Posts Tagged ‘Maple Ridge Sciatica’

I just finished a busy weekend at the Maple Ridge Home show.  We had a booth set up, and I met hundreds of people with a list of physical and mental symptoms like you wouldn’t believe, and all of them are under the care of a medical physician.   “My doctor knows about all of this, and we’ve been trying to deal with it for a very long time.”    Some would even tell me “he told me to stay away from Chiropractors.”

“And what is he/she doing for you?”

The response is always invariably “he’s sending me for an x-ray”, or “the x-rays came up negative, so we’re looking into an MRI”.  Each one left the office with a prescription for painkillers or something else.  In fact, if I was to show you how many people walking around are taking some sort of pill for one or more of their conditions, you’d be alarmed.  It’s official:  We are an overdosed, overmedicated society, and the saddest part is that we think it’s making us healthier.

I completely understand… growing up, every single time I would have an ache, pain, or a sniffle, my mother would take me to the Doctor.  Funny how most of us grow up with the perception that the Doctor will have “the cure”.   If the doctor can’t figure it out, then there’s nothing anyone can do.  This is the feeling I was getting from hundreds of (overmedicated) people this weekend.

It was an interesting observation for me that it seems that people equate going to the doctor with becoming healthy. Another interesting observation I made when it comes to most people who go to the doctor, I wanted to share with you because it could mean the difference between you taking control of your own health vs. you leaving it in the hands of someone else.  Let me explain.

It’s all about the diagnosis, baby!

To medicate or not to medicate? That is the question.

When seeing a patient, the Medical Doctor is concerned FIRST with coming up with a diagnosis.  Doctors spend years learning about patterns of symptoms that they can group together and come up with a label for your condition called a “diagnosis”.  From there, they are taught in medical school which course of action to take.  In the field of MEDICINE, what is usually the first line of defense?  MEDICINE.  Their focus is entirely on the disease and how to fight disease.

The main tools that are taught in medical school are Medicine and Surgery.  That’s why all the people who I saw who are still suffering despite our “free” medical system here in Canada have started out with Pharmaceuticals.  And it’s making us sicker and sicker as a society.  It’s all in the focus:  Focus on fighting disease, and you create more disease, the same way that focusing on fighting terrorism brings about more terror.  Deaths from adverse drug reactions are among the leading causes of death in the world.

How we view the body is important

The reason why I’m so dead against starting with Pharmaceuticals first is because of the fundamental way that I view the body.  And I’m on a mission to teach this to the world:   Instead of being a weak and stupid, I see the body as a wise, intelligent group of cells that are energetically bound together and created to function at a high level, provided we give it the essentials in movement, in nutrients, water, in a balanced mental focus, and a clear nerve system.  If we started with that, Drug companies would go bankrupt.

The problem with most people walking around with a diagnosis is that instead of using it as feedback for how we’ve been eating, moving, thinking, or how out of balance we are so we can make the changes, people wear their diagnosis as a badge or label and they remove all personal responsibility.  They make statements like:

“I can’t work because of the Fibromyalgia”

“I took 3 weeks off because of the Anxiety Disorder I have”

“I can’t exercise because of the Diabetes”

“My doctor says I have Arthritis”

“I was diagnosed with Osteoporosis”.

Each and every time I hear someone say something like that, I can’t help but cringe.  While the symptoms may be real– people are completely in the dark about how they got there in the first place.  They think it’s a disease they caught because of bad luck or bad genes.  Chances are, it’s not.  That’s why I created “What your doctor won’t tell you about your symptoms” class to shed light on why your body speaks out to you in those ways and what you can do about it.

In the mean time, all I can do is to help show people a different way.  It first comes with a different way of looking at yourself and the amazing way your body responds and reacts to the crap you are throwing at it.

The simple-yet-effective way to start your journey towards health (notice the focus is on HEALTH not the disease)

The way that you remove disease is the same way it’s been done for centuries… it’s the same way you remove darkness from a room.  I’ve dedicated my life to taking my patients and clients through a journey of healing with 3 simple steps:

1) Clear the Nervous System of interference.  Depending on how imbalanced you are, this could take days, months, or even years.  While we do that it’s important to add in step number 2…

2) Feed the body with essential raw materials, nutrients, water, and REAL food, while curbing your food cravings and addictions slowly to help detoxify your cells which make the building blocks of who you are, and if the client is up for the most difficult, yet most critical component of the healing journey….

3)  Taking charge of your emotional health.  Our resentments, fears, guilts, or incomplete emotions from the past and our inability to deal with adversities of the present prevent us from truly being healthy in the mind and body.  As Hanz and Franz of Saturday Night Live fame used to say… “HEAR ME NOW AND BELIEVE ME LATER”.  At the root cause of almost every single chronic illness is an emotional charge that hasn’t been properly dealt with.  This is not up for debate any more.  Period.  You hear me?

It’s my mission to tell people the truth about why they are sick and in pain in the first place, and what they need to do to become healthy.  Something that isn’t available in a pill form:  Health from within.  I’m sure that if we start with this approach FIRST, we’d be able to save many more lives, reduce our debt and dependence on the medical system.

After meeting hundreds of people this weekend who are walking around with a dark cloud of pain, resentment, fear, and who simply aren’t living to their potential, I can see I have a lot of work to do.  I’ve decided:  I’m bringing healthy back.

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I sit here in the Emergency room waiting for a doctor for my wife.  It appears that she’s having a severe bout of appendicitis or an ovarian cyst rupture.  Persistent, worsening pain in her right, lower quadrant, pain that comes in waves.  Touching her abdomen sends her through the roof.  She’s cursing at me like a sailor.

How ironic is this?  Me, one who is extremely critical of the medical system is knee deep in it—and turning to it for help.

Medicine’s genius is in FIRST Aid.  Emergency care to prevent impending doom is where the magic of the profession is.

People come from all walks of life in to see me, and a lot of them are in acute care… sometimes even emergency situations… A great majority of them, we as chiropractors help them along, make them feel better, teach them to live in better ways, and sometimes miraculously after an adjustment, or a series of adjustments, they feel like a new person.

But in this case, I feel powerless. My wife, now resting, was screaming, writhing in pain, so I have no choice but to turn to the First Aid experts to do what their major strength is—help prevent impending doom.  And I humbly step aside for them to work their magic.  This is likely going to be a surgical case.  Ironic that I make my living provide the means for my patients to avoid drugs surgery at all costs.

As I sit here in the Emergency unit, I’m surrounded by people who are at their worst.  As my wife is now high on morphine, she’s fast asleep, and I’m constantly interrupted by beeps and coughs and sounds of vomiting and moaning patients.  The staff here appear to be miserable.  I don’t blame them.  The long hours, the suffering they are surrounded with.  Our environment does have a great deal to do with our pain.

From my research, I know statistically that 75-90% of all problems that people are in here for are lifestyle related.  These are conditions related to how we eat, how we move, and how we think.  The major killers?  Diabetes, Heart Disease, Cancer, and Adverse Reactions to Medications.

I can’t help but think of how that means that about 8 out of every 10 people who are in here could have prevented their need for being here. What’s worse is that the majority of people who are around me are already on copious amounts of medication—I overhear them listing all the medications they are on.

Our doctor’s offices are jam packed every day because people aren’t taught the why’s and how’s of what keeps them healthy and what makes them sick.   That’s because the system isn’t equipped for that.  While there are many places to go to get a diagnosis and a treatment, there aren’t too many places that will teach you why you got there in the first place and what role YOU have to play in getting yourself out.  That is too time consuming, and it’s not very profitable for the drug industry.

Doing research, attending health conferences, changing my own lifestyle habits… I was made aware that the only way our healthcare system can survive is to have LESS SICK PEOPLE.

This, fortunately, is not in the hands of the sickness care “health care” system.  It is entirely in your hands.  It is in the choices that we make every single day in how we eat, move, and think that will determine if you will be dependent on the system (drugs and surgery) or you will leave the system to what it is really there for:  First Aid.

My focus has now changed from “treating symptoms” to “teaching and helping the individual create health.” Using the logic of turning on light to remove darkness instead of focusing on the dark, I teach classes now in my office about lifestyle—how to eat, how to move, and how to even think– because people still live under the illusion that their genes control their health.  Even though it’s now been proven in science that your genes are not your destiny (as was the “Central Dogma” of Medicine).  It’s now undisputable in the literature.   Your environment, (how you eat, move, and think), not your genes, determine how your body expresses health or disease.

Let me give you an example:  When you are under any stressor, from family, to work, to even dietary stressors like too much processed foods; your body goes through a “fight or flight” response, liberating a great deal of energy triggered by the lower brain into an emergency protective mode.  Like a tiger chasing a gazelle, the only thing on the mind is survival for both lion and gazelle for that temporary time—just until the chase is over, and the gazelle returns to safety.

The gazelle, 20 minutes later, returns to grazing, and the tiger returns and rests shortly after, but we humans are so intelligent that we have the ability to re-live that lion attack

over and over again, day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.

Now, we don’t have to worry too often about being chased down by a tiger here these days—unless you’re on a safari… But we are programmed to react exactly the same for our own version of tiger attacks—Family stress, work stress, lack of feeling of control of our environment, insecurity, divorce, financial pressures, low self esteem, resentment, anger, victimhood.

We re-live these emotions and repetitively wire our nervous systems with this damaging biochemistry, year after year, and our health falls apart—and we run to the doctor for an answer.  We line up in hospitals and in doctor’s offices.  And we end up spending more and more money, year after year. We’re reaching a breaking point, and simply can not sustain what we’ve created.   We call them chronic “medical conditions”, it’s but I can show you beyond the shadow of a doubt that 75-90% are simply the body making a

normal response to our lifestyle and thoughts.   And the system is designed in such a way that the only solution is in the form of a test, a pill or a knife, which has been proven to do a little to deal with the symptoms, and NOTHING to deal with the cause.

So what’s the solution to our long hospital waits (it’s now been 6 hours already and we haven’t seen a doctor—let’s hope her Appendix doesn’t rupture in the meantime–if it’s appendicitis)?  Simple:  LESS SICK PEOPLE.  And that, my friends, is not in the hands of a doctor.  It’s in your hands.  Everyone knows they should drink less alcohol, stop smoking, exercise more, eat more veggies, control our stress, etc.  But the problem with our system is that it doesn’t teach us the why or the how.

When you realize that you simply can’t express your health potential without exercise, and you are taught how to slowly incorporate it in your sedentary life, change becomes easy.

When you realize the processed foods we are eating are toxic, and how our cells respond to the deficiency of proper nutrients in our fast-food diets, and then we are shown how to overcome our food cravings, change becomes easy and the pounds start to fall off.

When you realize that just as your thoughts have the capacity to make you sick, your thoughts also have the capacity to help make you well—once you’re shown how to get out of survival mode and into creating the life you want, change becomes easy.

Sitting and talking endlessly about our problems re-creates the emotions, biochemistry, and physical illness patterns.  When we are taught how to overcome our fears, guilts, anxieties, and depressive patterns of thinking with some simple tools, we can heal the mind (and then the body) from all sorts of dis-eases.   Instead of blaming our current misery on what happened weeks to decades ago, we can learn to be grateful for what we have NOW.  And our biochemistry begins to change.

Far less costly on the system and far more effective than anything the system could offer, If these lifestyle changes could be bottled and sold in pill form, it would be the next blockbuster drug.   These changes have been shown to cure diabetes, reverse heart disease, and heal cancer.

But they’re not available in pill form.  They’re choices that require empowering yourself rather than being a victim to your environment or heredity.  A difficult choice for most of us, but without taking action personally on this STARTING TODAY, our collective physical, mental, and financial health has ZERO chance of survival.  It’s that serious.

It’s the reason why I’m dedicating my life to teaching how to create wellness and avoid the use of drugs or surgery, rather than treat disease.   The biggest challenge my patients face is not how to change–  It’s making the time to do it.  The hopeless cases are all the ones who “never seem to have the time”.  Even though they have all the resources I may offer at their disposal, from wellness chiropractic spinal care, to exercises, to attending classes on posture and stress:  “I’m just too busy.”  And then eventually their body seems to force them to make the time.  And I watch them deteriorate year after year.  So it fuels my passion to teach.  “Doctor” in Latin doesn’t mean “pill pusher.” It means “Teacher”.

Side note:  It’s now 2 in the morning, and the doctor has just come in and narrowed it down to 3 possibilities:  Kidney stone, or Appendicitis, or Ovarian Cyst Rupture.  Since CT scans have high levels of radiation, we’ve elected to do an Ultrasound in the morning.  Took us 8 hours to get to this conclusion—and now we have to wait another 7 hours for another test to determine the next course of action.  I’m staying with her in the hospital and I write this amidst the moans and screams of other suffering people.  My heart goes out to them because I know many of their problems are preventable if they only took the time to learn how. Here’s a list of how most of them could have avoided being here in the first place:

1)   If you want to be more alive than dead, eat foods that are more alive than dead.  Find resources to teach you strategies how to overcome your food addictions.

2)   When you wake up in the morning, don’t get out of bed without first thinking about all the things that you are grateful for, and what you would love to create in your day.  If you don’t take time to do this, your day will be filled with things you will be ungrateful for.  Guaranteed.  Re-program healthy brain/body biochemistry by THINKING WELL—Think better than how you feel.  Learn strategies to deal with the inevitable adversities of relationships and of life.  Everything begins with a thought.

3)   Keep your spine moving with exercise.  50% of all body movement nerve pathways are in the spinal joints and if it doesn’t move sufficiently, or it gets stuck, you could be in a great deal of trouble.  See your chiropractor regularly to keep it moving properly.

4)   Balance your movement and rest.  If you don’t get enough movement and exercise in your day, or you don’t get enough sleep—your cells become resistant to insulin—which has been shown to be the underlying root cause of all chronic degenerative illness—diabetes, cancer, heart disease, aging, osteoporosis, even mental disorders like Alzheimer’s and depression.

The hospital is a horrible place to be, but thank God it’s there in emergency cases like the one Maria finds herself in right now.  Doctors and nurses can be heroes.  But when we turn to doctors and nurses to treat diseases caused by poor lifestyle choices—we are playing with fire, and it’s a game we can’t win.  I’ve dedicated my life to teaching strategies on how to dramatically reduce our need to ever play.

P.S.  Turned out to be a ruptured ovarian cyst, and Maria is home recovering beautifully.  We elected for no surgery, and it turned out to be the right decision.  Many thanks to the doctors and nurses and Paramedics at Burnaby Hospital, and to our friends and family for their support.

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Walking among the Great Pyramids in Egypt, I realized that what was built over 5000 years ago has stood the test of time because of vision and a goal, mixed with action and deliberate intention.  We forget that in order to get anywhere or accomplish anything worthwhile like the Pyramids, all the souls involved in such an endeavor have to go through fears, frustrations, health issues, anxieties, dramas, family issues, and disappointments.

We forget that just because we’re going through some turmoil, these experiences aren’t just nuisances… they’re part of the things that create our story, what makes us interesting, what makes us who we are.

I had my own fears to face when I left– I had fears about leaving the office for a couple of weeks– that leaving would deter me from the million things I had to do, planning my talks, patients who needed follow up, etc.  I have been afraid for so long that I didn’t go on a honeymoon because I didn’t want to leave the office!

Little did I realize that simply leaving the comforts of my home, getting a rampant case of what the Brits call “runny tummy” that affected us all, having some great (and sometimes not so great) experiences with my family and friends and meeting some of the friendliest (and yet most pushy, most aggressive, and sneaky buggers) people in the world would cause me to grow and learn so much about myself and others.

The highlight had to be witnessing with my own two eyes what the ancients could accomplish because of devotion to their beliefs, their mission, and their purpose.  Walking amongst the Pyramids inspired me to share some of my thoughts of what we can consider when thinking about what we want to accomplish in 2010.  And it made me grateful for the comforts of my home, my patients, clients, students…..and solid bowel movements (in no particular order).

If anyone is thinking of visiting Egypt, my suggestion to you is to be extra cautious when crossing the streets of Cairo!  And get comfortable bargaining and negotiating!  Thanks to Nazila, James, and Mo for making our time so memorable.  Please watch this footage from the Pyramids and if you watch it till the very end…There’s a message for you from a friend we met at the Pyramids… Looking forward to your comments.

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Every day, because of the choices we make in our thoughts, our foods, and our activities, our bodies are either getting stronger or weaker. Over a lifetime of poor choices, our bodies accumulate stress, toxins, and deterioration and start aging faster than they actually should. We have been trained to see a medical doctor in those cases where the body breaks down due to poor lifestyle choices. While extremely important in emergencies, medical care doesn’t solve a problem caused by our choices of thoughts, foods, and activities, and a poorly functioning Nervous System.

Here are some testimonials of how people can recover back to their natural state of health, simply by changing what they put into their bodies, how they move their bodies, how they think and what they believe about their health, and most importantly clearing their Nervous system interference through wellness-oriented chiropractic care. These are true stories. These people are not actors and they have not been paid to give their testimonial. If you’ve been told that you have “_______” (enter diagnosis here), and “there’s nothing that can be done for you, “you need to take these pills”, “go do physio” you DO have another option. If you’ve been scared away from seeing a chiropractor, you’re not alone. Several of our patients report being discouraged from seeing a chiropractor by their GP or specialist. At the same time, we get many referrals from medical doctors who have been keeping current with the research supporting chiropractic care.

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