Poor Posture

Transcription

Hello everyone. It's Dr. Aaron Seaton again with The Chiropractic Place. And today, our video is about poor posture. So poor posture typically is rounded shoulders forward, sometimes people are kind of forward with their head from the side, you can kind of see, the ear should be lined up with the shoulder, but it's not. You kind of wanna be more here, but you start noticing in poor posture, people tend to complain about having neck pain, upper back pain, maybe even lower back pain, chronic headaches. Poor posture has a pretty nasty effect on our level of pain that we can have. So the effect that it actually has, not just on spinal stress, but it can actually affect the function of our vital organs. We actually know with forward head posture, we can actually decrease the vital lung capacity, so the amount of oxygen our lungs can take in is decreased by quite a bit with forward head posture. So posture has not just effects on neck pain, headaches, on upper back pain, on lower back pain, it also affects how our organs function.

So they actually did a study on seniors and seniors that had forward head posture really bad, what we call a hyperkyphosis, increased curve in their mid-back. People that had poor posture that were older, had higher mortality rates, higher death rates across all causes of death with poor posture. So we know it is linked to health, and it's important that people learn more about the importance of posture so that they can live healthier lives. Now, causes of poor posture, there are a few, so we're gonna kind of go over those today. Abnormal spinal curvatures. Perhaps somebody had a major fall when they were young that injured their spine, kind of through it out of natural alignment, some people who have scoliosis in their family, sometimes it can be genetic, where they have these curvature issues which affect their posture, so this is a really good thing for us to take a look at when we're looking at someone who has these bad posture habits or poor posture, they're having neck pain, back pain and headaches, what is going on in the curves of their spine, because our spine has natural healthy curves, when you're looking from the front, it should be straight up and down, and when you're looking from the side, we have a curve like this in the neck, a curve that goes down in our mid-back and then a curve back this way in our lower back pain.

So when we are in our office taking digital X-rays on our patients, we can analyze those spinal curvatures and look at them and understand is this curve abnormal or is it normal. So the other thing that can cause poor posture is weak muscles, a sedentary lifestyle, somebody who sits too much. This can really begin to affect your spine because when you're sitting, a lot of the muscles aren't firing as much as we'd want them to, so it puts a lot of stress on the joints and the ligaments that hold the spine together, and over time, that can create this kind of leaning and stretching of those ligaments, and we start to see that poor posture develop. Sitting, obviously a major contributing factor for that, but weak muscles, that's another big one, people not getting enough exercise. Believe it or not, exercise is not just good for our heart, it's really good for our spine, really good for our posture, because we have to use those muscles that hold our spine up if we expect them to do their job.

And a lot of times, this is a conversation we tend to have with our patients after we've seen some good results, their pain levels have gone down, they're doing much better, then we start beginning to discuss, "Hey, now that we've gotten the chiropractic care, we know what we need to be doing moving forward. It's really time we start introducing some exercise back into your regimen to keep you moving properly." Another one, number four, obviously tied to the exercise that we talked about, is overweight or obesity is a major contributing factor to poor posture. We know just the extra weight pulling on the spine, because the spine is loaded with weight-bearing joints. The more weight we have, the more it puts stress on the spine and the quicker that that spine is going to wear out if we have that extra load on the spine. So looking at losing weight can really help these other things as well, help with the curvature issues, help with the neck pain, the back pain, the headaches that we know are associated with poor posture, it makes a big, big difference.

And of course, we're gonna talk about the chiropractic aspect here, because when we start seeing abnormal spinal curvatures, we start seeing things in the spine that aren't moving properly, that are locking up; chiropractors, we call those subluxation. The job of the chiropractor is to analyze and locate these subluxations, figure out where they are in your spine and start correcting them, getting proper motion back in there, restoring that proper motion to help begin to improve that posture. And the other great thing about chiropractic care is when we make adjustments, you have nerves that come out between every single one of these spinal bones, we start taking pressure off those nerves, and those nerve signals go to every single cell in your body, helping your body function at a much higher level. So people who tend to have poor posture, they tend to get great results with chiropractic care, and then as we get great results, we can start talking about, "Hey, let's get some of the weight off you here, let's introduce some better diet habits, let's get you exercising and get you moving," and really begin to correct those poor posture, the underlying causes of that poor posture.

So hopefully, this answers your questions. If you're struggling with poor posture, neck pain, back pain, or headaches, give my office a call, The Chiropractic Place. I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton here in Redding, California.

Call our office today to schedule an appointment to kickstart your healthy life: 530-221-8443