Planet Chiropractic

The medical approach to health has come to dominate the field of primary health services in our country over the span of the last half-century or so. It goes like this. First, the doctor identifies and lists all the clinical signs and symptoms exhibited by the patient. Second, the resulting list is compared to named diseases and their lists of signs and symptoms. These are then matched up and the patient gets labeled with one or more diseases. Third, the doctor prescribes a treatment to cure the diagnosed disease. Almost universally, this consists of taking medication, due to the underlying philosophy of medicine. When you are ill, you take a pill.

An ugly two-inch long and quarter-inch wide dark pink scar is slashed across my right shoulder. This is the remnant of what will most likely be the last office job I will ever have. It is, however, not the only remnant. I also have the misfortune of being one of over 50 million people in the United States who suffer from chronic pain. Although I have yet to find anything that completely cures my pain, I have found only one thing that helps it. I receive chiropractor care. Without it, my body falls into a dismal state of agony and numbness. I am 38 years old and in great physical shape. I am otherwise perfectly healthy. So how did I come to this? It’s quite simple, really. The human body was not designed to do the things we ask of it in the workplace. Who hasn’t heard of repetitive stress injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome, and ergonomics? There’s a reason for this. Statistics say approximately one third of the workforce regularly works in pain.

I love cheese, don’t you? Cheese, of course, is made from the milk of strange-looking four-legged mammals with big eyes and dull horns who live in concentration camps scattered around the countryside. You know — dairy cows. Chances are that the cow who made the milk to make my cheese gets injected with growth hormones to speed up milk production and raise profitability. This also means the poor old cow gets dosed with loads of antibiotics to treat the impacts of added stress.

I was out today for my morning run which typically involves running along the shoreline in Venice and sometimes into Marina del Rey or Santa Monica. The morning started out quite cloudy and the weather was perfect for running on the beach. I headed south under the pier and towards the marina jetty. When I reached the rocks I turned around and headed north until I reached the rocks at the base of the Venice lifeguard station. I started heading back south again and was about to finish my run as it was starting to get fairly warm and I had already logged just under 5 miles. At about the point that I would head back up to the house I felt a sense urging me to continue down to the marina jetty again. I accepted the suggestion and it left my mind as fast as it came. I continued to run about another mile, in the now warm morning sun, and just as that runner’s high was kicking in everything just slipped into place.

The name midwife means “with woman.” Midwives have always been in charge of delivering babies, ever since the beginning of human existence, all the way up to about 150 years ago in the United States. That was when a small group of medical doctors decided to launch a war against midwifery, having unilaterally decided that medical doctors were better suited to the job than midwives.

The interest rate on new federal Stafford loans is going to be 6.8%, and that rate could go up again in the near future. The rate on existing Stafford loans, climbs today from 5.3% to 7.14%. That is for current student loans that have not yet been consolidated. The loan rate for Plus college loans is going from 6.1% to 7.94% with new Plus loans issued after today beginning at 8.5%.

I was curious to find what the status was on the term “chiropractic medicine” in relationship to other terms that may or may not be getting used when performing search engine queries online.

When I get too caught up in how things turn out, I need to look at that as a symptom. Of course I want all things to turn out well and everyone to live happily ever after (especially myself) but that is not reality. Things turn out the way they turn out. I am not in control of the world or even my little world. There is a power greater than myself and it’s not me. I sometimes get frustrated and self doubting if things don’t work out the way “I” think they should. If the reason that I think they didn’t work out turns out to be because of something someone else did then I have a tendency to feel like a victim.

Stalwart American corporations have been hard at work ever since, pursuing new ways to penetrate the chain link fence that surrounds the schoolyards of America, attempting to exploit that juicy, enticing market. Think of it, millions of children held captive inside, all of them just dying to buy something five days a week, nine months of the year!

Life University is pleased to announce the election of President Guy F. Riekeman, D.C., to the thirteen member Board of Directors of the Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE), marking the first time in the University’s history that a Life representative has been elected to serve on the CCE leadership in any capacity.

Have you ever wondered who originally came up with the cruel idea of placing thirty children in a single school classroom day after day, week after week, with only one adult in charge? If you have observed a classroom in session, you know for certain that the majority of the children, particularly the boys, are just barely able to keep a lid on their natural instincts to leap out of their chairs and yell crazy stuff at the top of their lungs while hurling erasers, tennis shoes and apple cores at the girls.

This week, my son John graduated from high school. There we sat in the stadium bleachers, my wife and I, crying, laughing, and feeling every shade of emotion in between. We were surrounded by hundreds of other proud parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and grandmothers of every shape and size all crying, laughing and getting emotional right along with us.

The April student loan consolidation article resulted in some e-mails consolidation of federal chiropractic student loans.

I have a patient, I will call her Mary for arguments sake. Well Mary has been coming to me at least once a week for about 20 years. She has remained asymptomatic for most of that time except for a few car accidents she had and a few stupid things she did, overall she felt good most of the time. Mary is in her 80’s now and she still works in a discount retail store full time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go into our chiropractic office and love, serve and give all day without dealing with insurance companies and taking care of some difficult patients and having to manage the business part of your office. I find the loving, serving and giving to be the easy part. The trick is to be able to deal with all the other parts and still feel like being a loving, giving and serving kind of person. I have a tendency to want to ignore the other parts of running a business. Pretty early on I got to see that I couldn’t get away with that for long.

As the old saying goes, “A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.” Tell the doctor which pill you want, based on which advertisement you like best, and bingo! Four minutes later you walk out of the doctor’s office and head to the pharmacy clutching the prescription you asked for.

Well maybe I don’t really mean DO a little extra. Maybe I mean BE a little extra. I’m not asking for you to add something else to your “to do list.” Do what you do with a little more LOVE. Do it with a little more STYLE. When you are with your people in the office take an extra second to look them in the eye, connect with them.

The curious front-page story that had me scratching my head concerned the intrepid scientists at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who claim to have carefully studied the question of daily multiple vitamin/mineral use and found the evidence supporting this practice to be “especially thin.”

Culver City, California: Planet Chiropractic sponsored Pauline Nordin competed this past Saturday in the 2006 IFBB California State Pro Figure Championship.

In case you’ve been asleep and didn’t notice, insomnia has been elevated to the status of a public menace. Depression, auto accidents and high disease rates are all being blamed on sleep deprivation. “He sleeps well that knows not he sleeps ill,” observed Publilius Syrus in the first century B.C.

It is generally believed that biological organisms require a certain amount of stress in order to maintain their well-being. So, according to Taber’s medical dictionary stress is good for us. But what is meant by ‘a certain amount?” Just the usual daily stress that makes you want to gesture creatively with your hand toward the guy who just cut you off on the freeway? Or are we talking about the ‘throw your television set through the living room window’ kind of stress? I guess we shouldn’t stress over this too much and just take the old English proverb to heart, ‘A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.”

Choosing a chiropractic school can be an easy decision for some future chiropractors as they may simply go where their parent/s or doctor/s went. For many future students of chiropractic, thoughts of location, cost, level and length of education, licensing exam preparation, and housing may come to mind.

Your prescription is ready Mrs. Jones, fresh intestinal whipworm eggs straight from the pig! This type of medicine may sound rather unorthodox, but scientists testing this unusual treatment on six human patients with inflammatory bowel disease found that it helped every one of them.

This past Saturday night I was eating dinner before our Philosophy Night with several Chiropractors and with a long term friend Dr. Ginger Grancagnolo. Dr. Ginger is a long time advocate of chiropractic besides being a very talented seminar leader, author and therapist.

Occasionally, the government asks us for help in its thankless task to reduce the unintended collateral damage caused by good-hearted, but busy, medical professionals.

We all see ourselves as being a certain way. I remember back in college some students already saw themselves as being wealthy. These students had nicer toys and wore more expensive and/or wore more trendy clothes. They hadn’t worked a day in their lives yet but they were driving a nicer car than my dad drove.

There it was lying on my plate in front of me, a dead chicken. That was when the idea struck me, a method to easily solve the whole bird flu ‘get-ready-because-it’s-coming-for-sure’ pandemic. Well, partially anyway. I lifted my fork for another bite of the perfectly cooked, savory fowl. Delicious.

Classified Ads sites are all over the internet. Even the most popular classified services such as craigslist experience scam activity daily. Our chiropractic classifieds are no exeption. Just like with everything you do on the internet, if you are posting ads, watch out for suspicious replies and activities.

I am posting this to the news so that users of our chiropractic website don’t miss it. This was just forwarded to me days ago and is an example of a suspicious reply someone had after posting an ad for front office help.

It’s been 6 months now since my dad passed on, and as time goes by I find the memories of his last few months of pain and confusion and sadness and terror fading. Instead, there are countless reminders of his joy, his humor, his warmth and his wisdom. Every day I have an increasing awareness of the impact he had on my life. I literally quote him daily.

Archaeologists have always been known to check the waste of societies for important clues about life. Now they’ve got company. A recent news article, describing new activity by government scientists, caught my eye. These federal investigators in white coats have developed a taste for waste-testing. They have begun the fascinating task of studying America’s wastewater, intent on finding out just how much cocaine people might be snarfling up their noses.

Several chiropractic students and former students have e-mailed me asking about their student loans and if they should be consolidating student loans. I’ve been there, done the borrowing, and all my student loans are paid, hopefully what I’m sharing is of value to you.

I have been receiving lots of questions from people searching for information regarding various chiropractic schools, mostly those in the United States. In an effort to better answer some of these questions I began doing some research of my own. What I discovered was that while there is a web site for every chiropractic College of the United States, most of the information I found was similar to reading a brochure.

American medicine was publicly flogged recently because life expectancy in our country falls below that of most wealthy nations. This is totally unfair. I don’t think we should blame the medical industry for our lifespan. Medicine in the United States is doing everything in its power to fight death. Heck, we spend twice as much per person on medical care than any other country.

The obvious answer might seem to be no but the answer that I always seem to forget to be true is yes. I am thinking here specifically about my practice. I want my practice to do well. I want to serve a lot of patients.