Integrative Care Heals the Whole

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Have you ever caught a cold because you were experiencing incredible amounts of stress? Have you ever found that you get sick at the worst possible time, when you are already depressed or swamped with work or dealing with relationship or family troubles?

While some might call your situation a coincidence or bad luck, those with an integrative perspective on wellness would see nothing coincidental about it. This is because health issues are rarely just physical issues; they often arise in direct conjunction with or even because of the mental and emotional stressors in your life. And even if these problems are just physical, one problem might be related to several others and you might not even know it!

One faulty gear can interfere with the rest!

At The Balancing Center we believe that health problems are multidimensional, involving physical, emotional, and mental states. We therefore offer multidimensional solutions to get you out of pain and into wellness, energy, and vitality. We help you discover and apply the right, integrative combination of doctor care and self-care to maximize your recovery and your overall state of health.

What might go into your customized care plan? Well, there's no one answer! Since every person is unique, every care plan is unique. The Balancing Center offers an array of health and wellness services, integrating chiropractic care with bodywork, energy synchronization, supplements, and more.

The Balancing Center features the N.U.C.C.A. technique as its signature chiropractic care, a specific kind of care that focuses on adjusting the upper cervical vertebrae. Dr. Daniel Fedeli, Dr. Ken Bennett, and Dr. James Tickel also practice B.E.S.T. and NET, synchronizing your mental, emotional, and physical states and releasing traumatic patterns. The doctors teach you their signature Foundational Movement Practices to retrain you to sit, stand, and move better, allowing you to integrate your chiropractic care into everyday life.

The Balancing Center’s bodyworkers, Barry Krost and Mary Holmquist practice various kinds of therapeutic techniques, including Ortho-Bionomy, cranial-sacral therapy, myofascial release therapy, and more. These therapies help to clear stress, relieve tension, and increase your energy.

We are also always excited to offer Orenda products and partnerships. Orenda offers a variety of supplements that support your body’s natural functions and health systems, including your immune system, your endocrine system, and your pituitary gland. We also sell a variety of supplements from other trusted partners-in-health. You can get your daily dose of Vitamin D, iodine, digestive enzymes, and fish oil at the office.

Besides these specific services and products, we strive to provide general resources for health and wellness, from diet to exercise to healthy thinking. We advocate integrating a dynamic combination of techniques to first get you healthy and then keep you healthy. A variety of tactics creates a strong health strategy that you can use as your master plan for increased and continued wellness, now and far into the future!

Sit Better and Be Healthier through Chiropractic and FMP!

Posted by: The Balancing Center

The Washington Post recently published an informative and helpful chart on the medical science behind the dangers of sitting for too long and how to offset and counter those effects.

Dr. Ken demonstrates correct seated posture.

Their recommendations are simple, sensible, and easy to incorporate into your workday or relaxation time. They are, however, are missing two other, important recommendations:

1. Visit your chiropractor for regular adjustments.

Regular adjustments not only get you and keep you out of pain--they also help keep your spine aligned and your body balanced. This means that while you’re sitting, you won’t be putting uneven pressure on isolated parts of your body. Regular adjustments also prime your body for health and activates its self-correcting nature. Remember, you are designed to be well!

2. Learn and implement the Foundational Movement Practices.

The Foundational Movement Practices, falling somewhere between exercise and yoga, are series of simple movements that retrain your body to sit, stand, and move better. The FMP also help you hold your spinal adjustments longer, which creates a stronger foundation for even more physical, mental, and emotional improvement. They are great to implement while you are at a desk job because they teach you how to locate and then engage the correct bones and muscles used in seated postures. The FMP can further alleviate chronic back and joint pains as you retrain your body’s muscle memory to engage in healthy, dynamic postures.

You can learn more about the FMP on our website or YouTube page, where we have PDF instructions as well as instructional videos.

Call the office today for an adjustment! You can even add 10 minutes to the end of your visit to get a hands-on FMP session!

They say sitting is the new smoking. And we say that it doesn’t have to be!

Go Upstream to Find the Problem!

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Imagine you live by a river, brown from chemical pollution, gritty from agricultural runoff, choked with debris. You work hard to clean it up and manage to get it decently restored. But a few weeks later the river is right back to where it was: brown, gritty, choked...out of balance.

And then you travel a few miles north and discover the factory that is actually responsible for all the problems appearing miles downstream. Without working to have the factory improve its waste management, any downstream clean-up efforts become mere stopgaps.

Often when people deal with health problems and pain, their situation is like the story of this river. When you are ill, it is easy to become distracted by the most apparent evidence of a problem, usually pain or discomfort. And while pain is a powerful sign of illness, it is often the last sign that something is wrong. Cleaning a river that is still being polluted only provides a temporary solution. Addressing pain, symptoms, and side effects without discovering the source of your health problems will only provide temporary relief.

That’s where we can help! When you visit The Balancing Center to experience our care, the first step we take is to travel “upstream” in your spine to discover exactly what root causes are contributing to your pains, sufferings, and imbalances. Rather than “cracking” separate areas of your back, we focus on your upper cervical vertebrae to realign your neck and head. This is because your upper cervical vertebrae has a controlling influence on the rest of your spine and body. This is how we uniquely specialize in getting to the root of the problems that are robbing you of your vitality and interfering with your life. By uncovering these underlying conditions, we can provide customized care to get you out of pain and back into balance!

Once we address your upstream problems, your body is clean and clear to receive the full benefits of the other wonderful care you provide for it: regular exercise, calming meditation, a nutritious diet, all three or more! We help provide you with the balance and connection your body craves in order to enhance your body’s wondrous ability to heal itself. You are designed to be well. We help you on the path to achieving that healthy design.   

Better than Boot Camp? Try Chiropractic Care!

Posted by: The Balancing Center

A recent piece from NPR details an alternative technique some people try to alleviate their back pain. “Back pain boot camp” rehabilitates sufferers by having them exercise through their back pain; this helps strengthen their back muscles and conditions the sufferer to not be as sensitive to her back pain. This boot camp is often a last resort after failed attempts at surgeries, painkillers, and spinal injections.

It might seem counterintuitive to work through pain when, “Normally pain is an alarm bell that says, ‘Stop what you're doing right now or you may hurt yourself!’” The piece highlights, quite correctly, “that pain is a false signal. It's not about looming danger; it's actually caused by hypersensitive nerves.” Pain can indeed be a poor indication of illness. We often forget that pain is often the last symptom to arise from an illness and that many pain-free people can have unseen health problems. So, sometimes we do have to work through the pain to get out of it. And sometimes we might not be in pain but need a health change anyway.

The piece highlights how sufferers from back pain received no relief from surgery, spinal fusions, and painkillers. But I wonder: did they try chiropractic care? After all, even though chiropractic care offers a wealth of benefits, alleviating back pain is what it’s known and famous for!

A misalignment of the vertebrae can be a direct irritant of those “hypersensitive nerves,” bulging discs, and herniations. Nerve disturbances caused by spinal misalignments can cause mild to severe back pain that persists through painkillers and surgeries. If you’re out of balance, all the surgeries and spinal injections in the world won’t help since your body cannot accept and adapt to those cures. Underneath surface level changes, your imbalanced spine and body can and will most likely revert back to its unhealthy foundation.

The piece highlights how this is a “different way of thinking about pain” and The Balancing Center happens to specialize in that difference. We get you back into balance. Once you are aligned and balanced, you can avoid surgery and any rehabilitation, physical therapy, and strengthening exercises will be even more effective since your body can fully accept their benefits.

At “back pain boot camp,” the philosophy seems to be movement can override pain. Chiropractic care is also great at facilitating pain relief through the movement of muscles by directly addressing joint dysfunction and reestablishing proper joint mechanics.

Some graduates of back pain boot camp report that their back pain still returns. And if they are out of balance, even with stronger back muscles and decreased nerve sensitivity to pain, this makes sense. The root cause of their pain still affects them. If their spines remain misaligned, surgery, physical therapy, spinal fusions, and painkillers are mere stopgaps.

Before you resort to surgery or spinal fusions or even boot camp, give chiropractic care a try. If we can heal the underlying cause of your pain, your illness can unravel and you can get back into balance, achieving health and robust wellness.  

Any Day is the Best Day to Make a Change

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Everyone is talking about resolutions: which to make, why we make them, why we break them, how to keep them. Of course, the new year sparks these discussions. The promise of a new beginning is both inspiring and irresistible.

But you know what’s amazing? Any day is technically the start of a “new year.” The entire calendar might not roll over, but if you are here today, you were (most likely) here exactly one year ago and you will (hopefully) be here exactly one year from now. January 1st might be a poetic date to start anew, but January 2nd is just as good. And if January 2nd or 3rd or 4th happens to be today, than it is automatically better than January 1st. Because today is the only day you can do anything, change anything, be anything.

Any day can herald the ending of an old habit and the beginning of a new one. Any day can be Day 1 of your Awesome Plan to Get Healthy, Wealthy, and Happy.

“Any day” also takes the pressure off of January 1st. The first day of the New Year doesn’t have to be the be-all, end-all date of your life changes. Why not create a new anniversary, a new personal holiday? Celebrate a year of success, growth, and change on February 12th or April 24th, or maybe every day of the year. Celebrating success is a profound way to make sure you keep on striving for it!

Also, as long as we’re discussing resolutions, what happens If you lapse? First, according to countless studies that I will not link here, that’s almost to be expected. Second--and it can never be stated enough--lapsing is perfectly awesome. You’re human and it happens. Get back on the horse. Pick yourself up and brush yourself off. It’s not about perfection: it’s about perseverance. After all, the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.

And finally, in the meantime, the best place to begin is with self-acceptance. Accept yourself, unconditionally, right now. Warts and all. Flaws and everything. Self-acceptance is like a rallying cry for your dreams, intentions, and actions. Let’s gather together and accept every last part of Me today and push ahead into the future as one whole, powerful unit.

You might know where you want to go, but it is so much harder to get there if you don’t know and accept where you are. Imagine trying to get directions with only an end location. “Well, I want to arrive at X but since I don’t know where I’m coming from, I have literally twenty options to try to get there.” Which is all still fine. But without knowing where you are, you might end up on the scenic route when you want the express lane, or end up caught in traffic because you didn’t know about a strategic overpass that avoids the messes.

You might not necessarily like where you are or who you are right now. But did you know that that’s awesome? It’s awesome because dissatisfaction can give you the inspiration and drive to be somewhere else and change into somebody new. But who you are today is an integral part of the person you will be tomorrow. You can’t have the “after” picture without the “before.”

So, let’s recap:
Accept yourself for who you are today.

Start your changes any day. Any day can be a New Year.

If you lapse, start again. And again. And again.

When you get there, celebrate your success.

Repeat.

And have a most wonderful 2014.

Why I Love Chiropractic Care

Posted by: Lindsay

Yesterday morning began like any other morning when I have to be at work by 9:30. I woke up to my alarm, snoozed for ten more minutes, lounged under the warm covers for three minutes more (wishing I could take them with me), and then rushed through a shower to make up time.

The pain began when I was blow-drying my hair. I’d had pain similar to this before: sharp and throbbing, contained to one particular spot on one side of my head (but sometimes radiating to the other), exacerbated if I bent over. The pain would recede as the day wore on, surprising me in intervals but turning into nothing more than a slight nuisance.

I was not so lucky yesterday. As I walked fifteen minutes to the train, every step seemed to make the pain worsen. By the time I was on the Red Line, I was almost dizzy with discomfort. Nausea overtook me, and my stomach roiled with the swaying of the car. My headache added to the nausea and the nausea augmented the headache. I counted down the stops with increasing desperation, wanting nothing more than fresh air and solid ground. And, of course, for the pain to stop!

Needless to say, by the time I reached the office, I was a useless wreck. I could barely get my heavy snow boots off and explain to my coworkers that I was feeling at least slightly ill. 

My office manager told me that I could have stayed home. And I was certainly planning on heading straight back there. 

But not before I got an adjustment.

I am beyond fortunate to work in an office that provides absolutely world-class chiropractic care. As awful as I was feeling, I knew that I stood an infinitely better chance of feeling better if I could make it to the office and get onto an adjusting table.

Dr. Dan himself provided my adjustment. He corrected my neck, adjusted my upper back, worked on my head, and corrected my neck again. I stood up from the table and felt a little dizzy, and lightheaded, but in the good way, as if I was floating and free. One of the best parts? The pain was gone. 

As I sit at my desk today, I am so grateful that I work with some of the most talented healers in Chicago. It’s liberating to know that my pain was addressed at its root level and not just masked by a painkiller. 

My story is not unique. Countless people come to The Balancing Center seeking relief. Some people enter unable to walk and leave dancing; others suffer from monthly migraines that recede into memory as they progress in their care. The doctors here strive to bring wondrous healing to everyone who comes through our doors. 

Some important takeaways: 

Healing takes time and progresses in stages: the damage of a few years is not cured within a few days. Like braces remold your teeth over time, chiropractic care heals your spine over time.

New pain might actually be old pain that is allowed to resurface and come to light. Has your foot ever fallen asleep and gone numb? Well, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that it comes back to life, even if the pins and needles are new and painful.

Regular chiropractic care is better than sporadic chiropractic care, just like regular flossing and tooth-brushing are better than sporadic tooth care. Regular care keeps you healthy and out of crisis just like regular tooth-brushing keeps the cavities away.

Finally, when you feel awful and want to cancel your appointment, come in anyway. Yesterday’s train ride was one of the longest, most unpleasant experiences of my adult life, but it was absolutely worth it for the relief and healing I received.

After Dr. Dan finished adjusting me, I went home to sleep off the remainder of the monster headache. Little twinges of pain did return as the day progressed, but rarely and not nearly at the same intensity of the morning. It was almost a miracle.

I say “almost” because while my healing was wondrous, it certainly wasn’t unusual, extraordinary, or unexpected. This is what chiropractic care does and is meant to do, after all! We think of the results as miraculous because they can be so profound and personally meaningful--in that way, this care is indeed miraculous. Chiropractic care, however, is not a supernatural phenomenon that is unavailable or inexplicable: if you’re willing to give it a try, you can welcome some wonder into your everyday life.

Your Immune System Could be 200% Stronger

Posted by: The Balancing Center

It’s that time of year. As if the snow and the dark weren’t enough to deal with, the winter season can be a harbinger of the cough, the cold, the runny nose, the stuffy nose, the sore throat, and the flu. The physical and mental discomfort of being sick stops us in our tracks and for good reason: the body heals best when it’s at rest.

Sometimes the commitments of being adults force us to leave the comfort of our homes and beds. In the throes of a nasty cold, canceling the non-essential items on our list can be a huge relief. Maybe your haircut or shopping trip can wait until after you’re not hacking up a lung or running a fever.

But if you want to get better faster, here’s a crucial tip:

Keep your chiropractic appointment!

People who are feeling sick will venture out to visit the doctor’s office for antibiotics or a check-up. You might want to cancel your adjustment but remember that your chiropractor is a type of doctor, and, more importantly, a type of doctor who can help you feel better even faster!

By getting adjusted, you are making sure that your spine is allowing your nervous system to function at its highest capacity. Why is this important? Because the nervous system is the master control of your body, affecting your organs, your brain, your muscles, and your various systems, including your all-important immune system. A misalignment in your spine can greatly interfere with your nervous system and subsequently the regular functions of your body.

A misalignment also throws your body into its “defense physiology.” When your body is under stress, any systems that aren’t essential to your immediate survival are suppressed. The stress of a misalignment reduces the efficiency of your digestion, respiration, elimination, procreation, and your immune response.

So, first, getting aligned means that your immune system won’t be compromised. Second, and even better, regular chiropractic adjustments can actually further boost your immune system! In a five-year study, subjects who receive regular chiropractic adjustments had a 200% increase in immune response than subjects who did not. Chiropractic adjustments also increase the number of white blood cells in your system.

We hope you stay healthy all winter long but if you should come down with a cold, keep that appointment or call us to set one up! In addition to bed rest, hot beverages, and chicken noodle soup, a chiropractic adjustment is just what your body ordered.

Spotlight on Barry Krost

Posted by: The Balancing Center

Therapeutic bodywork is a wonderful complement to chiropractic care. The advanced techniques of practices like Ortho-Bionomy, craniosacral, or Neuromuscular release, (just to name a few), can enhance the body’s innate ability to heal itself, especially in tandem with regular adjustments. If chiropractic keeps the roads straight, clear, and flowing, bodywork increases and deepens the connections made on those roads.

If you’ve been a patient of ours and want to see great acceleration in your healing, consider scheduling an appointment with one of our skilled bodyworkers. This week’s spotlight is on Barry Krost, a.k.a., the Psoas Whisperer.

Barry has over 30 years of experience in bodywork and energy healing, specializing in Ortho-Bionomy and Family Systemic Constellations, among several other techniques. He has an incredibly deep bag of skills and calls upon any and all of them when he is working with a client. Barry tailors his session to match each client’s unique needs.

He is known as the Psoas Whisperer because he has extensive experience working with the psoas muscle, a muscle that is located in the lower back and flexes the hip and spine. As Barry states on his website dedicated to the psoas, “Back pain frequently results from a dysfunctional psoas muscle. When the psoas becomes contracted due to injuries, poor posture, prolonged sitting, or stress, it can alter the biomechanics of the pelvis and the lumbar vertebrae creating intense pressure on the lower spine.”

So, basically, have you been experiencing lower back pain? Pain in your hip or leg? You might have a stressed psoas muscle and you might not know it!

And Barry’s talents just begin there! He is also a skilled Family Constellation facilitator, and helps people heal their bodies, minds, and spirits by way of Family Constellation therapy. This modality centers on untangling you from the intricate web of your family, past and present. Have you ever felt stuck, lost, confused, personally or professionally, no matter how many techniques you try? You could be caught in the unresolved tension present in your family and even your ancestors.

Barry just returned from the US Systemic Constellation Conference 2013, a four-day conference in Seattle. He had the opportunity to meet and breathe with indigenous Maori tribesman, participate in profound constellation sessions, and deepen his connection with the work. And he also completed a year-long immersion course in Family Constellation facilitation training, mentored by Suzi Tucker, a prominent author in the field.

Barry is a warm light at the office, offering his perspective and wisdom on both healing and office flow. He offers appointments from Monday through Saturday and his schedule complements the chiropractors’ schedules so patients can heal at optimal times for them!

Call for an appointment with Barry to relieve your lower back pain, untangle yourself from your family web, and accelerate your innate ability to heal. And visit one of his many websites for more information on his modalities and techniques.

Unleash the Fear

Posted by: The Balancing Center

We might not consciously think of it, but beyond the candy and the costumes, Halloween is a holiday that allows us to confront fear. We visit haunted houses and marathon scary movies and feel the primal chill that runs through our guts. It’s uncomfortable but electric and undeniably compelling.

What other time of year do we decide, nationally, to let fear flow through us? (Maybe inadvertently at Christmas time, but that’s another post.) Most of the time we strive to minimize the fear in our lives (even as the culture around us strives to create a fear-based economy, but that too is another post).

Fear does strange things to us. We might run, we might fight, we might freeze. Rational thought stops as our heart races, our blood vessels constrict, our cortisol levels rise, and our stomachs drop to the floor. And because we are so rarely educated in how to deal with fear, we don’t always make healthy choices. We ignore the fear. We distract ourselves from or anesthetize ourselves to the fear, eating out of stress, using drugs (including caffeine and nicotine), watching too much television, spending too much time on the internet.  

After school specials and our moms tell us to face our fears. Why? Because fear, in its primal profundity, can be an opportunity. If we can breathe through the fear, if we can pause before we run or fight or freeze, we might get a chance to figure out why we’re afraid and, even better, find a way to defeat, confront, or embrace what is scaring us.  

Understanding the causes and effects of fear opens up so much of life. We’ll try new things. We’ll want to run and stay anyway; we’ll want to fight and instead we’ll forgive.

At The Balancing Center, we strive to present the facts of your health. Whatever emotions arise out of that--fear or frustration or confusion--we strive to find ways to work with you through those emotions.

When you don’t let the fear move through you, well, it can’t move through you. It will get stuck. Emotions cause physical reactions and the emotion of fear will cause your body to enter its defense physiology, leading to poor sleep, increased stress, constricted digestion and respiration. Just like how fear might paralyze you from growing, fear that is stuck somewhere in your body can prevent that part of your body from healing.

And we want you to heal.

The chiropractors at The Balancing Center also practice N.E.T, or “NeuroEmotional Technique,” a question-based method of discovering the locations of trapped emotions and stress in your system. Practical example: we store fear in our kidneys and in the vertebrae T1, T5, and T8. By using N.E.T., the chiropractors can discover if you’re storing fear and they can help you to release that from your system. 

Your body can relax and rest. And you can use your fear as the spring board into health. Fear will always find a way into your life. And you can always find a way through it.

Allow this Halloween holiday to unleash the fear in you and see what happens. Let the fear move through you and see what it can in turn unleash and even inspire. And then consider making an appointment with us to round out your October.

Flu Shots: Beyond the Banner Ads

Posted by: Lindsay

Today in the Red Eye I saw an ad that made me pause. Along the bottom of the page, a banner touts the flu shot by way of the tacit endorsement of the sports celebrity pictured in it. It is one ad in a larger, citywide campaign to get you to buy a flu shot because your favorite sports star says it’s a good idea. If you want to be awesome, like this soccer star, buy a flu shot!

If you can tell by my tone, I’m not a fan of this campaign. Using celebrity to promote products or services is nothing new, but a tactic doesn’t have to be new to still be irresponsible. And it’s irresponsible to push the flu vaccine in this manner.

Before we get into a huge fight, let me say this: I’m not here to denounce vaccines. Vaccines can be and have been effective at reducing or eliminating countless once-lethal diseases. I’ve never had polio or the measles and neither have most of my family and friends and coworkers. That’s simply amazing.

What I am here to do is advocate informed consent. A flu shot might work for you and it might not and knowing the difference can be key! There’s no fine print on the ads that tell you that the effectiveness of the flu shot can vary between 30% and 90% depending on how old you are, how healthy you are, and how accurate the CDC is. The vaccine’s effectiveness varies depending on whether or not the CDC has guessed correctly which strains of the flu are going to be most prevalent this year. And the debate about the vaccine's effectiveness continues among the medical and scientific community. (The New York Times alone has posted articles both for and against promoting the vaccine.)

This issue is obviously complex just in terms of science, never mind that the debate involves public health and millions of dollars. It wouldn't be unreasonable to take a step back, learn about both sides, and then make a decision from there.

What I'm also here to do is promote additional and alternative methods of strengthening your immune system. Wouldn’t it be great if you could prevent the flu without having to receive injections of it? Here are some ideas you might have heard before:

1. Eat a healthy, balanced diet.

2. Reduce your stress levels.

3. Exercise regularly.

4. Get regular chiropractic adjustments.

Yes, those recommendations are repeated to the point of inanity. But sometimes the cliches bear repeating.

I’m not a fan of that ad campaign. I am a devoted fan of educating yourself and choosing for yourself.

Check out Dr. Ken’s and Dr. Dan’s take on the flu shot. And visit the National Vaccine Information Center, an informative resource for all-things-vaccine, for an unbiased fact sheet on the flu shot and its risks.