  • 3.2% saw a physical therapist

The authors set out to “compare the duration of financial compensation for back pain” among patients from each care group.

The study found that chiropractic patients had the shortest amount of time receiving compensation for their pain and also were less likely to have a recurrence.

In addition, chiropractic patients didn’t need to see other healthcare providers for their pain. 75% of chiropractic patients saw no other provider, while 58.6% of physical therapy patients also saw a medical doctor.

The authors conclude:

“The type of healthcare provider first visited for back pain is a determinant of the duration of financial compensation during the first 5 months. Chiropractic patients experience the shortest duration of compensation, and physiotherapy patients experience the longest.”

Blanchette M, Rivard M, Dionne CE, et al. Association between the type of first healthcare provider and the duration of financial compensation for occupational back pain. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation 2016 Sep 17.

Today’s article was written by Michael Melton and is shared from the following website: https://www.chironexus.net/2016/09/chiropractic-patients-recover-faster-spend-less-money/