Massage Warsaw- Massage Therapy – Warsaw Acupuncture

Category: Pain Management & Self Care

  • Bacteria and Your Health

    The New York Post recently published an article on the bacteria’s influence on health.  It outlines the research at the American Gut Project, a study that aims to map out the bacteria involved in our digestive system the same way that the Human Genome Project mapped out our genetic code.  Some of the things they have uncovered give reason the change the way we think about health:

    1. There is overwhelmingly positive evidence that fecal transplants can cure C. Difficile infections
    2. Obese mice that have been transplanted with intestinal flora from thin mice lose weight and vice versa
    3. Timid mice when transplanted with the flora of braver mice, became more active and adventurous
    4. Mice injected with flora from malnourished children could not digest food properly
    5. Breast milk, nature’s most perfect food, contains a carbohydrate, oligosaccharide which for years confused scientists because this carb could not be broken down by the infant.  Why would nature include something useless in such a perfect food?  It turns out that oligosaccharides are not present to nourish the infant, but rather to nourish a certain class of intestinal bacteria.  This is further evidence for the importance of breast feeding and also for the importance of bacterial health.

    Click here for the full article.

  • The Benefits of Yoga

    Yoga can be key to helping you recover from an injury, undo years of bad postural habits, or relieve your stress.

    Like few other exercises, yoga has the ability to get you focussing on breath, willing chronically tight muscles to loosen.  It creates a mind body awareness of how you are positioned and starts a dialogue between you and your body that will help you find physical cues of rising stress levels and enact change simply by thinking about it.

    This enhanced state relaxation is key to getting muscles to release.  One reason tight muscles stay tight is because of the pain-tension cycle.  Often there is nothing wrong with the muscle.  There is no damage, but the muscle simply won’t release because it is painful which is causing tightness, which causes more pain, which causes more tightness.  By destressing the person, focussing on the breathing, and entering certain positions, the pain-tension cycle can be broken and the muscle may find it easier to release.

    The positioning in yoga is unique and shows an ancient understanding of modern concepts such as anatomy trains.  Anatomy trains was pioneered by Tom Myers.  It shows that there are chains of fascial connections that link many muscles from the feet all the way to the head.  Basically, the fascia fascia on the soles of the feet is connected to the fascia of your calf muscles, which is connected to the fascia of your hamstrings, which is connected to the fascia of your glutes, which is connected to the fascia of the back’s erector muscles, which is connected to the fascia of the neck and head.  The advantage of yoga over traditional stretching is that traditional stretching focusses on stretching the fascia of one muscle at a time, while yoga stretches all the fascia of all the muscles in a given anatomy train at once.  This means that if a fascial restriction in your foot is leading to tightness in your lower back, yoga helps to address it.

    The yoga poses are also helpful because they are the opposite of the harmful postures we assume most of the day.  Daily work in front of your computer may cause you to slouch.  Yoga asks you to assume the opposite posture: chest open, shoulders back, head tall.  Daily work may have you sticking your gut out, while yoga asks you to suck in your belly and elongate your lower back while you tuck in your glutes.  By reversing the postures you can change what your body sees as normal and give your body time to repair itself.

    Yoga works.  Why not give it a try?

  • Gluteus Medius Exercises to help IT Band Pain

    The gluteus medius muscle is located in the upper part of the glutes, just below the hip bone (iliac crest).  The gluteus medius muscle is very important in stabilizing our hips during exercise or sport.  It is weak in most people and this weakness can be a major source of problems in the lower back, SI joints and IT band.  Running or jogging can reveal long hidden weakness in this muscle, but you don’t have to be an athlete to have gluteus medius problems.  Because simply standing, walking, or sitting requires participation of the gluteus muscle, clients that lead mostly sedentary lifestyles often develop weakness here that leads to different pain syndromes.

    Here is an interesting article and another explaining the importance of the gluteus medius muscle as well as some exercises to help strengthen it.

  • Candida Diary #12: Ancient Chinese Secret

    June 6

    Up until recently, I had relied completely on Inno-Vite’s products and my restricted diet to cure my candida, but on Thursday of last week, I remembered the many successes I had from a doctor of chinese medicine on Gerrard St.  Traditional Chinese medicine treats candida quite differently.  In traditional Chinese medicine, yeast infections are usually caused by an imbalance in the spleen meridian.  Chinese herbal remedies can be some of the most vile, disgusting things you have ever willingly put in your mouth.  So bad, you might rediscover your gag reflex.

    But, they work.

    Every time I tried an herbal remedy it always did the trick.  The first time I tried it was for a rash that would not go away after useless visits to a dermatologist and tubes of cortisone cream.  The herbal remedy for my rash was especially atrocious including large insects in its ingredients.  But after choking down this vile drink for three days, I was completely cured.  When the rash resurfaced a couple of years later, I didn’t waste any time and rushed to the Chinese herbalist for another course of self inflicted torture and lo and behold, I was cured again by the end of three days.

    With such a good track record, I figured I would try it again, this time for dizziness.  A quick visit to my doctor at Siang Yu Tang at 565 Gerrard St. E. and I was armed with some acupuncture points (spleen 6 and 9, liver 3, stomach 36) and three days of an herbal tea.  I started both the herbal formula and acupuncture as soon as I got back home.  The tea of course was horrendous, but the acupuncture was easy to administer to myself as I watched tv.  By the end of four days, the dizziness had subsided to almost nothing and my skin condition had almost disappeared.  I was back on track again.

    If you are interested in traditional Chinese medicine, you can try the staff at Siang Yu Tang on Gerrard Street East or The Best of Chinese Medicine on the Danforth.

     

     

  • Candida Diary #11: What Now?

    May 24

    Today was not a great day.  My dizziness came back with a vengeance.  I recently suffered from benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) first in October of last year.  It is a terrible condition where a bit of crystal breaks loose in your inner ear disrupting your sense of balance.  It makes walking, standing, and moving about very difficult as you feel like you are completely drunk on a ship caught in a storm.  My last episode lasted until the end of the year when I used a home ear cleaning kit to remove a massive wax plug that had built up in my ear.  I thought that the problem was long gone until today when I awoke to a spinning room and funhouse floors.  I was actually thankful that my morning appointment did not show up.  It gave me time to regroup and figure things out.  I did the Epley Manoeuvre a couple of times and cleaned my ears out with the kit, but no luck.

    As I am on the candida cleanse, I have a tendency to attribute every single positive or negative change in my health to candida.  So, now I am wondering if I am suffering because on the weekend I had barbecued chicken and beef that was marinated in soy sauce.  This cleanse is definitely bringing out the paranoia.  Can such a small quantity of soy sauce cause such drastic effects?  The quantity of yeast in soy sauce must be negligible.  Would breaking my cleanse by such a small bit reverse all of the sacrifice that I had endured the previous 4 weeks?  If that was the case, I need to consider options.

     

    Edit:  A week later, I talked to Dr. Lee Know, the naturopath at Inno-Vite and he assured me that any effects from breaking my cleanse that one time would have been much smaller and gradual.  In other words, the return of BPPV was due to something else, not that one slip up.  Whew…

  • Candida Diary #10: Bigger Faster Stronger

    May 23 2012

    I hit the gym again today.  I can’t believe that I have all the strength that I do considering what I eat. It is hard to believe that when I first started, I could barely get through a short workout, and now, I have lots of energy after my workout is already over.  I am actually stronger now than when I started the cleanse.  Which still makes me pretty wimpy, but less so.  My weight is down to 167 lbs, which is about 3 lbs lighter than when I started.  My biggest struggle is actually to keep the weight on.  I don’t want to lose the muscle I had worked so hard to gain.  This has meant adjusting my diet to include lots of proteins every day and often every meal.  Of course the easiest sources of protein are the chicken and fish, both of which are allowed on the diet.  But there are also lots of other sources of proteins that I am relying on.  Beans, almonds, and tofu are also very rich in protein.   A little juggling with the diet and regular inclusion of proteins in my meals has helped to maintain my muscles and stem the weight loss.