How well does chiropractic care help with migraine headaches?

I see a lot of patients in our chiropractic office in Cottonwood Heights that suffer from migraine headaches. Most know that chiropractic care will help, and yet others were at one point skeptical because  they couldn't see the connection between the spine and their migraine headaches. But once they started treatment, they felt for themselves the results. Will you benefit too?

What is a migraine headache?

They use to think that migraine headaches were a completely different kind of headache than a regular tension headache. Migraine headaches are actually classified the same as a tension headache, they are just more severe, and as the severity gets worse, the neurological symptoms that you classically associate with migraines appear.

The typical "classic" migraine headache looks like this:

• Throbbing sensation throughout the head, and perhaps only on one side. 
• There's a prodrome. A prodrome or "aura" is a symptom that comes along before the headache starts. It could be a strange smell, an weird sound, lightning bolts flying across your field of vision, or a generalized sleepiness. 
• There could be visceral symptoms.
• Aspirin does not help relieve migraine headaches.
• Migraine headaches wake you up at night. 
• Certain foods will trigger a migraine headache. 
• Alcohol will trigger a migraine headache.

The most common complaint that people give me when they come to the clinic with a migraine is that they are very sensitive to sounds and light.  They will stop what they are doing, find a bed in a dark room that is away from everyone else, and lie down until it all goes away.

What's this prodrome aura?

There is an aura that people experience as a prodrome. Let me explain. An  aura is a sensation that you experience that you aren't supposed to feel. It could be a strange taste, a funny smell, ringing in the ears, a dizzy sensation or a stomach ache. The most common aura is visual sensations like lightning bolts shooting across your field of vision. An aura is usually pain free, but it comes right before your migraine headache. When it does this, they call it a "prodrome." A prodrome comes before the migraine attack. This is usually how experienced migraine sufferers know that they are out for a few hours.

How does it work?

They've looked into this throbbing pain in the cranial vessels before. You don't actually feel the pain in the brain itself, but it's the blood vessels that wrap around your brain where you feel the actual pain.  When there is a reflex imbalance of the nerves that control the tone of the blood vessels around your brain, your blood vessels will tighten down and squeeze off the supply of blood rushing through. This squeeze on the blood vessels will actually starve parts of your brain, and that will cause your aura. With the right medical imaging equipment, you can functionally watch the "ischemia" of the starved parts of the brain as it migrates across the surface of the cortex. It travels at about 1 cm per second from one part of the brain to the next. This is the reason why your visual aura goes at a certain rate from one part of your visual field to the next. You are actively seeing oxygen starved parts of your occipital lobe in your brain make funny shapes in your vision.

As the blood vessels constrict with the serotonin secreted from the nerve endings controlling the blood vessels, they tighten down and starve themselves too. They get fatigued. They've reached the limits of their metabolic capacity. They give up. They dilate. The dilation in the blood vessels lets more fresh blood in, and gives the blood vessel muscles a chance to recharge, and they start to constrict again.

And as the blood vessels are dilated, they let out parts of the blood into the space outside of the blood vessel. Some of these blood contents are inflammatory and they cause pain. This gives you the pain from the headache. And as you have inflammation all around the blood vessels around your brain, you become sensitive to pressure and you feel every pulse from your beating heart as the blood rushes through the vessels.

The imbalance that comes from the nerves coming from your brain-stem to the blood vessels is sensitive to other neurological inputs from throughout your body. This includes very powerful nerve pathways from your upper spine to your brain-stem. The quality and rate of the nerve signals can greatly influence the serotonin output from your brain-stem. If your neck is tight on one side, but not so tight on the other side, you can have an imbalance that can upset this mechanism of migraine headaches.

Chiropractic care and your migraines 

Chiropractic care is the best way I can think of to balance out and relax the stress on the upper neck. When you get your upper neck adjusted, it relaxes the tight muscles in your upper neck, and this allows the nerves in your brain-stem to relax and not cause havoc in the vessels around your brain.

When people start chiropractic care for their migraines, they usually notice three things:

1. People under chiropractic care have fewer episodes of migraine headaches. 
2. People under chiropractic care have a shorter duration of migraine headache episodes. 
3. However, when under chiropractic care, when you do get a migraine headache, the intensity tends to be just as severe. (They just won't last as long and you don't get them as often.)

Chiropractic treatment for migraines have been studied alongside amitriptyline, which is an antidepressant drug designed to prevent the prodromes of migraines. They found that the two treatments work equally well, but once you take yourself off of amitriptyline, the migraines will just come back.  Chiropractic care tends to have a long-lasting benefit for migraine headache relief (Boline et al, 1995; Nelson, 1998.)

We see this in our chiropractic clinic in Salt Lake City too. When people come in with migraine headaches and I examine their neck and I find muscular imbalances from underlying problems in the joints, I smile because I'm confident I can help this patient. It's actually getting to be pretty predictable.

There are several techniques that I use to adjust the subluxations in your upper neck. A subluxation is a chiropractic term for functional joint dysfunction. Subluxations cause nerve imbalances. Chiropractic adjustments reduce subluxations, and allow the body to function properly. Before your adjustment I feel tight muscles and you can't move your neck as well as you should. After your adjustment, your muscles are relaxed and everything moves better, and feels better.

I encourage anyone with migraine headaches to get under a regular course of chiropractic care. The time and costs involved with traveling to your local chiropractic office is well worth your being able to function properly at work and at home.

Dr. Todd Lloyd
Chiropractic physician

Doctored The Movie producer Jeff Hays visits The Joint

 Jeff Hays is a regular patient of 

The Joint Cottonwood Heights.

Click on link below to read about his recent award as

Person of The Year

From Dynamic Chiropractor Magazine  

http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=56269

Affordable Chiropractic care for families in pain

How chiropractic care can help your family.  Many Salt Lake City families have found how convenient and affordable The Joint Cottonwood Heights is for active families.

Stop in and see for yourself!

The Joint Cottonwood Heights

Next to the Blue Lemon

6910 S. Highland Dr.

Salt Lake City, UT 84106 

How Chiropractic Care helps Skiers and Snowboarders

Why chiropractic biomechanical corrections help athletes.
A biomechanical evaluation of the feet, ankles, legs, knees and hips includes joint range of motion evaluation, targeted orthopedic tests, and other functional tests.

Evaluation
Correction
Test & Play

Correction involves specific manipulation of the feet, ankles, knees and hips. This increases range of motion and body proprioception, and results in an immediate difference
 

The Joint Sugar House 

1126 E 2100 S Salt Lake City, UT 84106 

(801) 467-8683

The Joint Cottonwood Heights

6910 S Highland Dr. #9 

Salt Lake City, UT 84121 

(801) 943-3163
www.TheJoint.com

Can chiropractic care help with spinal arthritis? A Salt Lake City chiropractor explains.

The arthritis that most of us develop in the spine has a few names that doctors like to use.

• Osteoarthritis
• Degenerative Disc Disease (DDD) 
• Degenerative Joint Disease (DJD)

But, if you have it, you probably know it as "Stiffness," or "more pain in the morning" and less as you warm up. That's because the discs between the bones have dried out and have worn out. There is scar tissue deposited in the discs from repetitive injury. 

And as you get along with your day, you move more and more and the fluid in the soft tissue warms up and the viscosity changes. You feel looser. This is a good thing because at this point, you are allowing more nutrients to get soaked up from the bone to the soft tissues. 

That nutrient delivery is the key to keeping your joints healthy.

When you move more, You help the joints in your spine receive more nutrients. This counts when you are walking for fitness, swimming, or golfing. Sometimes, though the joints in your spine get stuck. This is where chiropractic care comes in. 

Chiropractic care helps to increase the range of motion of your arthritic joints. This makes your whole body feel looser, and it helps bring nutrients to the joints for a lasting benefit. 

If your joints are arthritic, getting more movement will also stimulate the nerve endings in the joints for better balance and coordination. This will make a big difference in your quality f life because it so profoundly influences the way you move through life. 

Dr. Todd Lloyd

Chiropractic physician in Cottonwood Heights. 

The Joint Cottonwood Heights 5 Star reviews

I love the Joint at Cotton Wood Heights.  Dr. Lloyd is wonderful.  He really listens to you about what is going on, and explains what the problem is.  He also explains what he is doing and how it will help.  He is very friendly, and not in a rush to get you in and out of the clinic, but rather takes his time.  Who knew that at a walk-in chiropractic clinic you could get such great care!?!

The receptionist is also very friendly and knowledgeable about the different plans.  On my last visit (Saturday), the owner was working the front desk and was very invested in talking with each person who came in.  For friendly, fast, and great quality service at a price that can't be beat, this is the place to go!

Building Relationships in Your Town

Building Relationships in Your Town

Can chiropractors in Salt Lake City help with your neck pain?

If you have neck pain, and you are in the Salt Lake City area, where do you turn for relief?

You have several different options to help you with your neck pain:

1. Do nothing. Doing nothing is "hoping" that things will get better. After a while of doing nothing, your neck pain might decrease, but your biomechanical dysfunction will remain. This is not recommended. 
2. Taking pain killers for your neck pain. This is faster relief than just "doing nothing", but the same principle remains. If you do nothing to support good biomechanics of your neck, you still run into the potential of accelerated arthritis in the joints of the neck. This is not recommended. 
3. Cervical Collar. This use to be a way for people who injured their necks to keep the neck from moving further. Ask any Salt Lake City chiropractor, this is a technique for pain relief that has no place for our modern understanding of the healing process. Again, this is not recommended. 
4. Chiropractic care: If you have neck pain, we recommend chiropractic care in Salt Lake City. Any place, for that matter... Chiropractic care will help you restore the normal biomechanics of your neck, allowing you to move better with normal range of motion.

Check out the published studies on chiropractic for neck pain. Even the American Physical Therapy Association guidelines recommend spinal manipulation for neck pain. 

And of course, if you are looking for a chiropractor in Salt Lake City, look no further than our clinics at The Joint.

Dr. Lloyd
Chiropractic physician in Salt Lake City

Foot and ankle adjustments for athletic performance

Today Dr. Smith from The Joint in Sugar House and Dr. Lloyd from Cottonwood Heights presented chiropractic care for foot and ankle biomechanics to the Westminster College track team.

Chiropractic care is a very important part of a training regimen for any serious athlete. With chiropractic care, an athlete enjoys three main benefits:

1. You perform with more symmetry from one side to the next under chiropractic care. 
2. You have less drag when you perform at your sport. 
3. Your body enjoys better proprioception under chiropractic care.

With a chiropractic adjustment of the feet and ankles, you enjoy an immediate sense of better range of motion. This palpable feeling of having the joints better lubricated makes you appreciate the increased feedback that you feel when the nerve signals from your feet are sending information back to the brain. You feel more sure of where you plant your feet. You take each step with confidence.

This form of chiropractic care can be found in our two The Joint clinic locations. Ours is in Cottonwood Heights, just off of the 2000 East exit on the I215 freeway. The other clinic is in the heart of Sugar House, and is perhaps the most popular chiropractic clinic in Salt Lake City.

Todd Lloyd, DC
Chiropractic Physician in Salt Lake City

Prevention is the neglected part of the Hippocratic Oath

Hygieia is the goddess of preventative medicine. She is the personification of good health, and she uses nutrition and hygiene to prevent sickness. She is mentioned in the traditional Hippocratic Oath, and oath that all medical doctors take when they graduate from medical school.

Unfortunately idea of the Goddess Hygieia and the philosophy of health through nutrition is largely ignored by the medical community. The philosophy of wellness should be balanced out by complimentary ideas, including emergency care, recuperation, beauty, hygiene and nutrition.

These days, if you are enthusiastic about nutrition, or if you are a doctor prescribing nutrition, you are seen as being on the fringe of society. This is unfortunate because good nutrition is essential for your health throughout your years of growth, maturity and old age. Good nutrition is good medicine. Every cell in the body is influenced by the foods that you eat.

In our office, we emphasize fresh, natural foods to maintain your good health. Don't take our word for it, though. Read some of these books to educate yourself on the philosophy of eating good food.


 I found Deep Nutrition to be a really interesting book so far. It's talking about the way our foods interact with our gene expression. It links the foods that we eat today to the health of the kids we have in the future. Very interesting ideas.



The Paleo Solution diet tells a story of the author going from using the fad of vegetarianism to discovering that high-inflammatory foods such as grains were making him sick. This is a great overview of the paleo diet.


Wheat Belly is my favorite book in the subject so far. Wheat Belly talks bout how the wheat that we eat today is far different than the wheat we ate 75 years ago. Wheat has been hybridized to the point that it is unrecognizeable from the wheat that our grandmothers cooked with in their day. Get this book.

Todd Lloyd, DC
Chiropractic physician in Salt Lake City. 

Are you doing your short foot exercises correctly?

Are you doing your short foot exercises correctly?

Are you doing them at all?

Short foot exercises help support the posture of your feet while facilitating better flexibility and control.

Short foot exercises help line up the biomechanics of your lower extremities and can improve the way your whole body works. I have a textbook dedicated to disorders of the neck in our office that recommends you do short foot exercises on a wobble board to help with neck rehab.

Here's a video I created that shows how this is done:

 Before that, though, in the office we recommend that you receive a biomechanics adjustment to the feet and ankle. Here's why:

Got it? Let's take care of our feet!

Dr. Lloyd
chiropractor in Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City Chiropractic for low back pain.

If you live in Salt Lake City, and you suffer from low back pain, you have a few choices to make for your to take care of that low back pain.

The first thing that you can do is nothing. Doing nothing might allow a little pain relief due to the natural history of the way your back can heal, but you will likely heal with dysfunction. This leaves you with the other unfortunate option:

The second option is the most common option, but doesn't solve much. You can take drugs for your low back pain. But the drug problem in America is out of control. I'm not just talking about hard drugs like Oxycontin, but your every-day anti-inflammatory drug like Ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is great for short term emergency relief, but you shouldn't have to be in a position to take it for more than a week or two.

Surgery isn't really an option, but I'll throw it in here for option number three.

The fourth option should really be your first: Chiropractic care. Chiropractic care has been shown over and over to be an excellent choice for acute and chronic back pain relief. Chiropractic care restores function to the spine in the form of improved range of motion, better muscle control of the spine, and better neurological feedback.

Chiropractic care works by restoring normal motion to the spine. This motion helps bring more nutrients to the discs and soft tissue between the bones in the spine, and it flushes out irritating inflammatory chemicals that build up. The motion also facilitates reflexes that reduce muscle spasm and reflexes that provide pain relief.

There tends to be a lasting benefit to chiropractic care too. This is because you are making spine function better with care.

If you are in the Salt Lake City area, drop by our clinic for excellence in chiropractic care. Your back will thank you.

Dr. Lloyd
Chiropractic physician.

Taking a closer look at chiropractic care and low back pain.

https://www.facebook.com/thejointcottownwood

I see firsthand on a daily basis how chiropractic care helps with your low back pain. It works very well even as a stand-alone treatment modality. It’s always good to examine the evidence, though, to see if what we are doing in our clinic is the best approach for our patients. Without evidence, we are making a guess that what we are doing is the best therapy for our patients. And we need to always be collecting new evidence. 

Researchers are always scrutinizing chiropractic adjustments and other forms of spinal manipulation as a therapeutic approach to take care of your low back pain. In the September 28^th edition of Spine, researchers at an orthopedic clinic in Bremen compared patients with acute low back pain with three types of therapies. This was a randomized double blinded control trial with 101 patients.

Group 1: Spinal manipulation and a placebo pill.

Group 2: Sham manipulation and Diclofenac, a powerful anti-inflammatory pill.

Group 3: Sham manipulation and a placebo pill. The control group.

They measured the following outcomes in their patients:

• Satisfaction with care.
•  Function of the patient.
•  Off-work time.
• Rescue medication.

What they found is that the spinal manipulation (chiropractic adjustment) group “was significantly better than the Diclofenac group.” The placebo group did so poorly that they had a high dropout rate; so much so that they had to close that group prematurely. This study illustrates the value of chiropractic care for acute and severe low back pain.

Dr. Todd Lloyd

Chiropractic physician in Salt Lake City

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23026869

Change your Life in only Ten Minutes per Day

One of the most encouraging discoveries in the history of exercise is the concept that you can make positive changes in your life by doing one thing only ten minutes per day. When you start to exercise, in as little as ten minutes, your body’s physiology can change for the better. After ten minutes, your heart rate is elevated, your blood flow increases, and the metabolic machinery of your muscles and hormones kicks into high gear. These benefits can last as long as twenty-four hours. 

If you exercise for ten minutes, twice per day, the benefits become compounded. For example if you take a morning power walk for ten minutes before your day begins and you go for a bike ride with your family in the evening after work, the benefits you receive will actually be greater than if you exercised for twenty minutes straight. 

Just about anybody can find an extra ten minutes to exercise. This ten minutes will positively affect the rest of the 23 hours and 50 minutes in your day. Spend at least ten extra minutes in some kind of physical activity, and you will slim down, feel better, have better posture, have more awareness of the world around you, and will have a more positive outlook toward life. 

Derek Lloyd exercising for a little over ten minutes at Ensign Peak.

Along with general movement that will stimulate your aerobic activity, try to do some strengthening exercises too. Do some push-ups. Try some squats holding a weight with both hands close to your chest. Find some exercises online that you can do without going to the gym and exercises that fit your general fitness level. At the office, I keep a set of Perfect Pushups and I will use the Swiss Ball to do triceps dips balancing on our chiropractic table. Improvise. 

Make regular physical activity part of your lifestyle. Be the person who takes stewardship over the care of your own body, and you will look and feel great!

Todd Lloyd, DC
chiropractic physician in Salt Lake City

News from The Joint

The Joint Daily is out

Five reasons why you should use chiropractic for neck pain relief.

Do you have neck pain? Neck pain can be very disabling, and if you have neck pain, you know exactly how painful and interfering it can be in your day to day life. Dr. Lloyd, of The Joint Cottonwood Heights, has spent 15 years studying how the neck works, how it can interfere with other areas of the body, and how the patterns of pain radiating from the neck can occur.

So, you have neck pain? Does the pain restrict your neck movement? Is the pain radiating down your shoulder blades or arms? You need to cure it as fast as you can. Here are 5 reasons why chiropractic care should be your first stop for neck pain relief:

1. Chiropractors will do orthopedic and neurological tests to discover a specific diagnosis for you. If needed, we will order x-rays or MRI studies to look at the structure of your neck. With thorough detective work, we can narrow down what is the exact cause of the pain.
2. Chiropractic care is cost-effective. While physical therapy appointments or general practitioner appointments can run into $100 or more, an appointment at The Joint chiropractic clinics in Salt Lake City is only $29. Even better, your first visit is only $19. And if you anticipate more care, you can reduce the price even more. Sure a few ibuprofen pills are only pennies each, you still aren't getting the lasting biomechanical correction that chiropractic care offers.
3. Chiropractic care restores range of motion and reduces muscle spasms. If your neck pain is restricting your range of motion because your muscles are guarding so tightly, a chiropractic adjustment will help you stop the pain-spasm cycle and allow your body to relax the pain away. 
4. Your improved range of motion in your neck will help deliver more nutrients to the soft tissues in the joints in your neck. The discs and other structural parts of your neck are weight-bearing. Since they carry weight and other strong forces, they cannot have a network of blood vessels to supply nutrients. They soak up nutrients from the bone next to them like a sponge, and your body relies on movement for this to happen. When our adjustment restores movement to your spine, your body receives more of these nutrients, allowing you to heal naturally. 
5. Chiropractic care works with reflexes in your spinal cord and parts of the brain to inhibit pain and to provide more information about movement and balance. This is why you feel such pain relief when you get an adjustment. And this is why others experience collateral effects from their adjustments such as fewer and less intense headaches, better sense of balance, less TMJ (jaw) symptoms, and clearer thinking. Many of these effects are documented in the medical literature, like the time German researchers found that chiropractic care is the treatment of choice for "cervicogenic" dizziness.

How will you feel if you can restore the full articulation of all of the joints in your neck? What would it be like to have that sense of ease in your neck muscles? Will you get a better night's sleep? Will you be able to safely back your car out of a parking spot?

Or, will you choose to mask the symptoms with more ibuprofen? 

Like our chiropractic office on Facebook, or come on in to the clinic to be seen right away.

The Joint Cottonwood Heights
...the chiropractic place
6910 S Highland Drive, #9
Salt Lake City, UT 84121