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Hello, I’m Dr. Sandy Baird, owner of Riverstone Chiropractic here in Oakland California. Anytime the load that’s placed on the body is greater than the capacity of the body to handle that load, adhesions are the result.
So here’s what I mean: Let’s take a quadriceps muscle for example. A lot of times clients will come in with knee pain and they’ll say “My doctor told me that I just have arthritis in my knee and there’s not much that I can do about it. Am I going to be in this pain for the rest of my life? What can you do about it?” 0:00:32.000,0:00:48.000 The way I look at is that there are a lot of muscles that are involved in making the knee work. There’s muscles that extend the knee, muscles that flex the knee, muscles that help the knee rotate and move side to side- and any one of these muscles can get overused. 0:00:48.000,0:01:10.000 So let’s talk about the quadriceps muscle just to pick an example. Typically the quad muscle can handle a certain load. You can run a certain amount, you can swim a certain amount, you can run around with a weighted vest and squat 500 pounds if that’s what you do, but there comes a time when the quadriceps just can’t handle any more load than that. That’s it’s capacity.
If you think about it being like a see-saw, you can have a really light load and strong tissue capacity, that’s good, that’s healthy tissue. But if you start to overload the tissue, all of a sudden the load is tipping the see-saw this way, not so good, that’s when you have dysfunction.
Anytime the muscle gets overused or overworked, whether it’s an acute injury such as a fall or a crash, or whether it’s a more chronic, insidious, repetitive injury such as chronic poor posture, sitting at a desk for a long period of time, repeated motions, things related to carpal tunnel, anything like that, the involved tissue, in this case the quad muscle, is not getting enough circulation. So wouldn’t it follow that if the tissue is not getting enough circulation, it’s not getting enough oxygen? Yes? Yes!
So the tissue now has decreased oxygen, which is a condition we call hypoxia. The hypoxia creates an inflammatory condition in which adhesions actually lay down in the muscle.
So how do we fix dysfunction? It’s simple really. We either need to decrease the load, or increase the capacity.
There are a few ways to decrease the load on the tissue. The first one is reducing mileage. If you’re a runner or training for an event, cut back on the mileage, make sure you’re not doing too much too soon, make sure you’re taking rest days, being conscious about any changes in trail surface or road surface. The next one is improving posture. When you have good posture, there is less load on the spine. Maybe even consider getting a standing desk if you’re sitting for 8 hours a day or more at work. What this does is makes sure the hip flexors are not always in a shortened position, so they have a chance to lengthen out. This will improve the biomechanics of the body and make sure there’s as little knee pain as possible.
If needed, lose weight. And then, in terms of repetitive tasks, there’s not always that much going on in the lower body. For the upper body this might be things like typing, computer work, with the lower body, just being conscious of things like driving a stick shift, if there’s anyway to decrease the amount of driving, if that’s something that flares up your knee pain. And just remembering that sitting, itself, is a repetitive activity! There’s no rest period in sitting, and your hip flexors are in a sustained contraction. 0:03:53.000,0:04:21.000 There are several things that you can do to increase the capacity of the tissues. Avoiding cigarette smoke and other environmental toxins is the first. You can also make sure you’re getting plenty of antioxidants in your diet, so any of the colorful greens, vegetables, fruits, blueberries, kale, all of that has antioxidants, so if you’re eating a rainbow of colorful veggies and fruits, you’re probably getting enough antioxidants.
The next is a low inflammation diet. That means avoiding processed foods, avoiding trans fats, making sure you’re getting a lot of vegetables, some healthy fats, and some nice clean protein, things like that. In terms of sunlight, sunlight provides us some Vitamin D. Make sure you’re getting at least 15 minutes of direct sunlight, no sunscreen. You don’t have to go out in the middle of the day, but at least get some sun on your skin, as much skin as possible, for 15 minutes a day.
Then try to get 8 hours of sleep, it will really help with your overall well-being, and even down to the cellular level in terms of tissue health. The next thing is treatment. Treatment can be Active Release Techniques, or it can be another modality, but it’s designed to breakup the adhesions so that the tissue will have a higher capacity. It will have the motion that it needs, it will have the circulation that it needs, and it will be able to function as desired so that the biomechanics of the area are in place.
When a client presents to my office with knee pain, I will do an exam of the knee, the hip, and the foot, to determine exactly which structures are involved and have adhesions.
I will then use a combination of Active Release Techniques and chiropractic treatment, to reduce the adhesions, and get them back to the activities they love.