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Pain relief medication has a lot of great benefits, but if you take them regularly, you know that it can also come with some pretty bad side effects.

That’s why more and more people today are seeking an alternative solution for their treatment: their own body.

Your body already contains all it needs to treat pain. Through years of research and clinical trials, scientists have found that biomedically-based acupuncture is a safe and low-cost way to manage chronic pain and inflammation.

The idea behind biomedical acupuncture is to promote self-repair by encouraging more blood flow to the affected areas through microtrauma, or tiny injuries to the body. This in turn dramatically increases the probability that your body’s own natural healing mechanisms can resolve the imbalance and pain.

How is this effective? Why does this work for naturally treating pain? Watch the video to learn more.

If you’ve been injured on the job or in a sport and you feel stuck, not making progress towards getting back into your life, I’m going to share with you a distinction that I’ve made over the past 19 years as a doctor and competitive athlete. This distinction is the difference between those who break out of that stuck cycle of chronic pain, and everyone else.

In my nearly 19 years of being in clinical practice, I have seen distinctions in both the injured athlete and injured worker. Early on when I began my studies in Chinese medicine, I also began to train and compete in full contact fighting at national, international, and world levels. This gave me a firsthand experience of being on both sides of the medical system at the same time.

Early in my career I began treating not only athletes but also injured workers. Over a short period of time I began to see a crossover between the injured athlete and the injured worker. I then figured out that an injured worker is not much different than an injured athlete. And from that point on, there was a consistency in how I treated both. In seeing both as the same, my ability to help both types of patients dramatically improved.

So why is this important to you? Well, because if you want to make a breakthrough, you need to model people that have achieved what you want. If you’ve been injured on the job, in a sport, or for just about any reason, pay close attention because it only takes one insight to make a breakthrough in your own health.

The first distinction that I made was in the area of performance. That is, the ability to generate force and power while maintaining body alignment. In other words, it’s the ability to stand and move with maximum efficiency while minimizing the probability of injury. For a competitive fighter like myself, that translates into the ability to throw and strike your opponent with devastating force. For the non-athlete and especially the worker, it translates into the ability to lift, push, pull, and carry with more strength and ease. Both working in your office and in a competitive athletic arena require functional strength. That is, the ability to maintain posture and movement against demands.

So the question becomes, “How functionally strong are you?” Not how many curls can you do or how long can you run on the treadmill. A better question to ask yourself is,  “How tired do my muscles get from just sitting, standing, or filing papers?” or “How long can I walk before I must sit down?” or “Do I get pain or muscle tension if I’m leaning over to pick something up, putting on my shoes, or after just washing dishes for 5-10 minutes?” That’s functional strength and endurance!

The second correlate is a focus on minimizing yourself from getting re-injured or aggravating the injured site. Now, this is not solely about ergonomics, but more importantly it’s about an understanding of the underlying cause. This really comes down to how conditioned or functionally strong you are prior to the injury. With that said, if you do the wrong thing – that is, try to strengthen the injured area at the wrong time and when the condition is still inflamed – you’re only going to aggravate it! So timing is everything. For example, utilizing a modality such as biomedical acupuncture to reduce the pain and inflammation may be a great first step. A second step would then be to strengthen the area with physical therapy.  Sometimes using both at the same time is the best strategy, as long as the condition is not flared up.

A third distinction occurs when an athlete or worker becomes injured and fear develops which causes most to stop moving. When you slow down or worse, stop moving, the body becomes de-conditioned. It gets weaker, predisposing you to higher probability of injury. I learned my lesson the hard way because when you’re fighting full contact, you’re constantly getting injured. If I stopped moving each time I was injured, I would never move! I’d be a statue!

One successful strategy I’ve used that allowed me to continue to train and compete is what my teacher called the “Front burner, back burner” concept. For example, if I injured my right hand, I would use my left. If I injured my left foot then I would kick with my right. Sometimes, multiple parts were injured and I simply felt like I was hit by a truck. Have you ever felt like that? In those cases, what I did was shift my workouts entirely to slow-moving restorative exercises like tai chi, chi kung, and other core functional exercises until I healed. When we’re treating injured workers and athletes and they’re in that really inflamed state where they can’t do much of anything, this is where we teach them these restorative exercises as well. The key is simple: Keep moving your body!

In order to maintain muscle strength, minimize weakness, and maximize healing, the body needs to move. Now, the ritual of movement is not only for the purpose to maintain a strong physical body, but more importantly a strong psychological and emotional state. What I commonly see with patients who aren’t moving their body due to the fear of worsening an injury is the increased probability of depression and anxiety. When you keep the body in motion, you feel emotionally better!

That’s why when working with injured workers or athletes, getting back into your job or sport as fast as possible, is high priority! Why is it so urgent? Because the longer you’re out of your job or sport, the more you become weaker physically, and more importantly psychologically. When you fall out of the ritual of work and sport, you increase the probability of falling into the habit of being lazy and emotionally unstable.

So, let me give you a trait that high-performing injured athletes and workers have, that gets them right back into their game – a sense of urgency! What does a sense of urgency look like? Imagine a clock ticking each day you are out of work or your sport. That clock of urgency is a reminder for you to keep moving your body and maintain a positive attitude so you don’t fall into the trap of bad habits. A sense of urgency on the job means seeing yourself as an athlete needing to get back into competition by a specific date or otherwise you’ll get cut from the team, or in reality from your job. If you’re an athlete, know that each day you’re not training, you’re losing your edge.

We’re all creatures of habit. If you’ve made exercise a daily habit, you know it’s something that you no longer have to think about. It’s like brushing your teeth.  You don’t put brushing your teeth on your to-do list. Why? Because it’s part of your daily ritual. I don’t say, “You know, I’ve brushed my teeth 3 weeks in a row. I’m going to take a couple days off. Or I’m going to switch it up to 3 days on 1 day off.” You don’t to that! Why? Because it’s a habit.

So I encourage you to make exercise – or movement – a daily part of your life, so that if and when you have an injury you know to move. Lastly, make exercise a daily habit. Why?  Because life will give you days off. What happens if you go on vacation, the kids get sick, or you’re not feeling well and you don’t work out? Then you let a little too many days go by? Do you notice that it is more and more difficult to get back into your routine?

The oldest book of Chinese medicine called the Yellow Emperors Classics – which is over 3,000 years old – stated that one of the most important factors of long-term health above everything else is to maintain healthy rituals– otherwise known as habits of health.

When you have a strong enough reason, you will figure out how to do get to your outcome.  The most powerful reason I’ve seen motivate athletes and workers back into their sport or job has by far more to do with one’s life outside of work or sport. What we’re really talking about here is your entire life and your ability to live fully! So begin to ask yourself, “How many why’s or reasons can I find to fuel my drive? In addition to getting back into my sport or job, what else will I get to do and experience by becoming healthier?” The more emotionally charged reasons that you add to your outcome, the more fuel and power you’ll have. Recent research from the Institute for Work & Health reinforces this, with evidence that patients who are optimistic about recovery following an injury will actually recover and return to work faster than patients who are less optimistic!

Our goal here at the Center is to keep planting the right seeds in those injured on the job, in a sport, and in life. So hopefully, I’ve provided you some seeds of insight that will give you a strong enough WHY to take your life back. Give yourself the gift of health by integrating science-based natural medical modalities into your health care today.

If you like to find out more about how we can assist you with your specific health concerns and how we can best integrate the use of medical modalities such as biomedical acupuncture, contact our office at (619) 287-4005 to schedule a free consultation where we can answer any questions you have to find out if and how we can help you with your healthcare needs.

If you or a loved one has been in a chronic state of stress and can’t break out of it, I’m going to share with you a powerful insight that the Chinese discovered over 3,000 years ago. First, let’s break stress down so we can develop an awareness of what it really is. Once you’re crystal clear on what to look for, you can then find the right strategies to handle it!

There are only three kinds of stress. The first is physical stress.  What’s physical stress? Things like accidents, injuries, traumas, and falls. Second, we have chemical stress. This includes things like pesticides, heavy metals, toxins, hormonal imbalance, and blood sugar issues. Third and last is emotional stress such as traffic jams, 401K plans, Internet connections, family tragedies, divorce, single parenting, and maybe your job. When these stressors chronically bombard you, they start to break down your body.

Short-term, we can handle it! In fact, we have a life saving system called the fight or flight response, which is an amazing system to have. Why? Because it protects us from danger! Think about this, if you step off a curb and a car is coming right at you, this system turns on immediately. It gets your heart racing and it gets blood flowing to the legs to jump out of the way. Right? You don’t stand there and determine the angle at which the car is coming. You move, and you move fast! This system can even give you superhuman powers. Really! You’ve heard of the scenario where the child who’s stuck under the car and the mother goes and picks the car up just enough to get the child out from underneath it. Right? You can take that same mother, bring her into the gym the next day, and she can’t even budge 1/10 the weight of that car. Why? Because that stress response was not turned on. There was no threat to her survival or her child’s. So this is a life saving system when it’s working correctly.

All animals have this. Let’s say that you watch a zebra running from a tiger, and that stress response turns on and the zebra outruns the tiger. In about 15 minutes that zebra’s stress response is turned off and the zebra is back to grazing like normal – on and off. Humans on the other hand are a whole other story! We can think about the worst-case scenario, and to the exclusion of everything else we can make that thought so real and focus on it to such a degree, that we can cause our body to physiologically change. Our body then perceives that event is happening, and boom, the body gets knocked out of balance because it believes it’s living in that future event. Let’s stop here for a moment to ask you a question: How often do you or others you know get stuck in this place? If you do this often, this is a major fuel source of your stress.

You can also get stuck in a past bitter memory with all those emotions attached to that memory, and just like magic, in that moment, your brain believes it’s living in that past event. When that happens, your body responds as if it’s living in that past event. This is the state of mind that drives the highest amount of stress in the body. So again, “How often do you or someone you care about, get stuck in this cycle of stress?”

 Now, just making you aware that this is one of the primary drivers of stress will not really change anything in and of itself. What I have found is that by going deeper into the process of why we do this in the first place, we begin to uncover the seed of these chronic patterns of stress. And by going to the source of these issues, it then begins to give you the opportunity to make profound changes in your health. Why? Because we are addressing the root cause of your chronic stress instead of just the effects.

Would it not be absurd to mow your lawn and say, “Okay! Now that I cut the lawn, I don’t need to cut that again!” Of course you don’t say that! If the seed is still there, you’ll be cutting it again and again every week for the rest of your life. If you want to stop the grass from growing, we all know that you need to kill it at its roots. And more importantly, what feeds the root. If you cut off the feeding source, the root dies. That is what our outcome is. So, let’s break these patterns down to what I like to call the major fuel sources that feed the root of stress.

Stress Fueler #1
This fuel source is the degree that you are stuck in a stress cycle consistent with how much of your attention is focused on past bitter memories or future worries. You’re probably thinking, “No, I’m stressed now!” Yes you are stressed now, but whatever you’re stressed about is probably about a past negative event or a future worry. You may be saying, “Okay you got me there, I get it about the past, but I have to think about the future…” It’s true that you must think about it, but the more you chronically replay a future that generates worry and anxiety, it generates stress in the body NOW!

I learned about this fueler of stress early on when I was training to fight full contact martial arts. I initially had a lot of anxiety about the opponents I had to fight. But once I learned specific strategies – which we now teach patients at our Center every day – I was able to strategize the fight and at the same time not generate worry and anxiety from my thought process. You might be thinking, “Well I’m not going to fight in the ring, so this is not for me. I’m just going to turn this off and listen to some cool music.” However, fighting in the ring is really not much different than the real world when it comes to how the mind responds to the future. Yes, in the ring you get those physical hits. But in life, you get those emotional hits, which often hurt just as bad and sometimes more.

Stress Fueler #2
Your brain cannot differentiate between what is real and what is vividly imagined or perceived. Now you might be thinking, “No, I know the difference!” Well, let’s think about it. Have you ever had a nightmare or a dream that startled you or woke you up in fear or in a sweat? Or have you ever watched a movie that put enough fear in you that in that same evening, you locked the door to your bedroom that you NEVER lock, or you double-check all the doors to the house and you pull up the sheets just enough so you can breath? Remember, your brain cannot differentiate between what is real and what is vividly imagined or perceived.

Stress Fueler #3
This has by far the most profound impact. Your body believes whatever your brain is thinking, as if it’s happening right now. You may be thinking, “My body can’t be that gullible.” But it is!

Let’s illustrate an example. If you’re depressed or angry about a past bitter experience, when do you feel depressed or anger in your body – in the past or in the present? In the present! If you’re worried or anxious about a future event, when do you feel that worry or that anxiety in body? Now! Your body does not know the difference between the past, the future, or the present. It simply believes your brain as if it’s happening when? That’s right, NOW! 

And what’s amazing is that the Chinese figured this out over 3,000 years ago. In doing so, they developed very specific strategies and techniques that not only interrupt this process but more importantly support recovery from years of these chronic stress patterns. These principles are not only used in Chinese medicine, but also in a new field of health care called functional medicine. In fact, functional medicine is an evolution of Chinese medicine’s view of looking upstream at diffusing physical, chemical, and emotional stress.

To address these issues, we use strategies such as biomedical acupuncture, diet, lifestyle, exercise, nutrition, along with blood tests, hormone panels and other diagnostic tests your medical doctor would prescribe pharmaceuticals. When you begin to interrupt patterns of stress at the level of what feeds the root cause, you’re dealing less with constantly pulling out those weeds called symptoms, signs, and disease, and you’re dealing more with the direct source!

Here at the Center for Integrative Care, we provide these natural medical modalities along with a new technology called neurofeedback brain training. This technology has a dramatic impact on interrupting stress in the brain.

Now, I’d like to leave you with a simple yet powerful reminder. That is, the quality of your life is the quality of your brain function. Chronic stress has been shown to actually shrink and degenerate the brain. When that happens, the ability to experience life declines. So please, do something not only for yourself, but also for those you care about, who need to hear this information.

If you would like to find out more about how we can assist you or someone you know with specific health concerns, in a safe and effective way, contact our office at (619) 287-4005 to schedule a free consultation with one of our functional medicine specialists where they can answer any questions you have to find out if and how we can help you with your healthcare needs.

If you or a loved one is having ongoing digestive problems, I’m going to share with you an alternative option to medication that is safe, extremely effective, and that is being utilized by the medical community more and more today.

To better understand this option, let’s first start with the basic premise of digestion. The digestive system is controlled and regulated by one part of the nervous system that regulates all functional processes. This same system also handles any type of threat or danger. It is only able to move in one direction or the other, so it can’t go in both directions at once. In other words, if you’re jumping out of the way of a car that’s coming right at you, this system disengages from restorative processes like digestion, and shifts resources to the legs to RUN. It’s a great system to have when it’s working correctly!

Here’s the challenge. When you’re in chronic stress, this system is not fully engaged in digestion because, as I said earlier, resources are needed to manage the stress response. So what happens? You can’t digest, absorb, and assimilate nutrition for your body to function at optimal levels, not to mention normal daily processes.

Another critical factor is when most people tell me they just learned to live with it. Have you ever said that? What they’re really saying is that they’ve developed a way to cope with their condition at a conscious level so they can get through the day. The problem with that is the nervous system is still interpreting and processing it as a stressor and therefore still reducing gut function, and shifting blood flow to the legs to run, or to the arms to fight or protect.

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. I have patients come in and tell me that they have acid reflux, bloating, and/or nausea especially right after they eat and they often need to take antacids. These folks initially assumed that the more stressed you are, the more acid you produce in your gut. In fact, the exact opposite happens.

Let me explain… The production of acid in the stomach is part of a digestive process, not a stress response. This is because acid, specifically hydrochloric acid, naturally increases when food (especially protein) goes into the stomach. So why do people often get digestive issues like acid reflux following meals especially when under stress? When you’re stressed, digestion shuts down to shift resources to areas needed to respond to danger. So if the gut is shut down and you put food into it, that food will just sit there!

What would happen if you put a steak in a warm, dark place and left it there for a day? That’s right, it will begin to putrefy. If you put a banana in a dark warm bag, it begins to ripen much quicker and rot! So when you put food in a stomach that’s not fully functional, that food will begin to putrefy and ferment leading to acid reflux, gas, bloating, and other digestive issues! So why do the antacids still work? Because antacids are reducing the acid byproduct of undigested foods, but they are not addressing the cause. That’s why you have to keep taking them! Now, are these medications going to reduce your suffering? Sure they are. Is there a time and place for them? Of course, as all medicines have their place. When it comes to crisis and/or significant suffering, medications are front line therapy because they’re powerful. However, are they addressing the underlying cause? Absolutely not! So don’t confuse no symptoms with no problem.

Now there’s more! When you are chronically stressed, you release a powerful stress hormone called cortisol that floods your system. This hormone also begins to thin the lining of your stomach. So think about this. Even when you are producing a normal amount of acids, in a stomach that now has a thinner lining, what do you think will happen? That’s right, the lining will get irritated and ulcers can occur over time.

So what do we do? Move to Hawaii to start a sunny new life? Sure, but the only problem is you take you with you! The issue is not the environment, but how you respond to the environment. And I don’t only mean the part that you have control over – I also mean the part that’s automatic inside of you that you don’t have direct control over. This is the same part of you that goes on automatic pilot driving your car to work while you’re thinking about what has to be done that day or talking to the passenger next to you. It’s that same part that keeps your heart beating, and your lungs breathing! Good thing you don’t need to think about those things.

Over time, within this same system, you’ve developed reactions to the environment that automatically put you in a state of anxiety, fear, worry, and anger.  And you say, “Why am I feeling like this?” According to research, it’s this system that is running the show over 90% of your day. So if you do not develop strategies on interrupting, resetting, and reprogramming these patterns, you’ll just keep repeating the same problems over and over again.

Now, this concept is not new! The Chinese figured this out 3,000 years ago. From a Chinese medical perspective, we must look at what we call the branch and the root. The branch is how your nervous system responds to the environment. In other words, it’s the behaviors, symptoms, signs, and disease. Meanwhile, the root is the habituated negative patterns of thinking that have created those symptoms, signs, and disease.

So let’s dive in a bit deeper to unfold this process.

If you’re stuck in stress, such as chronically thinking about a past bitter memory or a future worry, that stress response is no different than you running from say, an enemy tribe.  Think about it. If you are running from an enemy, is it more important to have blood flow in the digestive system to break down that nutritious meal, so that you can assimilate it and have vitamins and minerals dispersed in your body? Or is it more important to have blood flow into the arms to fight or protect? Fight! Protect! Let’s go downstream a bit further. If you are chronically losing function in the gut, what downstream symptoms, signs, or diseases can you have?  You’ll have gut problems like nausea and bloating!

If you can’t break down minerals like calcium, what could happen downstream? What kind of disease could you end up having? Osteoporosis! Also, if you have reduced gut function and your hydrochloric acid levels and your enzyme levels start to go down, you can’t break down proteins. Downstream, what can that look like? And I’ll give you a hint- protein is the building block of what? That’s right, muscle! And did you know what one of the primary biomarkers of aging is? Muscle loss! So, what’s the solution here? Do we address the nervous system or do we fix the gut? The answer is yes! Both! If we just work on the gut and you haven’t interrupted the stress response, it will return, bigger, badder and meaner simply because it’s been conditioned to do that. Basically, it’s simply following a habit.

In Chinese medicine, we cross boundaries. We do not get stuck in specific areas of the body. This is different from the traditional medical approach of going to a specialist.  Think about it. If you have digestive problems, where do you go? A gastroenterologist. Right? And when you’re there, you say, “Doc, I’m getting really depressed.” Your GI doc will then send you where? To a psychologist or psychiatrist. If you tell your psychologist that with all this stress and depression, you’re having a tremendous amount of neck pain, where are they going to refer you? That’s right, to an orthopedic doctor who specializes in the spine! Now if you tell your orthopedic doctor that with all this stress, depression, and pain, you’re starting to get sick often and are developing chronic ear, nose, and throat problems, where are they going to refer you? That’s right, an ENT specialist.

We’re having fun here, but I want to point out that medical doctors, specifically in the area of specialty, specialize! So you absolutely need and want to have them on your team. They’re experts in how to address those major downstream health conditions called disease! But you don’t want to live there.

Now if you have an emergency, you’re not coming to our Center. You’re going right to the emergency room. If you’re diagnosed with a severe life-limiting disease, you want a specialist on your team. At the same time, you also want more drug-free options to your health care that will improve your health! You don’t want to just get out of discomfort. If that were the case you would just take more medications. Medications are powerful, and there is a time and place for them. However, we are here to give you more safe and effective options that are being used in the medical system such as biomedical acupuncture and herbal, dietary and nutritional therapy. Learning stress reduction techniques that the Chinese have developed and evolved over 3,000 years that WORK! If not for you, think about family and friends that are looking for another option.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can assist you with your specific health concerns and how we can best integrate the use of biomedical acupuncture and other natural medical modalities along with your current health care, in a safe and effective way, contact our office at (619) 287-4005 to schedule a free consultation where we can answer any questions you have to find out if and how we can help you with your health care needs.