It’s good, of course, to keep all your muscles strong and limber. But the strength of the body’s core — the muscles in your belly and mid- and lower back — is one of the keys to long-term health and stability as you grow older.

Walking may be, pound for pound, the most accessible, beneficial and inexpensive form of exercise available. The American Chiropractic Association recommends it as a way to stay fit.

Managing the stress in your life — and most of us experience stress to one degree or another — is essential to keeping a healthy lifestyle. Stress comes from many directions and makes itself known in a variety of ways--it might show up as a headache, tight muscles, nausea or back pain. It’s generally caused by outside factors, some obvious, like fretting over financial problems, and others not so much, such as planning for a joyous occasion like an impending wedding.

‘Frozen shoulder’ is a term sometimes used loosely in connection with any type of persistent shoulder pain. But specifically it is the loss of arm movement at the shoulder joint. The shoulder is the part of the body that is the third most common subject for chiropractic treatment, the lower back and the neck being the two most common. Frozen shoulder can be brought on by the trauma of a fall or car accident, or it may come on gradually as a result of muscle imbalance, overuse and irritation.

As with many forms of health care, people will sometimes ask: If I’m feeling good, why do I need it? In terms of chiropractic treatment, one answer could be, “Are you feeling the best you could be?” Are you reaching maximum capacity?

After an extensive study of all available care for low back problems, the Federal Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (now the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality) recommended that low back pain sufferers choose the most conservative care first. And it recommended spinal manipulation as the only safe and effective, drugless form of initial professional treatment for acute low back problems in adults.

One of the best things you can do to prevent and/or eliminate back pain is to exercise. Both an inactive lifestyle and being overweight contribute to back pain. Exercise benefits you in so many ways, such as lowering blood pressure, helping you maintain a healthy weight, lowering your risk for diabetes, and the list goes on!

Orthotics can help you maintain a healthy spine through the use of spinal pelvic stabilizers. Devices that you wear in your shoes, stabilizers align all three arches of your foot to provide a balanced foundation for your spine and body.

While sports injuries or accidents can cause back pain, sometimes the simplest of movements — for example, picking up a pencil from the floor — can have painful results. In addition, arthritis, poor posture, obesity, and psychological stress can cause or complicate back pain. Back pain can also directly result from disease of the internal organs, such as kidney stones, kidney infections, blood clots, or bone loss.

Research supports chiropractic spinal manipulation:

Access to essential health care is limited in economically depressed urban areas. Federally qualified health centers strive to bridge the gap of care to these areas by providing affordable, comprehensive health care. Some of the risk factors for chronic pain happen to be the same risk factors that are common among those who utilize FQHCs (low education level, low socioeconomic status, and higher rate of substance dependence or abuse). Therefore, those more likely to have chronic pain are also more likely to have their healthcare needs met at FQHCs.

Older Medicare patients with chronic low back pain and other medical problems who received spinal manipulation from a chiropractic physician had lower costs of care and shorter episodes of back pain than patients in other treatment groups. Patients who received a combination of chiropractic and medical care had the next lowest Medicare costs, and patients who received only medical care incurred the highest costs. – Weeks et al (2016), Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics

For Headaches

“6 to 8 sessions of upper cervical and upper thoracic manipulation were shown to be more effective than mobilization and exercise in patients with CGH (cervicogenic headache), and the effects were maintained at 3 months.” – Dunning et al. (2016) BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders

In Comparison to Other Treatments

“Chiropractic users had 64% lower odds of receiving an opioid prescription than non users.” – Corcoran et al. (2019) Pain Medicine

A growing list of research studies and reviews demonstrate that the services provided by chiropractors are not only clinically effective and safe but also cost effective. Following are excerpts and summaries from a few of those studies. The evidence supports the natural, whole-body, nondrug approach of chiropractic for a variety of conditions.

For Acute and Chronic Pain

Chiropractic is a system of therapy focused on the structure of the body, particularly the spine. Chiropractors manipulate the body’s alignment to relieve pain and improve function and to help the body heal itself.

In addition to revealing trends in chronic pain, a new study also provides a glimpse of what might be causing the increase.

The information necessary for a detailed explanation isn’t part of the NHIS (National Health Interview Survey) data set, but the researchers did look at a host of variables to determine which ones were most closely associated with the pain trends.

Muscle relaxant drugs are largely ineffective for low back pain, despite being widely prescribed for this condition, suggests an analysis of the latest evidence published by The BMJ. The findings show that muscle relaxants might reduce pain in the short term, but the effect is too small to be considered clinically meaningful, and there is an increased risk of side effects.

Widespread pain is linked to a heightened risk of all types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, finds research published online in the journal Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine. This association is independent of potentially influential factors, such as age, general health, and lifestyle, the findings indicate.

Although doctors of chiropractic treat more than just back pain, many patients initially visit a chiropractor looking for relief from this pervasive condition. In fact, about 31 million Americans experience low back pain at any given time.

Medical guidelines help doctors understand the best way to treat health conditions. Surprisingly, many doctors do not adhere to them, and this is a problem, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Utah, studying health and MD guidelines. People with lower back pain injury miss 11 more days of work in a year when they only receive treatments for lower back pain that are not recommended by medical guidelines compared to people treated according to guidelines. The findings were published in PLOS ONE. Among the nearly 60,000 people whose medical claims were analyzed:

According to the Global Burden of Disease Study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, neck pain is ranked as the fourth leading cause of global disability. One of the main reasons for neck pain has been attributed to lifestyle, particularly when people spend long durations of time with their necks bent forward. however, a systematic, quantitative study has been lacking on how personal factors, such as sex, weight, age and work-related habits can affect neck strength and endurance.