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Hey everybody, Dr. Jon here. I am in my exam room here in my Newmarket office and with the
school year fast approaching, I kind of just want to address an issue that we see very commonly, in fact
more commonly than ever in our office, not only with children but with adults alike.
One of the things that we often see with patients that come in is what we call "forward head
posture."
Now I'm not going to bore you with details. Everybody understands what "forehead posture"
is. It's the movement of the head forward of the shoulders. We already know, it's well-documented,
that it causes things like headaches, neck pain. It can even cause low back pain. Concentration
issues, we see in our offices because of it. So we know that it's a problem. We know that
it's prevalent. We even know what causes it. Causes can be anything from trauma, like a
car accident, to a fall, but more commonly we are seeing it due to micro-traumas, things
like sitting in front of the computer for too long, sitting and playing video games
too long. What else? Backpacks. Too heavy of a backpack shoves the head forward.
So in light of the approaching school year, I want to address how you can go about trying
to fix this. So without further ado, there are often three tissues involved that need
to be addressed when addressing forehead posture. Whether I deal with it in a child or adult
alike, they are all the same things. First and foremost is the nerves. The nerves tell
the muscles how to hold length. They tell your body how to maintain posture and alignment
as you walk, sit, and move. So we want to retrain the nerve to hold a better posture.
We can do that in our office very simply really with specific chiropractic adjustments.
So that's one tissue. The other two tissues, though, often go neglected. One of the most
important tissues that are neglected with forehead postures is the ligament tissue.
And what I want to show you, there's a device...this is called a Denneroll and most of our patients
are aware what this is. What this actually does, it helps to stretch the ligaments that
are holding the poor posture to allow them to kind of reform or restructure, not unlike
your orthodontist is trying to change the shape of your teeth with braces. It is every similar
to that. Minutes a day to invest in this can have massive corrective possibilities for
not only posture problems but specifically forehead posture.
The last tissue that often goes neglected, too, is the muscles. Muscles hold our posture
as well, and oftentimes with how we sit, sleep, and move, or the lack thereof in today's day
and age, is those muscles weaken over time and allow our posture to shift. So for someone
specificly with forehead posture, we apply what we call head weights, that kind of just stimulate that
muscles in the back of the neck to hold that head posture in the right position. So, the good
news is that even though it is prevalent in society, in both kids and adults, with minutes a day
in investment, you can actually change the course of that and actually get some really
good correction of forehead posture. Again, tissues that need to be addressed are the
nerves, the muscles and the ligaments.
What I am going to do next though I'm going to actually show you why it's very difficult for people to correct
that on their own. One of the main reasons is because they don't have an objective measurement
in terms of where they are starting with that. So I am going to show you how to look at that.
I apologize if this is a bit difficult to see, but what you are looking at here are
two x-rays of someone looking this way, and this would be their jaw, and this would be
that back of their head, and this is the neck from the side. So if you look close, you can
actually see where something should be and then where this patient actually is. You can
actually get a measurement of how far that head is forward in space.
So this particular patient has a 39 mm forehead posture. That's contributing to a lot of numbness
in fingers, headaches, stiffness in the neck and a host of other health issues. So with
that first measurement, you can actually have a baseline test to find out exactly where
you are. Once you have that, you need to address what tissue needs to be involved, which we
discussed previously. But you can see the same patient actually undergoing correction
of their forehead posture. It's remarkably reduced from 39 mm to 8! You you can see, not only can you
see this on the outside in someone's posture, but you can actually see a massive reduction
in forehead posture that's actually correcting the problem objectively. So from 39 mm to
8 mm. Fantastic correction. This patient had to invest minutes a day to do this and had
to be consistent, obviously, but over time you can see that this can actually be corrected.
In summary, forehead posture can be corrected. First and foremost, the thing you need to
do to determine where you are at is to get baseline x-rays, so you need to find a chiropractor
who is going to measure that and give you a specific measurement. So at re-x-ray time,
they can tell you how much you have changed. A few minutes a day investment at home with
using some head weights or a Denneroll or whatever your chiropractor decides that you need to
correct this, addressing those three tissues we spoke about will pay off in dividends in
terms of quality of life in the future, which I know you deserve. Until next time, be well!