by admin | Nov 14, 2017 | Uncategorized
This post is going to be a little lengthy but I hope that you will read each of the summaries below. Right now chiropractic is at about a 7% utilization among the US population. To give you some comparison of what kind of uphill battle we’ve got, in 2010 enough opioid pain relievers were sold to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of 5mg of hydrocodone every 4 hours for 1 month. What you’ll see below is some of the peer reviewed evidence that proves that chiropractic should be a first line treatment option for some musculoskeletal pain conditions! Effectiveness of Treatment: – Spine Journal 2014: Chiropractic treatment led to greater short term reductions in self reported pain and disability than usual medical care. These changes were both statistically significant and clinically meaningful.(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25423308) – British Medical Journal 1990: Chiropractic was more effective than hospital outpatient management for patients with chronic or severe lower back pain. Including chiropractic into National Hospital Services should be considered.(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2143092) – Journal of Manipulative & Physiological Therapeutics 2010: 60% of patients with sciatica who had failed other medical management benefited from spinal manipulation to the same degree as if they underwent surgical intervention.(http://www.jmptonline.org/article/S0161-4754(10)00211-3/abstract) – Annals of Internal Medicine 2012: For patients with acute and subacute neck pain, spinal manipulative therapy was more effective than medication in both the short and long term.(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22213489) – Journal of Manipulative & Physiological Therapeutics 2014: For patients with acute and chronic lumbar disc herniation confirmed via MRI, significant improvement for all outcomes was reported at all time points, with 90.5% of patients reporting improvement at 3...
by admin | Oct 26, 2017 | Uncategorized
RE: Newsweek Article: How the VA Fueled the National Opioid Crisis and is Killing Thousands of Veterans by Art Levine, 10/12/17 To whom it may concern, My name is Dr. Travis McKay and I am a healthcare practitioner here in the state of Delaware. I read the above article by Mr. Levine over the weekend and was obviously distressed by its contents. My unease when reading it was primarily fueled by what is happening to our country’s veterans and how many of them are affected by this opioid epidemic that we are currently dealing with. However, I was also upset about the idea of how this negatively paints the members of the VA, and the staff that works tirelessly there to serve our veterans. I know, and have actually treated, some of your staff members before, and never have I met one who I didn’t feel cared about their patients and was doing whatever was in there power to treat them the best they could, with the tools at their disposal. This is why I’m writing to you. Not to chastise or cast blame your way, but rather to discuss those tools that your facility uses to deal with your patient’s pain. At my office in Newark, we specialize in dealing with mechanical spine pain patients, both acute and chronic. What makes us different from most pain management offices in Delaware though is that we only provide non-pharmacological treatment options for our patients. These obviously include the standard physical therapy and massage therapy but, unlike others, our main treatment tool is chiropractic. With regards to the tools that...
by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Uncategorized
90.5% of Patients Report Improvement With Chiropractic After Only 3 Months This study looks at what is the best treatment for MRI confused disc herniations that produces low back pain or leg pain. Not only what’s the best treatment, but comparing the effect of that treatment from 3 months to 1 year. The bottom line of the study is that a “large percentage of acute and importantly chronic lumbar disc herniation patients treated with chiropractic spinal manipulation reported clinically relevant improvement. As clinicians, we are well aware that approximately 70% of the population will have back pain at some time. We are also aware that low back pain with associated leg pain due to a herniated intervertebral disc is one the most severe and disabling forms of back pain. These patients are placed in two categories; conservative care or surgical care. Unfortunately as most Doctor’s of Chiropractic(DC) know, conservative care does not typically include chiropractic care. Instead it may include medications, corticosteroid nerve root or epidural injections, bed rest, and/or physical therapy. In certain cases chiropractic spinal manipulation may be used as a last resort effort, but it’s inclusion in the therapy is usually based on a referral from a friend or family member. The patients in this study were treated with high-velocity, low amplitude spinal manipulation and were tracked in regards to progress made at short, medium, and long term outcome evaluations. The patients in this study were between 18 and 65 years, experiencing back pain and moderate to severe leg pain in a dermatomal pattern with at least one of the following: Decreased straight leg raiser test...
by admin | Sep 22, 2017 | Uncategorized
Speaking as a parent myself, I can say that the term and diagnosis Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD for short, has become almost commonplace. I’m sure that like me, you know someone, most likely even close friend or immediate family, that was diagnosed with the condition and is currently medicated for it. In fact, in the United States, the rates of incidence for ADHD has increased from 7.8% of children in 2003, to 9.5% in 2007, and to 11.0% in 2011. That means that as of 2011, approximately 6.4 million children 4-17 years of age have been diagnosed with ADHD! So what’s this mean for you? For example, if my kid has ADHD, they just go to the doctor, get their medicine, and are fine, right? Well, fine as long as they take their medicine. Which they need to take for how long exactly? The rest of their life? Keep in mind that more than half of all young people with ADHD will continue to struggle with the condition well into their adulthood. But even beyond the medication, children with ADHD are more likely to have major injuries, hospital inpatient, hospital outpatient, and/or emergency department admission than children without ADHD. You’re probably thinking something along the lines of “great, thanks for making me feel bad about my child/friend/relative with ADHD and how there’s nothing I can do.” But the truth is that there have been examples in the research of chiropractic care effectively working as an alternative form of treatment for children with ADHD. In some cases, the chiropractic worked so well that the child was actually taken...
by admin | Sep 12, 2017 | Uncategorized
If you’ve been in our office at least once, then you’ve heard us discuss posture; most likely in the context of this is where your posture is and this is where it needs to be. Most of us have poor posture; it’s just a reality at this point. Human beings as a whole have moved away from the activities that they were designed for; running, walking, hunting for food, etc., and we now live in a world where the large majority of us spend eight to twelve hours every day seated in an office, or in some form of abnormal position like a mechanic spending all day under the hood of a car. But what does this mean? We’ve all been told not to slouch, to stand up straight, etc., but why? From a chiropractic perspective, poor posture is one of the greatest contributors to spinal related musculoskeletal and visceral complaints that we see. When we move away from our normal posture we create stresses and strains in our nervous system. A study in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics found that changes in our global postural components cause stresses and strains on our central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. These global postural components include our head, thorax, pelvis, and legs, and abnormal positioning of any of these in relation to the other can create a stress to your nervous system. So to sum that up, poor posture has a detrimental effect on both your peripheral and central nervous system. And yes, that’s central nervous system, you know the term that encompasses only two structures in your...
by admin | Aug 24, 2017 | Uncategorized
If you’re a human being living in the United States, then there is about a 99.99999% chance that you’ve taken an over the counter(OTC) medication like Advil, Ibuprofen, Tylenol, Aleve, Aspirin, etc. In fact, there is the same probability that there is a bottle of one of those brands sitting in your medicine cabinet right now. Regardless of how “natural” you feel you are, almost all of us have at one time or another taken one of these for a headache, fever……maybe even a hangover? The problem lies in the fact that because these medications are so readily available, without any prescription necessary to purchase, we all assume that they are completely safe. But is that necessarily the case? Most of the aforementioned medication brands fall into a category known as Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs, or NSAIDs for short. Acetaminophen, which is found in Tylenol, is generally used for the same purpose as NSAIDs but does not fall into their category based on its mechanism of action. Both types have potentially dangerous side effects associated with their use that most people are not familiar with. For example, in 1999 the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine released the following statement: “It has been estimated conservatively that 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur among patients with rheumatoid arthritis or osteoarthritis every year in the United States. This figure is similar to the number of deaths from the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome(AIDs) and considerably greater than the number of deaths from multiple myeloma, asthma, cervical cancer, or Hodgkin’s disease. If deaths from gastrointestinal toxic effects from NSAIDs were tabulated separately in the National Vital Statistics...
