Chiropractic and PMS

Every woman knows this acronym, and for those who live with it, they know it is disruptive to life, painful in most cases, and a major disruption to their lives.. Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) affects women most noticeably in their late 20’s to early 40’s, and 10-20% of women report severe or even disabling symptoms. So how does one avoid having this “monthly gift from God” and actually enjoy the whole month? Well, chiropractic may be able to help with that one.

PMS is thought to be a side effect from hormonal changes that occur right before and during the monthly menstrual cycle and can be made worse by stress, decreased serotonin levels in the brain, and subluxations (vertebra out of place that is pinching a nerve) in the lower back. We’ll discuss these three things that aggravate PMS so you can have an easier time dealing with it, and get back to enjoying life.

Decreasing stress sounds easy, right? Well, to deal with something, one must first understand it. Stress is the body’s response to everyday life. It is the end result when someone reacts to a situation. The body increases stamina, and heightens alertness, strength, and focus. While this sounds good for a short period of time, constant “heightened” senses can really wear out the body. If you don’t take time to relax (or de-stress), and let these “heightened’ senses actually relax and return to normal levels, you may be running out of juice early in the day, and that’s not good because that can cause more stress. Vicious cycle, I know. To help decrease stress you have to be realistic. Nobody’s perfect, not even you. If you put too high of expectations on anyone, especially yourself, it’s only going to put more frustration on your conscious if you fail. Avoid excessive scheduling by cutting out activities that aren’t on top of the to-do list and move what can be moved to another day. It’s not called procrastination; it’s called “time management.” Relax every once in a while. Taking a break in the middle of the day does wonders for the body, and setting time aside to set everything aside for a few minutes can really help to manage your stress levels. Get a good nights sleep every night. Being tired in the middle of the day can be more taxing on your body than you think. Stress levels skyrocket when you throw exhaustion into the mix. Always have a positive outlook on life. Whatever the negatives are, there are always some positives. Having a positive attitude helps keep the good chemicals flowing in your brain and helps you keep your stress levels in check. Good body treatment helps maintain stress levels as well. Good body treatment means your getting regular exercise and are eating right. Not only does this decrease stress, but we’ll talk later about how it helps to increase serotonin levels, the second aspect that affects PMS. Finally, solving little problems helps to lighten your schedule load, and builds confidence as well. If you can figure out what to have for supper tonight, then that’s one less thing on your plate to worry about (and yes, pun intended).

Increasing serotonin levels is the next step to helping ease PMS pains. Increasing serotonin levels is actually easier than it sounds. Since chiropractic believes in natural healing, we’ll stay away from the medical problems like prescribing drugs that may cause allergic reactions in patients. Homeopathic supplements such as Rhodiola and St. Johns Wort both show evidence of increasing serotonin levels, and are available without a prescription. Just exercise care when taking them. Change your diet and you can experience several health benefits. Serotonin is made from an amino acid called tryptophan. While the chemical tryptophan gets most of its attention during Thanksgiving, it isn’t just found in turkey. In fact, chicken and beef have almost the exact same amount of tryptophan. Unfortunately, other chemicals that interfere with tryptophan absorption are also found in these foods. Eat more carbohydrates to counter the countering chemicals. Carbs cause insulin levels to increase, which in turn absorbs those competing amino acids. Spend more time in the sun because bright light increases serotonin levels. For those of us living in Minnesota, the sun is a rare commodity for it seems like six months out of the year. Tanning beds and light lamps also work to increase serotonin levels, so they can be used when the sun can’t come out to play. Finally, exercise regularly. Regular workouts may not specifically cause an increase in serotonin, but several studies show that serotonin levels go up after exercise, and that exercise leaves increase amounts of tryptophan in the brain.

Finally, correct subluxations. The lower back is the outlet for the nerves that control the lower abdomen tissue, such as the uterus. A subluxation can cause interference in the functioning of a nerve, causing a misinterpretation of signals which in turn causes abnormal functioning of certain body parts. Although chiropractic can’t do anything about how your body reacts to hormonal changes, several studies have shown that it can help decrease and lighten many of the symptoms of PMS without harmful and annoying side effects of some prescription drugs, and since your body isn’t allergic to itself, there is no possibility of any allergic reactions or side effects.

The Proof

Studies done on chiropractic and PMS have been conducted and have found that women diagnosed with PMS have a higher incidence of spinal subluxations as compared with non-PMS subjects (Walsh, 1999). Also, in 1992 Dr. Wittler did a study on 11 women with histories of PMS that had occurred for more than 4 months, giving care through 4 menstrual cycles and averaging 5-7 adjustments per month. The subjects of the study were given questionnaires at the beginning and end of care asking them to evaluate changes in irritability and mood swings, tension, ineffectiveness, lack of motor coordination, mental/cognitive functioning, eating habits, variations in sexual drive and activity, overall physical symptoms, and social impairment. They reported improvement in all ten categories, with the biggest improvement in sexual drive (70.7%), social impairment (64.5%), and mood swings (60.8%). Average improvement in all ten categories was 44.2%. Chiropractic helps the body to heal itself and to regulate itself better. At Burtis Chiropractic we have helped numerous women out of this cycle and on to a better healthier life.

Chiropractic and Fertility
You’ve tried for months, but to no avail. You’ve talked your medical doctors ear off looking and searching for something that may be wrong, but his tests have all come up negative. You’re considering surgery, but there has to be another, safer, answer for why you can’t get pregnant. Well, there is, and we’ve been waiting for you. Chiropractic has helped couples get pregnant for some time, from those seeking out chiropractic care specifically for fertility issues, to those who come in for another ailment only to conceive “miraculously” after months of failed attempts. If you’re going through this, you are one of the six million women and their partners in the US today that are just as frustrated as you are.

The human reproductive process is a complex and tricky one. The timing needs to be just right to even have a chance of becoming pregnant. Usually, it eventually happens, but sometimes, something occurs in the process that interferes with fertilization, which results in infertility issues. The cause can be with the male, female, or both. About 40-50% of the time, it’s the female that is having problems, about 20% of the time, it’s the male, and about 30-40% of the time, it’s both. We’ll look at each of these problems separately and provide you with ways to overcome the challenges without the expensive in vitro fertilization.

Causes of male infertility - can be abnormal sperm count or function, impaired delivery of the sperm, general health and lifestyle issues, and overexposure to certain environmental elements.
Treatments - include addressing impotence or premature ejaculation. If a lack of sperm is thought to be the issue, surgery or hormones to correct the problem may be used, or use of assisted reproductive technology may also help.

Causes of female infertility - can be damage or blocking of the fallopian tubes, endometriosis, ovulating disorders, elevated prolactin, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), early menopause, benign uterine fibroids, and pelvic adhesions… and those are the naturally occuring ones. Other problems that females can encounter consist of certain medications, thyroid problems, cancer and subsequent treatment, other medical conditions such as delayed puberty, amenorrhea, or diabetes, and excessive caffeine intake.

Treatments include:

• Clomiphene - for ovulation problems such as PCOS

• Human menopausal gonadotropin (hMG)– an injected medication for women who can’t ovulate at all

• Follicle stimulating hormone (FSH)– stimulates the ovary to make mature egg follicles

• Human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG)– used in combination with the above three treatments, it causes the follicle to ovulate

• Gonadotropin-releasing hormone – a treatment for women who ovulate irregularly or prematurely during hMG treatment

• Aromatase inhibitors – includes letrozole (Femara) and anastrozole (Arimidex), it induces ovulation. It is used in advanced breast cancer treatment. WARNING: this treatment IS NOT approved by the Food and Drug Administration for inducing ovulation. It can cause birth defects and miscarriages

• Metformin – drug used to boost ovulation when insulin resistance is known or suspected

• Bromocriptine – a medication for women whose ovulation cycles are irregular due to prolactin levels being too high

Fertility drugs put the mother at risk of having multiple pregnancies, which is not good. We’re not saying twins or triplets are mistakes, but an increased number of fetuses increase the chances of premature labor, which raises the chances of health and developmental problems in the baby. If this does happen because of drugs or fertility treatments, they need to be watched very carefully to ensure optimal survival odds and for any signs of birth defects. Other options include surgery to the affected area, but doesn’t always work and is usually expensive, or assisted reproductive technology (ART) which is basically a team of health professionals working together to figure out what the problem is and then helping you to become pregnant. The thing is, it works best when the woman has a healthy uterus, responds well to fertility drugs, and ovulates naturally, basically a perfectly healthy woman that can’t become pregnant using any of the previously mentioned methods that are much cheaper.

While there aren’t many ways to treat male infertility, avoiding drug and tobacco use, and limiting alcohol consumption, is a good start. Also, high temperatures temporarily effect sperm production and mobility, so avoid hot tubs and steam baths.

A woman can increase her chances of becoming pregnant by exercising moderately (but not too much that your periods are infrequent), avoiding weight extremes (overweight is just as bad as underweight) avoid alcohol, tobacco, and street drugs (may affect your ability to conceive), limit caffeine (no more than 200mg, or two cups of coffee a day), and also limiting medications (prescription and non-prescription drugs may effect your ability to become pregnant).
How does chiropractic help? While each of the treatments discussed tries to help one or two aspects of becoming pregnant, chiropractic helps them all by improving the nerve function between your reproductive system and your brain. Your brain is the “on/off” switch that controls everything about your reproductive system, and when it can’t “say” something, then that something isn’t going to happen, causing infertility in one of the two partners, and sometimes both. Much cheaper than most of the above treatments, and usually covered by insurance, chiropractic is an obvious and safe alternative to dangerous drug treatments that increase the possibility of defects in the pregnancy. Chiropractic helps the body function naturally, like it was designed to.

Here are a few videos that may help you decide on chiropractic care:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnZOeEY08gE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zB_ZGG_XTs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PAzpqEmJZk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0deLP4wboWk

Chiropractic and Pregnancy

You’re having a baby! What a joyous occasion…a miracle in your life! You don’t care what gender it is, as long as it’s healthy. Now you want to do whatever you can to assure you AND the baby are as healthy as possible. You exercise, you get rest, you take your vitamins….. and that’s all, right? NOOOOO!!!!

Chiropractic care has been shown to help keep pregnant women feeling good, to help the birth process, and most importantly, ensure the health of your little miracle. That extra weight shifts a woman’s center of gravity forward, resulting in low back pain, pelvis rotation, and other problems that may cause complications during pregnancy. Chiropractic can relieve back pain and help keep your pelvis aligned, it can also help maximize blood flow to the uterus, helping the baby receive enough oxygen and develop like nature intended it to.

One of the most important aspects of pregnancy chiropractors can help with is establishing pelvic balance and alignment. A misaligned pelvis, called intrauterine constraint, can reduce the amount of room for the developing baby, making it more difficult for the baby to get the best possible position for delivery. The nervous system is the master of communications, or the conductor so to speak, of the body, and keeping the spine aligned helps the conductor do his job right.

Chiropractic care provides many benefits for pregnant women. It can help her maintain a healthier pregnancy, control nausea symptoms, reduce length of labor and delivery, relieve back, neck, and joint pain, and even help prevent possible interventions like a cesarean section (C-section). The more interventions you have during your pregnancy and delivery, the more likely it will be to need some kind of intervention after your delivery. Interventions are artificial ways of assisting delivery, such as forceps, vacuum extraction, epidurals, and C-sections, and they all put unnatural stress on the newborn, and a newborns neck and spine is so weak that it can’t correct these subluxations (vertebra out of place causing nerve interference) by itself, so they need chiropractic care as soon as possible after they are born to minimize complications.

It is hard to find numbers and statistics about chiropractic during pregnancy because there aren’t any adverse reactions to report. Pregnant women get adjusted all the time, throughout their pregnancy, and they haven’t had any problems with it, simply feeling better and having easier and safer births. Often times the children who have the most problems such as asthma, colic, ear infections, frequent colds, and ADD/ADHD are the children who have had the most difficult births and the most interventions during the birthing process.
One study done looked at the average delivery length for first time mothers and mothers who have already had a child. First time moms under chiropractic care took 24% less time in delivery as opposed to those who didn’t receive chiropractic care during pregnancy, and those who had given birth before enjoyed a 39% reduction in labor length. Those numbers are huge, especially if you are the one giving birth. Imagine being in labor for only 3 hours instead of 4, or only 6 hours instead of 8 for first time mothers. For women who had already given birth, imagine being in labor for 3 hours instead of 5, or 6 hours instead of 10. Do those reduction rates look any better now?

At Burtis Chiropractic Center we have a table specifically designed for use on women all the way through their 9th month of pregnancy, and are committed to making this special time of your life as comfortable and pain free as possible. So come in and help your baby, and yourself, get to full health and wellness today!

Here are some videos on pregnancy and chiropractic that may inspire you to try it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZh318IUZz0&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKc5LyijLDU