What can you do to make sure you stay healthy day-to-day? We only live one life and you are the only one who has to live in your body. So how can you ensure you’ll keep having the strength, agility, energy, and motivation to keep on keepin’ on? As we fly through the new year and into the middle of one of the coldest months in New York City, consider how chiropractic care benefits can give you the best gift of all: total wellness.

Chiropractic care is an excellent way to provide your body with the alignment and flexibility it needs to keep up with life, kids, work, and your workouts. Rather than wait until you are feeling pain or experiencing a decline in health, start providing your body with preventative maintenance now. The chiropractic treatments and techniques you gift your body today will help you avoid more serious conditions in the future and will allow your body to perform optimally.

If you are considering chiropractics to get (and stay!) healthy, you’ve made an excellent choice. Below I explain the benefits chiropractic care provides so you can continue to head into this new year like a champ:

Benefits of Chiropractic Care versus Physical Therapy: Enter the Chiropractic Adjustment

There are many different types of chiropractic treatments, but the most common is the osseous adjustment. When we adjust you, your body is realigned to its proper form so it can heal itself from ailments and release pain or tension from unnecessary musculoskeletal pressures. Everyday things like sitting at your computer, exercising, looking at your phone, and driving affect your alignment and, in turn, affect how your muscles and bones support you. Regular chiropractic adjustments help create movement between stuck joints, thus preventing aches and pains coming from pinched nerves, sore muscles, and out-of-whack bone placement. Unless you’re planning on changing your entire lifestyle to avoid any of the daily stressors that put you out of alignment (unlikely, though we’d love to see it happen!), regular, long-term chiropractic care is the best way to counteract misalignment, prevent pain, and boost overall wellbeing.

Chiropractors try to correct the body’s alignment to relieve pain and improve function and to help the body heal itself.

The Harvard Health Journal explains, “Chiropractors try to correct the body’s alignment to relieve pain and improve function and to help the body heal itself.” We know each of our client’s bodies and intuitively treat its subtle changes at each visit.

If you’re new to chiropractic care and the thought of having your spine adjusted gives you some trepidation, fear not! The adjustments performed by trained and licensed chiropractors–like the team at UWC–are perfectly safe. The chiropractic care benefits you’ll see from taking a preventative approach can stop significant issues before they start, allowing you to avoid riskier and more invasive treatments. We will always work with you to address any concerns and formulate an appropriate treatment plan that takes any risk factors into consideration.

Why consider a chiropractor over physical therapy? While a physical therapist can provide great relief when it comes to muscle and joint pain, it can potentially be a limited approach. A physical therapist can only look at the area prescribed on the orthopedist prescription, usually where the problem is located. If you have aches and pains in your shoulder, they’ll give you exercises and stretches for your shoulder. But if the root cause of the pain is originating from a problem outside of your shoulder, like in your neck, all the shoulder stretches in the world can’t provide a long term fix. A good chiropractor takes a global view of the body, head to toe, tracing the source of any issues back to their origins and treating the root cause. A gentle neck adjustment, some Active Release Technique around the shoulder and the neck, and some shoulder rehab will probably make that stubborn shoulder pain disappear! Returning for regular adjustments will ensure that the pain doesn’t come back again either.

Benefits of Preventative Chiropractic Care: The Posture Analysis

We have a keen eye for posture, as should any skilled chiropractor. Poor posture is very common these days with conditions like “text neck” sending sharp pain down the back or creating a dull soreness at the end of the day. Text neck is extremely concerning for young children because they can cause permanent damage to their cervical spine and cause a premature degenerative state in the vertebral column. But sitting for long periods of time or looking down aren’t the only things to blame for poor posture. The way you walk, stand, run, and exercise all impact your posture.

For example, if your hips are not aligned, your shoulder may dip slightly on one side. If you run with your toes pointed outward, your knees are affected which impacts the joint with the hip. If you have an old sports injury, you may be overcompensating with other muscles. They tighten and tug your body’s alignment to favor one side. You see, everything you do affects your posture. And with poor posture comes eventual pain and injury.

When we analyze someone’s posture, we can adjust them per their specific needs. We perform chiropractic techniques and exercises to strengthen and balance the parts of their body supporting proper posture.

Benefits of Going to a Chiropractor Regularly: An Overall Wellness Evaluation

We ask questions conventional doctors don’t. This is because we understand everything is interconnected, not isolated. Treating the symptom of one ailment with medication comes with side effects causing another, and this method never quite gets to the root cause of the issue you had in the first place. A top-notch chiropractor knows and understands where you are in terms of mental, psychological and physical health, because each component of your overall health can have negative implications on another. At Urban Wellness Clinic, we understand the need for harmony in all aspects of wellness, which is why we provide an array of services to provide overall wellness. A chiropractor looks at the whole picture – the whole you – to get a sense of where you are and where you need to be.

Long Term Benefits of Chiropractic Care: A Natural and Holistic Alternative

Rather than plug you in for a 15-minute slot, breeze over your health history, and send you on your way with a prescription for the pain you suffer who-knows-why, we offer a personal discussion of your health followed by natural, holistic treatments addressing the root cause of your pain first. We look head to toe, watching you walk down the hallway or having you show us what kinds of movements cause pain in your body. We do a thorough Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA) to see where you are not moving enough in the body and where you are moving too much. Remember hypermobility is a serious issue as well, especially in our postpartum population. (For mamas-to-be, the Webster Technique provides serious prenatal chiropractic care benefits, which can ease the transition to postpartum life). We then check for muscle compensations that may happen in the body due to injury. For example, a “sleeping” gluteus muscle may be causing plantar fasciitis or a tight calf muscle because the glut is not doing its job when going up stairs. We then follow it up with the gold standard in soft tissue massage known as Active Release Technique to work out those tight muscles. Lastly, we give physical rehabilitation exercises from our broad base of techniques, with anything from DNS and AiM to Strong First Strength training.

A chiropractic adjustment is used when needed, but what makes a good chiropractor great is one who knows when NOT to adjust. There are many conditions and situations that make adjusting the wrong choice. Our approach is so much more than just a chiropractic adjustment: we truly believe safe and long-term chiropractic care can prevent serious injury or disease by naturally ensuring the body is properly aligned and functioning properly in the first place.

The Best Benefit of Chiropractic Care: A True Relationship

We help keep you healthy by maintaining a relationship with you and becoming your partners in your health. We want to see our patients healthy, happy, and treated in a personalized way since no one technique works for everyone. Life is full of twists and turns–each day can be hectic, taking a toll on our bodies (especially considering our bodies are always changing). Each time we see a patient, we assess how their posture and alignment has changed and pay attention to what may be impacting them in a negative or positive way. Our ongoing relationship helps build on their improvements so they can continue being their very best.

Visit us at Urban Wellness Clinic and give yourself the benefit of continued health. At the clinic, your wellness approach could include personal training, nutritional therapy, and acupuncture, which will complement the results you see from your chiropractic treatments. Here’s to you and your continued health!

Best in health,
Dr. Emily Kiberd