Tag Archives: nervous system

Can Chiropractic Care With Migraine Headaches?

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Yes, it can. Let’s talk first about what migraine headaches are. Migraine headaches, they’re really debilitating. In addition to having pain and a headache, it’s usually accompanied by prodromal symptoms. This means that, before the headache comes on. You get a little bit of an aura, it’s called, an aura where you get some visual lights, some sounds, or even smells that kinda let you know that you’re gonna have a real migraine headache. They’re debilitating. Sometimes the patients can’t get out of bed, they can’t stand the light, they’re very photosensitive, meaning the light is really bothersome. What’s happening here is the nervous system gets out of balance. The nervous system, particularly the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight-or-flight response part of your nervous system, gets stimulated to a point where the blood vessels, the cranial blood vessels, in your head dilate and start to swell and that causes headaches, but it also causes a stimulation of the trigeminal nerve which is one of the main nerves coming out of the brain down into the face, and this causes migraine. There’s also, the nervous system is out of balance, but also the endocrine system can get out of balance through the same process. Endocrine system is your hormonal system, and so we see a correlation between menstrual cycles, for example, and the incidence of migraine because of that hormonal shift.

Chiropractic care works by restoring proper balance to the nervous system. You have two main sides of your nervous system. One is fight-or-flight, called sympathetic. The other is rest and digest, growth and repair, which is called your parasympathetic nervous system. So typically, you wanna have a balance in there. If there is pressure on the nervous system in the spinal level, it can make it really difficult for the body to get that, to restore that balance on its own. That’s where chiropractic care comes in. It’s really great for removing pressure and stress on the nervous system which can cause this kinda ailments. And then the body just restores balance on its own and heals on its own, which is what it’s designed to do.

I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic (in Petaluma, CA), urging you to get your spine checked. Especially if you suffer from migraines, it can be a huge help. I’ve seen patients myself that had been on expensive toxic medications for years and just basically suffer and try to muddle through for years before discovering that chiropractic care has a huge effect and a huge impact on migraines.

How Does Stress Affect Your Health?

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Well, it’s having an effect on your health. How much depends on how adaptable your body is, how much it’s able to resist the stress of your life. Now, stress is broken down into different kinds. There’s physical stress, which we all know, you have an accident or a fall. There’s chemical stress, you’re not getting enough nutrients from your food, or you drink too much coffee, or you’re taking too much medication. And then there’s emotional stress, you have grief, or worry, or all the different emotions that can affect your body in a negative way are collectively stress, and then it gets broken down further. You have stress which is external environmental stress, and then internal stress. But essentially, it all has the same effect on your body, which it stimulates your nervous system, specifically the part of your nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system.

While sympathetic sounds nice and warm and fuzzy, it’s actually the part of your nervous system that is the ‘fight or flight’ response. You are walking through the jungle, you hear a growl or something, your body instantly gets ready to fight or run away. Most people are in this state the majority of the time, unfortunately. Our lives have stress in them. We get tired and we drink coffee, which is another form of stress. You’re kinda stimulating the ‘fight or flight’ response with stimulants, hence the name.

This results over time in a suppressed immune system. Your immune system doesn’t flourish when you’re in fight or flight response. It’s kinda put on the back burner so you can run away from a threat. Studies show that chiropractic care reverses or inhibits the sympathetic response. So it turns off that fight or flight response in the nervous system. In chiropractic, the first goal is typically to improve the body’s adaptability, improve the function of the nervous system. And the second goal is usually pain relief or something, but the first goal is to get the body functioning properly. We can’t remove all the stress from our lives. You can do things like take walks in the forest, do meditation, yoga, go to bed early, and all the things that can help you deal with stress. Martial arts is really good in another way, but it can’t remove that stress. So the goal is to make the body as adaptable as it can be to deal with the stresses of life and to keep us on that balance where we’re still feeling good and our immune system is functioning well, despite all that stress.

I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic and this has been your Health Minute.

Chiropractic Care | Pain Free vs. Healthy

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I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Chiropractic, and I want to talk about pain. A lot of people come into my office, as you can imagine, in some sort of pain, and they want chiropractic to get them out of pain. Chiropractic is fantastic at getting rid of pain, but essentially, chiropractic has a different aim, and I want to share that with you. The power that made the body, heals the body. This is a main chiropractic precept. Now whether you believe that it’s God or in the East they call it the ‘Pranas‘, the life force, or Nature or the Universe or whatever you think it is, there is something that is animating us. This runs through the nervous system to empower our body and to run everything.

The nervous system runs every cell, organ and system of your body, and the nervous system has its headquarters in the spine. Structurally, we want the spine to run, to be aligned properly, so that there is no pressure on discs and nerves and there’s no pain and no arthritis down the road. But the real aim of chiropractic is to remove stress and interference from the nervous system so that that life force can come down and run everything in the body, and the body can have its optimal health that it’s designed for.

That is really the way that we can make our immune system stronger and to help relieve stress from our body. We can’t remove our outward environmental stress ’cause it’s everywhere and there’s just no way to do it. What we can do is make the body and the immune system, the nervous system, more resilient and more resistant to stress, and that will make us healthier.

You might see five people at your office, maybe three of them are walking around with some sort of flu symptoms and two are not. Well, they are all having access to this flu that’s going around. Why are two people sick, and three are not? The answer is because their immune system is stronger. It’s more equipped and more able to fight that stress and fight off those foreign invaders. Chiropractic is excellent at powering up the immune system and the life force. I’m Dr. Steve encouraging you to come and get your spine checked and boost that life force.