West Hollywood Chiropractor Treating Upper and Mid-Back Pain

Upper back pain is becoming more and more common as computers play a bigger part in our daily lives.  I recently showed you how chiropractic adjustments can help relieve upper back pain.  Another useful approach to use in combination with chiropractic care is physiotherapy, including electric muscle stimulation, heat and deep tissue massage.

Sports chiropractors will use various modalities to help reduce muscle spasm and soreness of the upper and mid-back.  Electric muscle stimulation, or e-stim as it is sometimes called, helps reduce spasm by puttin the muscles in a brief and alternating contracted state.  This contraction/relaxation cycle is actually necessary to break the neurological disruption that is preventing the muscles from relaxing on their own.  Some medical doctors attempt to do this with muscle relaxant drugs (albeit through a different mechanism), but electric muscle stimulation is a physical modality to address a physical problem.  Watch the video above to see e-stim in action.

Heat helps by bringing blood to the area, which also allows muscles to relax.  Once the e-stim and heat therapy is complete, a session of myofascial therapy, or deep-tissue massage does wonders at breaking up knots, trigger points, sore areas, and any adhesions in the muscle tissue.  Then, the pièce de résistance, of course, is the chiropractic adjustment, which opens the stuck joint and brings normal movement back to the spine.


Watch the video to get a taste of what you can expect in a sports chiropractic office where you might be getting treated for upper and mid-back pain.  If you find yourself in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills or West Hollywood, please come visit my chiropractic office to get relief for your upper back pain woes.

Sleepy Teens

Hey parents: Give Junior a break! He's tired all the time for a reason. Don't knock him for napping until you've read this: Most teens don't get enough sleep and suffer in their school work because their internal clock makes them night owls. So says an Australian study showing that the average teenager misses up to an hour of sleep at night and wakes up 2.5 hours earlier than their naturals rhythms dictate.

According to researchers, a teenager secretes melatonin--the hormone responsible for causing drowsiness--later in the evening than adults and children do; and they are thus more alert during the evening hours, leading to their greatest productivity. Furthermore, ambient light--the type of light given off by computer screens--actually decreases melatonin secretion causing even less drowsiness. So teenagers working at night on computers will be even more likely to stay up late.

I talk extensively about melatonin and sleep inducement in my new book, The Six Keys to Optimal Health. Since I believe that getting sufficient sleep is one of the main ingredients of great health, naturally I'm inclined to support teens in their unique circadian rhythms. An excellent solution to counter-balance poor performance in schools would be to start classes at 10am and finish at five in the evening. I'll bet most high schoolers would welcome the later schedule and I'll even bet some teachers would dig it too. And just think how positively it would impact big city traffic.

Without a doubt, teenager need adequate sleep. If their natural rhythms run a little later than our own, let's honor that and start treating high schoolers like college preps. It'll help their academics and it'll be healthier for them--isn't that purpose and benefit of doing research? to understand truth and then apply it? If nothing else, give Junior a break if he wants to sleep in on the weekends--it's his rhythm.