Coffee tastes good but what does your body think

A chiropractor friend of mine referred me a client who she had been treating for chronic long term neck pain. Her symptoms had improved considerably since her initial visit over a year ago however she required regular maintenance treatments every 2 weeks to keep her symptoms at a manageable level.

Where new clients have been receiving physical treatment already I am more inclined to look for other underlying reasons for clients pain issues. Chiropractic care is very effective but once you stop having regular adjustments the problem soon re-emerges.

One of the standard assessments I do with any new client is to test their individual muscles. I can then see which ones are not working as well as they should be. This does not mean they are weak and you need to get the client to work on those muscles. These muscles lack stamina or they give way quickly when tested. As an Applied Kinesiologist, I am able to isolate individual muscles to test their function.

 In Applied Kinesiology, each muscle is associated with different organs, nutrition, meridians and spinal levels. They are are also prone to effects of different food intolerances. Clients with neck pain often have weak Sternocleidomastoid muscles (found in the front of your neck). These muscles, in my experience, are particularly prone to the effects of caffeine in coffee by reducing it's function or stamina. When this occurs other muscles in the neck have to compensate and eventually they become tired themselves and go into spasm.

During her initial consultation, the client mentioned that she regularly drank 4 cups of coffee per day,

which immediately caught my attention. During her examination, I tested to see if her body's muscle's reacted to coffee by getting her to hold a vial containing caffeine and seeing if one of her shoulder muscles (which was strong on initial testing) weakened to testing. It did, and so this was a good indication to myself and the client that caffeine may be playing a role in her neck issues.

At the end of the consultation I advised the client that to get lasting resolution of her neck pain she needed to cut out coffee. This is no easy ask for most clients but this lady was keen to find a solution to he longstanding and somewhat debilitating neck pain. She totally cut out all coffee and promptly suffered with a headache over the next four days. This was a normal withdrawal symptom of caffeine. The headache disappeared and by the time she came for her follow up treatment the following week her neck pain was 90% better. Within 3 weeks, the pain had disappeared. As well as suffering from neck pain she had also mentioned she was often constipated, her energy was low, she was sleeping better, and her lower back and knees were no longer sore.

Be like Superman and look at your health from 30,000 feet!

What I love about my job is that is that it is a constant journey of exploration. Each new client that comes through the door brings a whole new learning experience for me.

There are some familiar patterns that tend to appear but I DEFINITELY learn something new from everyone, and everyone I treat makes me feel how little I need to learn about how I can help people.

Don't get me wrong I do help many people but with some I frustratingly draw a blank.

I am a huge advocate for looking at the BIG picture when looking at someones health.

I was listening to a interview with Dr Tom OBryan, a world expert on Gluten Sensitivity and Coeliac Disease, and he said that when looking at a persons health problem you have to "look from 30,000 feet".

I totally resonated with this as it is exactly where I want to be when a client comes to see me.

When your car starts making a funny noise you don't take it to the car wash and hope the problem is going to go away. The same when your body starts to get aches and pains, taking that pill, having that massage, getting that adjustment is not really going to solve your problem.

It may well go away temporarily but eventually it's going to rear it's ugly head.

I had a new client this week who came to me with chronic pain in his neck, shoulder, between his shoulders, lower back, knees and ankles. He was a mess!

He had been for massage and chiropractic care since he was in his teens. This had kept him going but now at 42 in his words, "I feel like an old man".

One good thing was that he was open to doing anything to help himself. This was music to my ears as I knew I could be brutally honest with him.

When someone has generalized pain like this man it is obvious to me from my overhead view that his body as a whole was not happy. Testing his muscles immediately confirmed this assumption as they were all hypertonic or over tight which is a good indicator to me that his body was overloaded or in a state of inflammation.

A glue for the source of this inflammation did n't come from his current symptoms but from something he suffered from as a child, NOSEBLEEDS.

Nosebleeds in children are an early sign of gluten sensitivity. 

Using muscle testing I tested his bodies reaction to gluten and sure enough his muscles weakened dramatically to wheat which contains gliadin.

Further testing of his muscles also showed that he potentially had a B12 Deficiency, which often is associated with gluten sensitivity because it prevents the absorption. He had also been suffering from fatigue and increased irritability which are also associated with low B12.

For me to help him, I said, I was not going to lay a finger on you to begin with but my advice was to go gluten free and to get his B12 levels checked with his doctor. This is not the whole solution to his problem but like many before him following this advice he'll start to feel better and he'll begin to fly and start to see the big picture.