Correct Posture: How and WHy

Can a chiropractor correct posture?

Certain types of chiropractors can correct posture. At Chiropractic First in Redding, we utilize Chiropractic BioPhysics, the most scientifically advanced system of spinal and posture analysis and correction anywhere in the world. Our group has over 250 peer-reviewed published studies on analysis, correction, and rehabilitation of spinal alignment and posture. The doctor will first note any postural abnormalities visually, then take a photograph with the renowned Posture Screen Mobile System, and then take state-of-the-art X-rays. We compare the 3 methods to get the most accurate representation of the person’s unique posture as well as any potential challenges in correcting it (injuries, arthritis, muscle weaknesses, etc.) We then prescribe a system of adjustments, often specialized traction, and strengthening and stabilizing exercises unique to their situation. After a course of care, we re-measure our progress with the same tools we used at the beginning. We see tremendous successes not only in feeling better, but truly measurable differences!

Is it too late to fix my posture?

It is never too late to improve posture. Some postural problems are not completely correctable (if there is severe arthritis or joint degeneration, for example), but it can always be improved somewhat and certainly in most cases prevented from getting worse. Regardless of how severe the postural abnormality, scoliosis, or injury, we can always help make it better (assuming the patient is willing to put in the work. It doesn’t correct itself!)

How should I sleep to correct my posture?

The best sleeping position for 99% of people is on their back. A pillow under the knees can be helpful to take the strain off the low back if desired. As far as a head pillow, the ideal pillow for most people has support underneath the neck but leaves the head nearly flush with the bed. This can vary from person to person and I would advise anyone to speak with their doctor of chiropractic to know what is best for their situation.

Do doctors recommend posture correctors?

Strap-based posture correctors have been around for many years but have only recently become popular. They can help as a temporary reminder or stretching device to allow the tissue to become sufficiently mobile to attain a more normal posture. But they are not for permanent usage to maintain a healthy posture as relying on them for hours each day will cause muscles that maintain a posture to weaken.

Does sleeping without a pillow improve posture?

Sleeping without a pillow can improve posture if your head is severely forward. Ideally, a person would still have some support under their neck like a proper pillow or even a rolled-up towel under their neck. But this, again, depends on their own postural makeup.

What exercises fix posture?

Exercises can be a great part of a system to correct posture. Very rarely do they correct posture on their own, as poor posture nearly always is accompanied by joints that are locked into place out of alignment. In most cases, some sort of traction and specific chiropractic adjustments are necessary to permanently correct posture. As to what type of exercises, it would be nice to have a “one size fits all” exercise, but unfortunately what helps one person often makes another worse! A person needs to see a doctor of chiropractic trained in proven methods to correct posture…

A few years ago in Brazil, a construction company built these gorgeous high-rise towers all along the beach in Brazil, just one of the most exotic, amazing, beautiful beaches. They built these gorgeous condominiums with all the highest end appointments of gorgeous mahogany cabinetry and marble floors and granite countertops, everything just beautiful. Well, a couple of months later, it was the first day of Carnival, the national… I was gonna say British, the national Brazilian party, and one of the towers just completely collapsed, killing every single person inside of it. Well, fortunately it was the first day of Carnival, so there were only eight people in it, but still eight people died. Well, they sent experts from all over the world to come in and figure out what happened, why they had lost this multimillion dollar building and eight lives in the process?

They found out that the construction company in order to save money, had used beach sand and mixed that in with the concrete in order to save money instead of using 100% concrete, killing eight people and destroying a multimillion dollar building. And I feel like a lot of people, they wanna build their foundation on something that is not solid. They wanna build their foundation on sand. What I wanna teach you is how to build your health foundation on something like rock, okay? So we’re gonna build our health and our body on a foundation of rock and on amazing, perfect health. So, one of the most important things that you need to do to do that is to take care of your posture. So, the American Journal of Pain Management said in 1994, to live a long, active healthy life, few things matter more than good posture. So your mom was right, it turns out. You don’t necessarily have to carry books on your head, although that can be a good thing, but your mom was right that your posture is extremely important for good health.

So here’s why that’s so important, because the nerves that are in your spine control every function in your body, from your digestion, to your hormones, your immune system, your energy levels, all that is controlled by the brain sending life through the spinal cord like a river and out through the nerves that come between the bones of the spine to give life to every cell, tissue, and organ in your body. So your energy, your strength is controlled by how well your brain can transmit life through your spinal cord and through your body. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if you’re slumped over like this, not as much life gets through there as if you’re sitting up all the way straight. As I hope everyone listening to this knows, but maybe you don’t yet, a subluxation is that fancy word for when a bone shifts out of alignment, and it’s choking off life from the brain to the body, or even the body to the brain.

So what we need to do is address that and take care of it before it becomes a collapsed building in your body, especially when we’re dealing with this nasty virus all over the world, we need our bodies in absolute tip-top shape. So today we’re gonna talk about why it’s so important and how to take care of your posture. So, very, very simply, there are 33 principles of chiropractic. We’re not gonna geek out too much on those today, but to just help you understand a few of them that apply to how healthy you are, how likely you are to catch this virus, how likely you are to live a long, healthy, fruitful life has a lot to do with how the brain communicates to the body and the body to the brain. We call this in chiropractic, since 1927, the “safety pin cycle,” ’cause this looks like a safety pin. The brain has to talk to the body and the body has to talk to the brain.

Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if this is your spleen and if something cuts off the communication from brain to body and body to brain, your spleen’s not gonna work optimally, which means nothing else is gonna work optimally, since everything’s connected to everything else. Dr. Chung Ha Su, at the University of Colorado, years ago did a study, found that the weight of a dime on a nerve root, that’s the nerve, the root as it leaves your spine decreases its transmission by 40% in 15 minutes. The weight of a dime, that’s tiny. So if we have a veritable subluxation, that’s gonna cut off our life through our body causing disease in the body. So, this is what this looks like. If you’ve been in my office, you’ve seen this poster most likely, this is what this poster is about. This is actually this person here, this is a cut away of the spinal cord, the transmitter of life in the body.

When we x-rayed this person, this was a study done. They x-rayed the person, then they examined the insides of the body, and they cut the body in half, excuse that, but they looked at the cross section of the spinal cord, so they cut away the spinal cord here. This is actually this person, this is looking straight down the canal. So this is the spinal cord of a healthy person with a normal healthy curve in the spine. When the neck is straightened, this is actually this person, when the neck gets straightened, it stretches or tethers the spinal cord. It cuts off the transmission. So you can see, this spinal cord is about half as thick as this spinal cord, the same diameter canal. It’s because that’s stretched out and chokes off life. You may also see all the black around there, that’s all the decaying and scarring, because bad posture, abnormal alignment leads to scarring on the cord, on all of the spinal joints, on everything around there. So what happens is, this doesn’t stay like that.

Once the foundation goes out normal, it deteriorates worse and worse and worse. So phase one is where we don’t see any visible decay on the bones, phase two is where we see visible decay, phase three is where people are typically bent over like this and we see a lot of physical decay. All because you had abnormal alignment or abnormal posture. So we tend to think, “Oh my gosh, well, this person is certainly in pain.” How do we know if we have one of these subluxations? Pain is the worst way to determine if you have any health problem. It’s like saying, “I know I don’t have cancer, my kidneys don’t hurt,” or “I know I don’t have diabetes because my pancreas doesn’t hurt me,” or “I know I don’t have any type of heart disease because my chest is not in pain.” All these things are very, very dangerous statements, but it’s how most of us live our life. We don’t think about our spine or our posture till it’s too late and we’re in massive damage. Pain is the worst way to judge your health, because only 8% of the nerves have anything to do with feeling.

Only 8% of the nerves have to do with feeling. So what are the rest of them all doing? The motor nerves, sounds pretty obvious, they’re controlling the very complex muscular movement and coordination of the body. The autonomic nerves, that’s what controls all of our hormones, our immune system, our digestion, all the things that are automatic or autonomic that we don’t have to think about to run every day in our body. This is where subluxation affects us mostly, not just in pain, which is why we check so many children from birth, thousands and thousands, we check them till they grow up healthy. We want their spine to grow up healthy, then when they’re older, they won’t depart from them. So, these are just a few studies on posture, and its effect on our health. We have thousands and thousands of them, but just a few I think you might be interested in.

So this is a study in Cephalalgia, the leading headache journal in the world, they found that the further the head is forward, the worse your head and neck posture, the more likely you are to get headaches, the more frequently, and the worse the headaches will be. This study is in Journal of Manipulative Physiological Therapeutics, they found that a straightened neck, if it’s less than 20 degrees, the curve should be 42 degrees in the neck, if the curve is less than 20, you’re twice as likely to have a lifetime of neck pain, headaches, and degeneration. They found if the curve is less than zero, which means, the curve should go this way, if the curve goes the opposite way, you’re 1800% more likely to live a life of neck pain and headaches for the rest your life. So correct it before it gets that way.

This study in Spine, the leading medical journal in the world on spine, they found that abnormal curves in the mid-back, this was on adolescents, 8 to 18-years-old, they found when there’s an abnormal curve in the mid-back, more pain, of course, lower self-image and decreased function or activity. Lower self-image, not just because of their image of themselves, because they know they look funny, but because it literally directly affects their hormonal function in their body. This study was done, found abnormal curves in the mid-back leads to uterine prolapse of the uterus of the female body prolapsing, and which means it misaligns and usually droops because of an abnormal alignment in the mid-back.

This Japanese study, European Spinal Journal 2012, found one of the most common predictors of heartburn is an abnormal curve in the lower back. So how can the lower back create heartburn? Well, your posture affects everything. This is one of the many reasons we see people get rid of heartburn from just getting adjustments and working on their spinal rehab. So, when there’s a misalignment in the spine, it chokes off life through the body, and if that nerve is going to the heart, can your heart function normally? Impossible.

If the nerves going to… Just like a plant here, if you put a rock on the hose that’s leading to the plant, can the plant possibly be healthy if it’s not getting water? Of course, it can’t. So why, when we have a posture-caused heart problem, why are we feeding them drugs and medications all the time, when that’s not been proven to decrease risks of heart disease or of heart attacks? Why is that? We do know that cholesterol does influence heart disease, we know that for sure, but do we have any evidence that decreasing cholesterol artificially through chemicals decreases heart attacks? We don’t. What do we have? We have evidence that the number one cause of death from heart disease, number one predictor of early death from heart disease is not cholesterol, it’s not blood pressure, those are very important, it’s actually alignment in your mid-back. 1353 subjects published in the Journal of American Gerontology, found the number one predictor, abnormal alignment in your mid-back.

It makes sense that alignment, the nerve energy can’t get through the spine. For every 10 degrees you’re out of alignment, 44% more likely to die early from heart disease. 10 degrees is not that much. Our spine controls our body. So what are some things that we can do about it. Number one, just sit up. Just as you’re sitting down at your chair, number one, get up every 30 minutes. Super, super, super important. Set an alarm. You will not only be more productive mentally, physiologically, you’ll be more productive, you’ll get more work output getting up every 30 minutes, but your spine will last you a heck of a lot longer. Sit up straight while you’re in your chair, but get up out of your chair frequently. Only, you can’t focus on it forever. You can’t concentrate on standing up forever. You’d never be able to get any work done or even when you’re standing or sitting doesn’t matter. But every half hour, get up and then when you sit down, really think about engaging, sitting up really, really tall.

One of the things you may notice that’s good is this person’s monitor is four or five inches above the straight line of sight. You want the top of your monitor four to five inches above your straight line of sight. That makes a big difference, ’cause if you’re constantly looking down like at a laptop, you’re constantly putting that tension into your neck. So how do we analyze for it? Well, two state-of-the-art ways. Our very first slide, you may remember, you may not, showed a picture of a digital photograph that we digitized. It lays a grid over it and we look at the posture, we measured the fraction of a degree, fraction of an inch off of normal. So if my shoulder’s elevated this side, usually means my spine is bent that way. If I’m rotated or twisted this way, we’re gonna pick that up, and we’re gonna design a program to be able to correct that.

The second way is x-rays. So we use state-of-the art x-rays, Chiropractic BioPhysics, it’s the most sophisticated analysis of your spinal alignment, and of your x-rays that anyone can use. It’s the most scientifically validated. So we need to know what’s happening in there. We need to analyze very, very carefully what’s happening with your alignment in order to fix it. In order to know where it should be, we have to know where it is in the first place. So how do we correct that? We use adjustments. Most of you have been adjusted, but we lay our hands on in the areas where they’re misaligned and usually fixated in that way, and we create a little gentle force to get it back into alignment. The second thing we do is general traction at home. We have people who live in town do this every single day. We send missionaries to Africa who still do these exercises. They come back, even though they’ve not seen a chiropractor for two years, their posture comes back better. It’s amazing stuff.

One word of caution. If you’re already doing your general exercises, number one, make sure you’re doing them, they’re extremely important. But number two, is don’t ever let someone else use your equipment. It’s like saying, “Oh, you have chest pain. Take my drugs for chest pain,” because they can be very, very, very different. So, do not advise someone else to do your set-up. Everyone’s set-ups are different, so they need to be analyzed first by a certified Chiropractic BioPhysics doctor to know what they do. So, if you live out of the area and you need help finding one, you can go to idealspine.com. You can look in the directory, but you can also contact my office. We’re happy to help you find somebody. If there isn’t somebody who does Chiropractic BioPhysics, the most proven system, but if there isn’t, then let us know and we’ll help you find the best doctor in that area. It’s better to have some chiropractic than no chiropractic.

The other thing that we do is traction. This is me after a severe accident, that we won’t get into the details of, involving a longboard and a car. So I reversed the curve in my very upper neck. I had to traction for three months to do that. Is it fun? Some people love it. I don’t particularly love it, and I don’t like wasting my time on anything, but it’s better than having a reverse curve in the neck and dealing with all the things that we’ve been talking about. So the further people are from normal, the longer it takes to get to nerve ana, get it? Nerve ana, because our nerves are all in our spine, we want nerve ana optimal health. So the further we are away from that, it can take a year to get to optimal posture, even a little bit more.

So it reminds me, people wonder, “Gosh, it’s a big thing dealing with posture,” and people don’t care about posture all the day, all the time. So, we wanna focus on serving those who are ready. And it reminds me of the old man who’s walking along the beach, and he sees starfish that are drying on the beach. It’s a hot day and they’re dying, they’re drying up on the beach. So he’s going along and he’s throwing them back into the ocean. And a cynical teenage boy says to him, “Old man, you can’t possibly hope to make a difference. There’s thousands of starfish all over this beach and there must be thousands of beaches all over this world, you can’t make a difference.” And the old man says, as he throws one back into the ocean, he says, “It makes all the difference in the world to this one.” So we hope this has made a difference for you. We appreciate you, we love you, and we ask that if you like this video, share it with the people that you care about and help us help others. God bless your day.