Mental Attitude: Money Can’t Buy Happiness. Once a point of being able to meet basic needs is reached, the effect of money on happiness levels off. More money leads to marginal gains (at best) or even less well-being as people worry about “keeping up with the Joneses.”
American Psychological Association, July 2011

Health Alert: Medical Bills And Bankruptcy? Most people who are driven into bankruptcy by illness and medical bills actually have coverage, but it’s such inadequate coverage that it doesn’t keep them from financial ruin. They face huge premiums, co-payments, deductibles and things that aren’t covered by their insurance. Minnesota News Connection

Diet: Food Labeling. A recently enacted law requires restaurant chains with at least 15 locations to provide calorie data on menus and menu boards. At McDonalds, there was a 5.3% drop in average calories per purchase, and at KFC, a 6.4% drop. British Medical Journal, August 2011

Exercise: Exercise For The Brain. Aerobic exercise and strength training plays a vital role in maintaining brain and cognitive health throughout life. A review of 111 recent articles suggests aerobic exercise is important for getting a head start during childhood on cognitive abilities. Physical inactivity is associated with poorer academic performance and results on standard neuropsychological tests, while exercise programs appear to improve memory, attention, and decision-making. These effects also extend to young and elderly adults, with solid evidence for aerobic training benefiting executive functions, including multi- tasking, planning, and inhibition, and increasing the volume of brain structures important for memory. Journal of Applied Physiology, July 2011

Chiropractic: Chiropractic Patients Most Satisfied. With regards to patient satisfaction, a survey of more than 14,000 consumers rated chiropractic #1 among all health care providers.
Consumer Reports, May 2009

Wellness/Prevention: Are Vacations Worth the Effort? Each year we save up for them, but do they do us any good? According to Dutch psychologist Jessica de Bloom, holidays help us recharge our batteries and perform at a high level. The Psychologist, August 2011

Quote: “I start where the last man left off.” ~ Thomas A. Edison

This Weekly Health News Update is compliments of Dr. Gerardo Contreras and Contreras Chiropractic Clinic. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us at 925 – 606 – 5490. www.DrCChiropractic.Com.

Are they kidding? These side effects are happening
all over the place.

But most doctors don’t know because they don’t
ask. If they did, they would find that so many people would answer, “Well, my
doctor gave me Lipitor®, but after I took it my feet went numb.” Or, “My hands
went numb.” Or, “My legs started to hurt, so I quit taking it.”

Statin neuropathy is something that’s very
prominent. Neuropathy is when nerve fibers throughout your body are damaged.
Usually, it’s caused by a disease like diabetes, or by trauma or injury.

It’s also a very common condition if you take a
statin drug.You may have heard statins cause a huge number of people to suffer
fatigue, muscle cramping, and muscle weakness. Or even rhabdomyolysis,
when your muscle cells burst and disintegrate. But statins don’t just cause muscle
problems. They damage nerves.

Nerves control the muscles in your body by
electrical signals that make them react in specific ways. Nerve and muscle
disorders cause your muscles to react in abnormal ways. Nerve conduction
studies test how well and how fast the nerves can send electrical signals. They
use a statistic called “conduction velocity” measured in meters per second.

Results for the man in the article show his
reactions are way below normal. For example normal conduction velocity for
peroneal nerves is greater than 44 meters per second. The man’s velocity was
only 40 at the head of his fibula, and only 38 at the knee.1

And conventional medicine has no clue this is
happening. The article reports: “Neither the patient’s cardiologist, nor his
general physician, was aware of any connection between statins and
neuropathy.”I believe statins are damaging most people’s nerves who take them.
But it’s subclinical. Meaning no one reports it because doctors never ask. The
drug giant Merck lists 23 separate causes for neuropathy… none of which include
taking their statin drug, Zocor®.

But it makes sense this is happening if you know
what statin drugs do. You see, nerves work slower when there’s demyelination,
which means damage and loss of the fatty insulation surrounding the nerve cell.

And do you know what 75 percent of the insulation
surrounding your nerves is made from? Cholesterol. It’s a staggeringly profound
ignorance of the effect of treating the wrong problem. Cholesterol is not the
bad guy.

You need cholesterol to produce the protective
coating around all your cells, including nerve cells. You need it to make all
your sex hormones, for both men and women. And you especially need HDL to take
away the plaque that may build up in your arteries which can be part of the
real cause of heart attacks. This is why statin therapy is terribly
de-conditioning, and it’s the last thing in the world you want to do to someone
who has a heart problem.

Because a heart problem in the modern world is a
combination of inflammation, de-conditioning, obesity and oxidation. And all of
those problems are the antithesis of exertion-induced changes.

You can stop inflammation, reverse obesity and
improve conditioning with progressively intense, short duration exertion. An
alternative to aerobics and cardio boosts reserve capacity in your heart –
critical for avoiding heart attacks – and raises HDL. But with statin drugs,
doctors give somebody pain and stiffness and the inability to heal after a
workout – ALL of which are major effects of statin drugs – and push them into
the grave.

You see it doesn’t matter what your total
cholesterol number is. All you have to do is raise your HDL and you’ll have
virtually zero chance of heart disease. In fact, in one recent study, each
1mg/dl increase in HDL cholesterol resulted in a 6% lower risk of death from
heart attack!2

To raise your HDL, and avoid being pushed to an
early death by the side effects of statin drugs, here’s what to do:

Step 1) Make your workouts more fun and
challenging – Intense, short periods of
exertion is the most effective way to increase your HDL. One study looked at
Navy personnel going through intense training. After only 5 days, their HDL had
increased 31%!3

Step 2) Eat pure, clean foods – Stay away from processed foods and junk foods…especially
refined sugars. Instead eat lean proteins and unprocessed carbs, like fruits
and vegetables.

Step 3) Drink in moderation –1 to 2 drinks a day are proven to increase HDL. A brand
new study followed 4,168 doctors for 14 years. It found the physicians were
able to increase their HDL by almost a full 1 mg/dl simply by drinking 1
serving of alcohol every day.4

Step 4) Take a few good supplements – Taking 50 mg of niacin (vitamin B3) daily improves your
HDL. Omega-3s increase HDL as well. You can find omega-3s in grass-fed beef,
walnuts, olive oil, cold water fish, and in the world’s richest plant source of
omega-3.

Step 5) If you already have some numbness, take
600 mg per day of alpha-lipoic acid.
Studies show it prevents or improves nerve conduction, blood flow to nerves,
and nerve activity and eases neuropathy symptoms.5

To Your Good Health

1 Walter F. Coulson, MD.
“Statin Neuropathy?” The Journal of Family Practice. April 2011 •
Vol. 60, No. 04: 182-184.

2 Singh I, et al, “High-Density Lipoprotein as a Therapeutic Target—A
Systematic Review,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 298
(2007): 787, 790, 795.

3 Smoak BL, Norton JP, Ferguson
EW, Deuster PA. “Changes in lipoprotein profiles during intense military
training.” J Am Coll Nutr. 1990 Dec;9(6):567-72.

4 Rahilly-Tierney C, Sesso HD, Djoussé L, Gaziano JM. “Lifestyle changes
and 14-year change in high-density lipoprotein cholesterol in a cohort of male
physicians.” Am Heart J. 2011 Apr;161(4):712-8.

5 Alexander S. Ametov, MD, et. al. “The Sensory Symptoms of Diabetic
Polyneuropathy Are Improved With ?-Lipoic Acid.” Diabetes Care
March 2003 vol. 26 no. 3 770-776.
Dr. Gerardo Contreras, 4200 East Ave. Ste. 102, Livermore, Ca. 94550

(925)606-5490

“This procedure has the effect of not one, but two blood-pressure medications given in combination,” study leader George Bakris, MD, tells WebMD. “And it seems to be adverse-event free. We saw no side effects and no problems,” adds Bakris, director of the University of Chicago hypertension center.

Eight weeks after undergoing the procedure, 25 patients with early-stage high blood pressure had significantly lower blood pressure than 25 similar patients who underwent a sham chiropractic adjustment. Because patients can’t feel the technique, they were unable to tell which group they were in.

X-rays showed that the procedure realigned the Atlas vertebra — the doughnut-like bone at the very top of the spine — with the spine in the treated patients, but not in the sham-treated patients.

Compared to the sham-treated patients, those who got the real procedure saw an average 14 mm Hg greater drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood pressure count), and an average 8 mm Hg greater drop in diastolic blood pressure (the bottom blood pressure number).

None of the patients took blood pressure medicine during the eight-week study.

“When the statistician brought me the data, I actually didn’t believe it. It was way too good to be true,” Bakris says. “The statistician said, ‘I don’t even believe it.’ But we checked for everything, and there it was.”

Bakris and colleagues report their findings in the advance online issue of the Journal of Human Hypertension.

Atlas Adjustment and Hypertension

The procedure calls for adjustment of the C-1 vertebra. It’s called the Atlas vertebra because it holds up the head, just as the titan Atlas holds up the world in Greek mythology.

Marshall Dickholtz Sr., DC, of the Chiropractic Health Center, in Chicago, is the 84-year-old chiropractor who performed all the procedures in the study. He calls the Atlas vertebra “the fuse box to the body.”

“At the base of the brain are two centers that control all the muscles of the body. If you pinch the base of the brain — if the Atlas gets locked in a position as little as a half a millimeter out of line — it doesn’t cause any pain but it upsets these centers,” Dickholtz tells WebMD.

The subtle adjustment is practiced by the very small subgroup of chiropractors certified in National Upper Cervical Chiropractic (NUCCA) techniques. The procedure employs precise measurements to determine a patient’s Atlas vertebra alignment. If realignment is deemed necessary, the chiropractor uses his or her hands to gently manipulate the vertebra.

“We are not doctors. We are spinal engineers,” Dickholtz says. “We use mathematics, geometry, and physics to learn how to slide everything back into place.”

Bakris notes that some researchers have suggested that injury to the Atlas vertebra can affect blood flow in the arteries at the base of the skull. Dickholtz thinks the misaligned Atlas triggers release of signals that make the arteries contract. Whether the procedure actually fixes such injuries is unknown, Bakris says.

Bakris began the study after a fellow doctor told him that something strange was happening in his family practice. The doctor had been sending some of his patients to a chiropractor. Some of these patients had high blood pressure.

Yet after seeing the chiropractor, the patients’ blood pressure had normalized — and a few of them were able to stop taking their blood pressure medications.

So Bakris, then at Rush University, designed the pilot study with 50 patients. He’s now organizing a much bigger clinical trial.

“Is it going to be for everybody with high blood pressure? No,” Bakris says. “We clearly need to identify those who can benefit. It is pretty clear that some kind of head or neck trauma early in life is related to this. This is really a work in progress. It is certainly in the early stages of research.”

Dickholtz has been teaching, practicing, and studying the NUCCA technique for 50 years. He says high blood pressure is far from the only thing an Atlas misalignment causes.

“On the other hand, if people have high blood pressure, there is a tremendous possibility they need an Atlas adjustment,” he says.

Dr. Contreras, 925-606-5490, 4200 East Ave. Ste. 102, Livermore, Ca. 94550