Turning Back
the Aging Clock
with Chiropractic and Exercise
What
are your views on aging? Is fatigue and joint discomfort the inevitable
result of growing older? If so, do you believe that the elderly should
take it easy when they are tired and suffering from mild aches?
The fact is that many age-associated declines occur not because of
the aging process itself, but as a result of our lifestyle habits,
including Chiropractic care and Exercise. In our sedentary society,
many muscle and joint problems are the result of weakness and inflexibility.
Chiropractic Care and moderate Exercise can possibly help increase
your flexibility, strength and endurance, and thus, help prevent injury
and slow the age-associated loss of muscle function. This means that
some of those old cliches turn out to be true, "use it or lose it"
and "you're as old as you feel".
Inactive people become more frail than active people and are more
likely to sustain a serious fall that could lead to hospitalization,
permanent disability, dependence and even death. According to the
federal government., Americans live a average of 73.7 years, but spend
their last 11.7 years in "dysfunctional life", which is marked by
disease and impairment. Reducing the number of years lost to restricted
physical activity has become a national priority.
Exercise can help slow many components of the aging process. Proper
exercise can rejuvenate you and take years off your chronological
age. In other words, exercise can add years to your life and life
to your years. The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, claims
that a 50 yr. old today can expect to live, on average, to over 79.
By the year 2000, it is estimated that 50% of the population will
be over fifty. This is a lot of time spent in the "golden years".
Instead of believing that over 50 means "over the hill and declining",
you should view it as "over the hill and picking up speed!"
It was once thought that aerobic capacity and muscular strength decreased
dramatically as one grew older: Studies revealed that a sedentary
65 yr. old has only 60% of the aerobic capacity as a young sedentary
adult, and that after the age of 30, people not engaged in strength
training lose muscle mass amounting to about six to seven pound of
muscle each decade. Remember that these declines apply to sedentary
adults. A 25 year study on runners performed at Ball State University
found that many of the runners who continued to train had aerobic
capacities similar to what they had 20 years ago.
A ten year study from the Center for Exercise Science at the University
of Florida found that runners who took up resistance (strength) training
were able to maintain their muscle over the ten years. Those who did
not, continued to loss muscle mass. The results of these studies apply
to everyone, not just athletes.
Each person over the age of 55 who I have trained and who continues
to exercise consistently, has found that they have marked increases
in their muscle tone, strength and aerobic capacity: they have become
more fit and vigorous then ever before. One of the things that happens
when you begin strength training is that connective tissue, such as
ligaments and tendons, gets stronger along with your muscles. This
helps to protect your joints from injury and makes everyday tasks
easier, such as walking up stairs, carrying groceries and keeping
up with grandchildren. The Simple Fitness Solutions Strength-Training
Kit is a safe, simple, and effective way for older adults to gain
the benefits of strength training.
There are community programs available to help older adults stay active.
Many wellness programs include low-impact aerobics and strength training.
Bowling, and croquet leagues are also a fun way to stay in shape.
Whatever form of exercises you choose to do, you should include ones
that employ a mixture of endurance, strength, balance and flexibility
exercises.
Before starting, check with your chiropractor to see if there are
any health concerns. Appropriate exercise can reduce frailty in old
age thus helping to make a person's last few years be filled with
active participation instead of the bedridden existence that too many
elderly people now experience.
We were designed to be active..don't rust out before you wear out
because you aren't putting your body to proper use. If you want to
stay strong and mobile, look and feel well, and continue to live independently
instead of ending up in the care of others, then you better START
MOVING!
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The
Process of Inflammation:
A Potent Source of Age-Related Cellular Damage
Chronic
inflammation spurred by an immune system run amok appears to play
a role in medical evils from Arthritis to Alzheimer's, Diabetes
to Deart Disease. There's no grand proof of this "theory of everything."
But doctors say it's compelling enough that we should act as if it
were true -- which means eating an "anti-inflammatory diet," getting
lots of physical activity, and losing the dangerous, internal belly
fat that pumps out the chemicals that drive inflammation ...
Chronic inflammation is so similar in different diseases, Libby said,
that when he lectures, he uses many of the same slides, whether he's
talking about diseases of the heart, kidneys, joints, lung, or other
tissues.
Only a few years ago, Heart Attacks were explained as a plumbing problem
-- blood vessels that became clogged with atherosclerotic plaque as
"bad" (LDL) cholesterol was deposited on vessel walls. Now, doctors
know that this bad cholesterol gets embedded inside artery walls as
well, where the immune system "sees" it as an invader to be attacked.
The ongoing inflammation in arteries, essentially a revved up immune
response, can eventually damage arteries and cause "vulnerable" plaque
to burst. It is because inflammation is now seen as such a hallmark
of heart disease that many doctors use a test for inflammation called
CRP to help assess a person's cardiac risk.
It's long been known that Type 1 Diabetes is linked to inflammation
-- the body's immune system attacks the cells that make insulin. Now,
new research is suggesting that Type 2 Diabetes, the kind that
generally sets in in adulthood, often begins with insulin resistance,
in which cells stop responding properly to insulin. Doctors now know
that during chronic inflammation, one of the chemicals released is
TNF, or tumor necrosis factor, which makes cells more resistant to
insulin.
"No one would have thought these things were related," but they are,
said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at
the Harvard School of Public Health. The TNF connection also helps
explain why obesity, particularly abdominal obesity, leads to diabetes.
Fat cells used to be thought of as storage depots for energy, as metabolically
inactive. Now we know that fat cells are little hotbeds of inflammation.
Excess fat in the belly is a great source of inflammation.
Autoimmune diseases like Rheumatoid Arthritis are also believed to
be linked to inflammation. In arthritis, for instance, inflammatory
cells called cytokines lead to the production of enzymes that break
down cartilage in joints.
Inflammation also plays some role in Alzheimer's disease, said Linda
Van Eldik, a neurobiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg
School of Medicine. Whenever the brain is injured or infected, cells
in the brain called glia pump out cytokines. Normally, this response
shuts down when the injury or infection is over.
"But in chronic neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, these
glial cells are activated too high or too long or both," Van Eldik
said. The plaques and tangles in patients' brains attract the attention
of glial cells, making them pump out even more cytokines to try to
repair this damage and creating chronic inflammation.
Age-related diseases are the final breakdown of a system that has
suffered a great deal of cellular, genetic and biochemical damage.
Just like any complex machinery, it will break down more rapidly if
subject to a higher rate of ongoing wear - such as that provided by
inflammatory processes. As scientists uncover and catalogue ever more
of our biochemistry, common sense health advice (exercise, stay trim,
eat a good diet, take supplements) generally turns out to minimise
exposure to chronic inflammation - especially losing the excess fat.
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Source: http://www.fightaging.org
Chiropractic
Care for Arthritis
New
Research Shows Wide Usage and Patient Satisfaction
A
study recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine
has found that 63% of people who visited a rheumatologist for osteoarthritis,
rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia conditions also
sought some form of "complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)."
Chiropractic was not only the most sought after form of CAM for those
patients, but it was also among those found to be most helpful for
these conditions. The research investigators decided to look at alternative
forms of care for rheumatological conditions, because they "provide
an optimal disease framework in which to examine patients' reasons
for using CAM and for discussing this use with their physicians. These
conditions are prevalent,2 have no known cause or cure, are characterized
by chronic pain and a variable disease course, and often adversely
affect the functional status."
The authors recruited patients from six locations: three university
practices and three private rheumatology practices. The three university
practices included a municipal hospital, a Veterans Affairs Medical
Center and a fee-for-service specialty care practice. Existing patients
who kept a scheduled appointment over a two-week period were eligible;
patients who were new to the practice, under the age of 18, had dementia,
or resided in a nursing home were excluded. Of 428 eligible patients,
232 (54%) patients responded to the survey. Of those, 146 reported
using at least one type of CAM for their rheumatologic condition.
Chiropractic was at the top of the list of alternative forms of care
ever used, with nearly 31% (45 of 146) trying chiropractic care. The
reasons why these patients chose CAM are somewhat typical: to control
pain; because they've heard it will help; because it's safe; because
it helped someone they know; and because their prescribed medication
isn't working. Sixty-three percent of the patients in this study reported
using CAM at least once, and over 90% of them were doing so on a regular
basis. This would equate to 57% of all arthritic patients using CAM
on a regular basis.
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Medical
Doctors Draft List for which
Patients should and souldn't be treated in a Disaster Situation?
Chicargo:
An influential group of Medical Doctors have drafted a specific list
of recommendations for which patients should and souldn't be treated
in a disaster situation.
The
suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from
prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government
agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and
Human Services.
The
proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals "so
that everybody will be thinking in the same way" when pandemic flu
or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux.
She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of
the task force report. The idea is to try to make sure that scarce
resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses
— are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.
Their
recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition
of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
"If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many
people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health
care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions
owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing," the report states.
To
prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike
task of deciding who will and who won't get lifesaving care, the task
force wrote. Those who will not recieve care are those patients at
high risk of death with a slim chance of long-term survival. But the
recommendations get much more specific, and include:
-
People
older than 85
-
Those
with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from
car crashes and shootings
-
Severely
burned patients older than 60
-
Those
with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure,
lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes
-
Those
with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer's
disease.
Dr. Kevin
Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office
at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force.
He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part
of preparedness efforts.
Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University
called the report an important initiative but also "a political minefield
and a legal minefield."
The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age
discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was
not on the task force. If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude
care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately
from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing
will be necessary in a mass disaster, "there are some real ethical
concerns here."
James Bentley, a senior vice president at American Hospital Association,
said the report will give guidance to hospitals in shaping their own
preparedness plans even if they don't follow all the suggestions.
He said the proposals resemble a battlefield approach in which limited
health care resources are reserved for those most likely to survive.
Bentley said it's not the first time this type of approach has been
recommended for a catastrophic pandemic, but that "this is the most
detailed one I have seen from a professional group."
While
the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could
help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.
Devereaux
said compiling the list "was emotionally difficult for everyone."
That's partly because members believe it's just a matter of time before
such a health care disaster hits, she said. "You never know," Devereaux
said. "SARS took a lot of folks by surprise. We didn't even know it
existed." Source: Associated Press Reutrn
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