February - March 2012

“People learn from who we are, rather than what we say, and to believe otherwise is a disease of the mind.”
–-Carl Jung

Spring Is Here!

Already?

For whatever reason Spring has arrived in February, and I think we are all happy to see the sun and the early bloomers! For such a short Winter, it sure was a looooong Winter!

As you all start migrating outside, exercising more and gardening again, please pace yourself. We do see some people in the office this time of year who did what many of us do (which is to sit on the couch for four months then suddenly explode into extensive physical activity) and pay a heavy price for it. One good way to support yourself in transition is to pull out those dusty exercise handouts and do some stretching and strengthening for 5-10 minutes each day. It will warm you up, loosen you up and help prevent Spring injuries.

On a personal note, this year I have been traveling to Los Angeles once a month for graduate studies, which I have been doing to become a better practitioner so I can serve you and your family more effectively and give you better care. In addition to less frequent newsletters, some of you may have noticed it can be a little harder to get an appointment with me mid-month, and I have also asked Jenny to reschedule a few of you based on which flights I could get. I want to thank those of you whom I have inconvenienced for your support and patience with me, and for those of you who have been unaffected, please plan on staying unaffected!

With blessings and gratitude,
Dr. Matthew

New Partnership with BeWell Associates / Angie Wallace While I have been referring to Monica Montag and Angie Wallace at BeWell Associates for over five years, recently I have been in discussion with them about how to make their indispensable nutritional support easier for you to access. We are currently working on two different programs for you. The first involves you being able to get the actual testing done through my office, which not only makes it more convenient for you to access their help, but will also allow many of you to use your insurance to pay for the testing! The second program will be a detox program that Angie will present at my office. Stay tuned in the coming months for more information about these services as we iron out the details.

Help Us Help More People

Please take a moment to like us on Facebook , write a Recommendation at LinkedIn, or write a short review at Yelp. Thank you very, very much!

Local News:

You may have heard that the Centre Hall PSPCA is now Pets Come First.

Pets Come First (PCF), a local non-profit group, has taken over the facility as of January 1, 2012. This no-kill facility has two main focuses: spaying/neutering and finding homes for homeless animals. PCF is dependent on community donations and volunteers and recieves no government funding. - they need your support.

So, how can you help? You can volunteer with Dr. Matthew, who has committed to eight hours a month at PCF. Also, we're collecting donations at Centre Chiropractic, donations can be made on the PCF website, or by mailing a check to Pets Come First, P.O. Box 493, Lemont, PA 16851. We have several projects in which the community can become involved; for more information, visit www.petscomefirst.com

Friend Woody Wilson Starts an Awesome New Business

Our friend Woody Wilson, who we cam e to know through our involvement with Tait Farms, has started an awesome new business, Wilson's Home Grown Farms, which I believe is unique in the Centre County region. When he shared his idea with me, I was excited for him and the community and wanted to support him in getting the word out, so I asked him to share his idea and inspiration with us so we can support him. If you can't use his service, please tell someone who can.

What is Wilson's Home Grown Farms?
Wilson's Home Grown Farms is a company that installs and manages home and company vegetable gardens. I was inspired to start this company by my desire to bring people as close to their food as possible, and food is the freshest and most environmentally friendly when it is grown where it is going to be eaten. I install gardens at available space in back yards or lots at businesses, and transform these spaces into mini-farms, producing food for the people who live or work at the plots.

I am a graduating Senior of Penn State's College of Agriculture and have been working outside for years. Dr. Chris Uhl of Penn State's Ecology department, who has his own mini-farm in his backyard, sparked my interest in food.

It became clear to me that anyone's personal food supply could be secured by turning part of a yard or lawn into a garden with tomatoes, peppers, greens, onions and kale. I worked at Tait Farm's CSA and loved the fact that I was growing for people who wanted food grown by someone they could talk to. I love the personal interactions with the members of the CSA and found that these connections could be made not only on a farm, but in the backyards and kitchens of locals as well.

What makes Wilson's Home Grown Farms special?
The food scene in State College is unique and offers many options to people buying local, organic, and home made goods. There are farmers markets and CSAs all over the county, which is uncommon. Wilson's Home Grown Farms is unique because I bring the farmers market and CSA to you, where the food is going to be eaten. It does not take much land to grow enough food to support a family.

What excites me the most about the company is that someone who has a Home Grown garden can walk into their backyard while dinner is in the oven and harvest the salad that will be served alongside of the meal. This does not just mean lettuce, carrots and radishes can be pulled and grated over the salad, peppers can be cut and sliced and added with fresh specialty greens like arugula and endive. Wilson's Home Grown Farms is the only resource in State College that offers you a personal farmer who grows the food you want in your backyard or at your office.

How does Wilson's Home Grown Farms work?
New garden owners get the opportunity to have a completely new garden installed on their property. Their garden then gets filled with an assortment of vegetables they select along with other flowers and vegetables that create a complete garden. I make sure that everything is maintained correctly so that the garden is successful. I make sure that the plants are planted at the appropriate time and keep all the beds weeded so that the garden grows to its highest potential. When the vegetables are ready the garden owner gets the chance to harvest the vegetables fresh off the plant and eat them at their meals, or store them for the winter. Established garden owners get their garden worked for them, saving them time and effort. Wilson's Home Grown Farms also offers "Garden Sitting" for gardeners who want to take a vacation during the growing season, but do not want to risk their garden to the neighborhood kid to water.

If you are interested in hiring Wilson's Home Grown Farms or learning more, please get in touch with me at HomeGrownFarming@gmail.com or by telephone at 610-322-1990. The company's Facebook page will include a photo journal of each mini-farm for everyone to watch its progress.

Chiropractic and "Pumping": Can Arthritis Be Reversed?

Most of you have been hearing about the benefits of, research on, and focus of chiropractic for years, in many cases since long before you and I met. Despite the cultural focus on chiropractic as a musculoskeletal (muscle-joint) pain reliever, you've all heard me emphasize the supremacy of the nervous system and the necessity of getting pressure off the nerves. All basic medical texts refer to the nervous system as the "master system, which controls and coordinates all other systems," which addresses the importance of injury-free neurology. The University of Chicago Medical Center study of 2009, which showed that the chiropractic adjustment was not only the most effective treatment for high blood pressure but was more effective than any two HBP meds taken at the same time was significant in that it was medical establishment recognition of the chiropractic focus on healthy nerve function.

However there are many other benefits of chiropractic treatment that we don't talk about as often, mostly because the "nerve pressure as a cause of illness" idea is so new to most of us that it needs repetition. One of the less-commonly discussed benefits has to do with pumping function, which is ironic in that much of the osteopathic research and literature focuses heavily on this (osteopathy and chiropractic are essentially the same in terms of joint realignment).

So what does "pumping function" mean? Overall, a lot of our physiology is based on pumping. Certainly most of us think of the heart when we think of pumping, but even the blog stream has more than one pump. The veins in our legs are so far from the heart, and subject to gravitational influence as the waste-blood tries to ascend the long path up the legs, that we have a secondary pumping mechanism to make this waste return work: leg muscle contraction. This is one of the many ways in which sitting extensively is not good for our health. We have been a walking species for most of our time on the planet, and this constant muscle contraction in the legs helps squeeze the waste products back up the leg through the veins and lymphatics, making circulation better and taking stress off the heart.

Pumping function also refers to the way spinal joints keep the disc healthy. Discs are, to simplify things a bit, a combination of high-density proteins and water. The strange thing is that the discs have almost no blood supply whatsoever, meaning the discs need another mechanism to get water into the discs to keep them healthy and juicy. This other mechanism is normal range of motion. When you walk, the joint is moved through a range of motion as a result of your legs and lower vertebrae moving underneath it in addition to the muscles and ligaments pulling it side to side, up and down, and rotating left and right. Believe it or not, this cyclical range of motion pumps fluid into the disk through the endplates of the vertebrae! That's right, the water gets pumped through the bone and into the disk.

The point of this however, is that when a joint is stuck out of alignment, the normal range of motion is lost, and so the body can no longer get fluid to the disk in order to keep it hydrated and healthy. The ligaments around the joint are stretched, lose sensitivity to normal-versus-abnormal stretching, and start to deform, or creep, making it harder for the joint to work normally. This dramatically speeds degeneration of the disc, which leads to arthritic spurring as the body tries to fuse the bones together to stabilize the erratic range of motion. It leads to swelling, which not only compresses the nerves but also produces toxic byproducts that can start to dissolve even bone tissue within 30 hours. It causes pain. It causes erratic motion of the joints above and below as they try to "pick up the slack," which then speeds degeneration in those joints.

There have been dozens of studies that look at the twenty or so joint mechanisms that end up dysfunctional once a joint misaligns, and many additional studies that have shown that chiropractic and osteopathic adjustments not only restore normal range of motion, but can slow or stop arthritic spurring. If there is enough disc height remaining once the misalignment is corrected, the chondroblasts and other cells that build disc material can rebuild some of the disc height, and in many cases the body will start to resorb (reabsorb) the bone spurs - since they are a stress reaction, if the stress is removed and not too much degeneration has occurred, the body "undoes" the stress reaction because it's no longer necessary.

If you're ever interested in any of these studies, I have a three-hundred page book in the office with citations. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and take walking breaks at work - your discs will thank you for it!

New Research

New Study on Placebo and Expectation Calls All Pharmaceutical Studies into Question

While most of you have probably heard of the placebo effect, I am guessing you haven't heard about a 2011 study that shed new light on it and raised questions about the mind-body continuum and whether it should be a major consideration in "designing" drug treatment regimens for patients.

A group of volunteers were placed on a saline (salt water) IV drip, told they were getting salt water, then were asked to rate their pain as an electrical shock was applied to their leg, and also had their pain evaluated with brain scans (fMRI). Not surprisingly, the volunteers all rated the pain as pretty high. Then, they were given a high-potency pain reliever, told they were being given a high-potency pain reliever, and the shock was applied again. Their pain was evaluated the same way, with their pain rated much lower. Third, they were returned to the salt water IV, but told they were getting the high-potency pain reliever and again shocked. This time both their rating scale and brain imaging reported their pain at levels equivalent to when they received the pain killer!

This not only speaks to the power of expectation in pain, healing and health care, but also calls into question every test ever conducted on medication that doesn't have significant controls for placebo. Read the Abstract...

Some Asthma Medications Appear to Have Higher Fatality Rate Than Asthma

I found this article interesting, though inflammatory at times. Legitimate questions are asked. Please forgive the political slant of the website, I make no endorsements and get no compensation for linking here. Read the article...

Featured Practitioner — Greg Wright,
Up-Wright Ch'i, Acupuncture for The People

Not only is Greg one of my best friends, and the star of one of my Centre Chiropractic YouTube videos, he is an acupuncturist with a rapidly growing practice - a reflection of his healing presence, humility and skill. His treatments have helped me with a variety of issues from influenza, clearing phlegm, alleviating ligament pain and speeding ligament healing, and assisting my pancreas in functioning more effectively. Check out our conversation, and go experience his work, it makes a big difference in my life!

So Greg, what is acupuncture?
Acupuncture is a therapy of inserting and manipulating very fine, disposable needles in specific "points" along energetic channels or "meridians" of the body - meridians that roughly correlate to the internal organs.

What are the origins of acupuncture?
Acupuncture is one of the oldest healing practices in the world, and has been traditional in China for several thousand years. The oldest known book on Chinese medicine, "The Yellow Emperor's classic of internal medicine", indicates that acupuncture was widely practiced in China much before the time the book was written, around 2700 B.C Different types of needles were in use over two thousand years ago.

Acupuncture spread from China to other parts of Asia and the world through travelling physicians, scholars and Jesuit monks who translated the original Chinese texts into French and eventually English. Acupuncture has been practiced in Europe ever since, but it was not widely known in the West before President Nixon visited China in 1971. Television commentaries showed Chinese physicians doing complicated surgery without any other anesthesia than acupuncture.

How does acupuncture work?
Chinese medicine sees symptoms in relationship to the uniqueness and wholeness of each person. Acupuncture is seen to work by influencing the flow of energy or "qi" (pronounced "chee") in a person's body. The effect is to produce a balanced state where blockages are eased and states of excess or deficiency are short-term - in a physical, emotional, and spiritual system that is constantly in movement or flux. Symptoms are not, and never can be, (nor should be!) erased; they are our body's wisdom teachers that help us to make adjustments in our perspective and responses to life. In this way, we learn and grow - even sometimes in the very presence of disease. "Upright", "or virtuous" qi, gives us the sense that we are walking our unique path to wisdom and deep peace in life; it does not refer to the complete absence of symptoms, yet describes a state of perfect health.

In terms of Western logic, the process can seem mysterious. The use of research models suitable for testing drugs and devices (i.e. double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trials), is problematic in testing a synergistic therapy. The most widely accepted Western theory about acupuncture, is that it induces the release of neurotransmitters (endorphins), to create pain relief and relaxation.

Yet whether viewed from the Western perspective of causation, vs. the Eastern idea of interrelationship, it seems the more important question is DOES acupuncture work, rather than HOW does it work?

The World Health Organization (WHO) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have documented numerous studies showing the benefits of acupuncture. To my mind, this is perfectly compatible with the knowledge that modern medicine has been of great benefit in the world's collective health and longevity. Acupuncture can sometimes alleviate illnesses that modern medicine can't; at other times the opposite is true, especially in cases where high-tech interventions are needed. We live in a time where we now have access to both; acupuncture is a very cost-effective way to achieve and maintain a state of balance and vitality. It is often a viable alternative when other, more expensive therapies don't work, and is also an excellent adjunct to help alleviate side-effects from more aggressive modern therapies, such as chemotherapy or to help reduce post-surgical inflammation and pain.

Do the needles hurt?
A lot of people want to know whether the needles hurt. Some folks actually have a fear of needles; however the type of needles they are familiar with are for giving shots or taking blood. Acupuncture needles are very fine (.16mm) and solid, not hollow. You may feel a bit of a pinch when the needles are tapped in, but this should ease right away. If on the other hand you feel a slight ache or heavy feeling near the needle, this is usually a good sign – a clue that the body is reacting in a productive way. As long as the feelings around the needled areas don't keep you from closing your eyes and napping for a little while, you can let them be. Most people do get into a sleepy state once the needles are in. I believe it is one of the most predictable and best effects acupuncture has to offer, and can explain why acupuncture is so effective at helping people with high stress levels. They are being eased out of the "fight or flight" response (sympathetic) into the "rest and recuperate" state (parasympathetic).

How is community acupuncture different?
Community acupuncture is a nationwide movement to create access to acupuncture by removing the barrier of cost from healing. The typical community practice utilizes a sliding scale of $20-40, and treats while you rest in a comfortable recliner in a common treatment room, alongside other patients. Treating in a community setting allows the rates to be low enough for most people to afford. The quality or length of your treatment does not depend on how much you are able to pay. The goal is to make acupuncture available to everyone who needs it.

About Greg
Greg is a licensed Acupuncturist in Pennsylvania and is board certified by the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM). As the founder of UpWright Ch'i Acupuncture, he is dedicated to providing access to affordable care to everyone. Greg commonly helps people with chronic or acute pain, digestive disorders, migraine, fibromyalgia, and stress management through acupuncture. He is a graduate of the Tai Sophia Institute, in Columbia, MD, with a Masters degree in Acupuncture, and integrates his practice using Worsley 5-Element, TCM, and Dr. Tan's Balance Method.

Athelete

You might have seen this already, as this video went viral a few months ago. I stumbled across it again while going through the folder in which I bookmark things to share with you, and was simply amazed at this man's physical prowess. As someone who break danced as a youth (in the 1980's - in fact I think I had the same shirt and haircut this guy has), and does yoga as an adult, I am inspired. Don't try this at home - and if you do beware that I probably won't know how to help you!

Break ton Neck from Alex Yde on Vimeo.

Beautiful

In the last six months I have been devouring time-lapse videos on Vimeo, and decided to share this one. Watch it on a large screen, maximized! More to come….

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

The Price of Sugar

In doing research on documentaries about food and inspirational films to share with you via our lending library (see News from Us above), I ran across this as one of the "Top 10 documentaries on food," but could not find it for sale to view and evaluate. With a bit of looking around, I found out that it has never made it to DVD but the film in its entirety can be seen on YouTube.

Stephen Levine, Who Dies?

This book recently came to my attention through the coursework I am doing in Los Angeles, and this has been a profound read for me. It is somewhat philosophical, in a buddhist spirit (oneness of all things), and deals in depth with the meaning of chronic illness, cancer, and death. For anyone with an interest in these arenas it is thought-provoking and life-changing.

Farewell

Thanks for your participation, and thanks for your feedback. In addition to linking to my website in order to keep the newsletter concise, these will all be archived on the website so you can always go back later to read, research or forward content.

It's also important to me that you know that I am never compensated in any way for any of the promotions in this newsletter; individuals, businesses and products are featured because I believe in them.

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© 2012 Centre Chiropractic. All rights reserved.

Dr. Matthew Hertert, Centre Chiropractic & Centred on Health
128 East Boal Avenue
P.O. Box 680
Boalsburg PA 16827
(814) 466-2000
info@centrechiro.com