Healthy Gut Girl, Catalina Martone introduces the 6 Week Total Gut Makeover

Living Foods DVD

Living Foods DVD

Add These Exercises To Your Daily Routine For Healing, Rejuvenation and Longevity

Described as an exercising program for “youthing,” The Five Tibetan Rites are a program used by Tibetan monks to live a long, vibrant and healthy life.  The Tibetans claim that these exercises activate and stimulate the seven chakras which in turn stimulate the glands of the endocrine system.  This hormonal network regulates the body’s overall functioning and aging.  The man who brought these Five Rites out of Tibet stated that, “performing the Five Rites stimulates the circulation of essential life energy throughout the body.”  This means that this practice will have a deep impact on the functioning of one’s organs, aging process, physical and energetic systems.

Documented benefits include; “looking much younger, sleeping soundly, waking up feeling refreshed and energetic, release from serious medical problems including difficulties with spines, relief from problems with joints, release from pain, better memory, arthritis relief, weight loss, improved vision, youthing instead of aging, greatly improved physical strength, endurance and vigor, improved emotional and mental health, enhanced sense of well being and harmony, and very high overall energy.”

The routine is similar to a modified yoga series.  Please refer to the following url for the print out of the exercises as well as several modifications if you have injuries that will prevent you from performing some of the moves.

http://www.mkprojects.com/pf_TibetanRites.htm

Thanks and enjoy!

Dr. Charlie Martone

Importance of upper cervical technique with soft tissue work

In my 11 years of practicing various forms of Chiropractic technique with muscle work I have witnessed the importance of upper cervical work no matter what the rehabilitation program is. Adjusting the atlas or the axis has global effects on the movement of the entire spine and the soft tissue must be considered in the surrounding area for the adjustments to hold long term. Adjusting the TMJ as well as segments to include extremities further strengthens the brain body connection.
Adjustments may not hold due to injuries to soft tissue not being addressed. My own personal experience revealed a need to address muscle rehabilitation. My wellness approach advocates cervical, shoulder and pelvic muscle rehab as it makes sense that injuries to the spine can and do result in atrophy and do disrupt ligaments and muscles responsible for maintaining the integrity of the spine. The shoulder and pelvic girdles are the two X axis’ on the long spinal Y axis. Spinal column alignment changes will result in muscle strength changes on both sides of the spinal column, with one side trying to compensate for the other side. If your corrective procedure does not include upper cervical adjusting and muscle rehabilitation involved in the subluxation complexes, there is slim or slower chance of permanent spinal correction. You may get out of pain, but I’m talking about real global spinal changes.
An adjustment to the upper cervical region can incorporate many different styles. A manual adjustment can be performed as associated with an audible release or an unwinding motion with firm specific pressures can also unlock the subluxation complex. Both are extremely effective techniques in correction of this area and correcting forward head positioning and other postural distortions. I will be further elaborating on how the five righting reflexes have a role with the upper cervical subluxations in the next blog.

Athlete’s and Bio-Mechanics

True athletes endure a tremendous amount of physical stress and   unless that is their sole occupation, then they are dealing with juggling work and personal life in addition to proper rest and nutrition.  Most of us fit into this second category where we have our occupations and then we have our physical hobbies that we still train hard in and may even still continue to compete in.  There are a lot of demands on us when it comes to performance, training and work which are often chronic repetitive motions that put significant strain on our bodies.  This makes us perfect candidates for Chiropractic care.

Doctors of Chiropractic are the only healthcare professionals who specialize in the process of correcting spinal misalignments with adjustments.  These adjustments re-energize the nervous system, reduce bio-mechanical stress, and optimize the athlete’s agility without the athlete having to overcome the side effects of drugs or irreversible surgeries.

When injuries occur to the spine or commonly to the shoulders, wrists, knees or neck, the structural balance of the skeletal frame will be altered because the body will have to accommodate this trauma or movement that has occurred.  This can impede the nervous system’s ability to process how to act and re-act.  Actions that you were able to perform “full on” for 10 solid minutes may exhaust you only up to 6 minutes.  Improper structural bio-mechanics will drain your nervous system faster, which is a definite unwanted result for an athlete.

Worm House

So it’s been a few years since I’ve become a nutritionist (a), 🙂 and I have to say, it isn’t until 6 months ago that I really started to “walk the walk”. Partly due to the fact that I had only scratched the surface of the world of health and wellness. It’s amazing how much education you can acquire, and not really know all that much. Being introduced to Quantum Reflex Analysis was the turning point for me. It’s  modality of practice is profound but not as profound as it’s basic concept of what health and wellness really is.

Basically, we, living breathing organisms, require certain nutrients to thrive. Without them we begin to die.

So add to that, that these nutrients should be pure, unadulterated, unaltered, nutrients.  And armed with an abundance of these nutrients we can walk through life battling illness, environmental insult, stress, and the toll on our bodies will be minimum and we should live to the ripe old age of 256! It’s true. The oldest recorded human being lived to be 256, his name was Li Ching-Yuen. And it was reported that he actually chose to die! Because he simply felt like he had done all he needed to do in his lifetime. I believe this is possible. I think our bodies breaking down and dying on us at 60-70 & 80 years old, is simply our bodies giving up because they’ve been running on insufficient amounts of nutrients for too long, unable to battle illness and the overwhelming toxic load that we are all burdened with.  Can you imagine thriving at 256! Okay all of you nay sayers out there. Lets say Mr. Yeun wasn’t 256, lets say he was only 156……STILL….that’s amazing. And the most amazing thing about THAT is, it’s possible. Living that long isn’t an accident. Did I hear someone say, “genetics”? Well then where are all his 256 year old cousins and relatives?

In my quest for health and wellness, I have come across something so basic, so simple, that it makes me question it everyday. It’s not a new diet, it’s not a new fancy drink from the amazon, it’s not a new corefusionpilates. It’s as basic as dirt, in fact that’s exactly what it is.  While Charlie and I were pursuing this new phase of being well, we decided to start our own garden, so we started a worm com-poster. We have to balance the pH in this com-poster or else it gets unwanted critters if it’s too acidic. The things that make it acidic are the same things that make us acidic. Meat, cooked foods, low oxygen, not enough water. And that’s basically it! And that was my realization. No matter how organic and delicious that chicken curry with lentils and raita is or how delicious a 24 ounce porterhouse steak is, if you throw it into the com-poster, you’re going to have a very stinky box of dirt crawling with everything except earth worms. So why should we expect that our bodies are any different? They aren’t, they are made up from the same things on the periodic table that the soil in the com-poster is  made up of. Everything in that ecosystem needs specific pure nutrients to THRIVE. And that’s the word of the day, THRIVE. Can the com-poster survive without thriving? For a while, until it can no longer sustain a healthy environment for it’s residents and then it will be taken over by pathogens, until it peutrifies and dies.

And in case you haven’t made the correlation, I’ll fill in the blanks. When we feed our bodies cooked foods, which we are physiologically not designed to eat (FACT), and we over consume highly acid foods, and we don’t get enough oxygen through exercise, and we don’t hydrate, we open ourselves up to pathogens, cancerous, viral, fungal, bacterial pathogens and our inner ecosystem slowly becomes uninhabitable and we succumb to age, to cancer, to hypertension, to pain and suffering.

We can live a healthy, active life to the ripe old age of whatever you choose.  But it requires purity and commitment.

Cat-

Why we don’t take health insurance….

On our new website (http://www.dedicatedwellness.com) we have a FAQ page. And on this page is a question that asks, “Do we take health insurance”, and the answer to this is of coarse NO. I briefly explain that we are a cash practice and that we will be happy to help anyone with a super bill, which is a self submission way for you to get reimbursed for at least a portion of what your insurance may cover for out of network providers. ANYWAY, my wife and I debated for a bit on whether or not we should go into greater detail about the philosophical  reasoning behind why we don’t take insurance, we decided against publishing it on the site and thought we’d save it for the blog in hopes that we could explain clearly our reasons and also get feedback from you.

I will begin with a fact, my clients who have been with me for years almost all have some form of health insurance that offers chiropractic coverage. However, they all choose to come to me for the same reasons, they get what they pay for. My rates are average in the Chiropractic world and my sessions are much longer than most Chiropractors so really they are getting MORE than what they pay for. Clients come to me as a form of preventative health care and a sort of maintenance for their body like you would take your car for check ups or your clothes to the cleaners, they all view their health as their responsibility. They do what they can to enhance their lives and coming to me helps them to facilitate that.

In my opinion there is something that happens to most people when you take away their right to choose, their decision to be accountable for what doctor they choose, how much one decides to spend on themselves, etc.. When you take away responsibility, people lose the desire to be responsible. I feel as though one of the many reasons our health care system is failing many, is because of this philosophy.

It works the same way for the Doctor who is providing the health care also. The current system creates boundaries for the Doctor, they stand between the patient and the Doctor, for example they decide how much the Doctor should charge, what the Doctor should call his procedures and they determine exactly what each procedure should entail, for example; they give a list of options that I have to use, if everything I provide does not fall under these options they refuse to cover it and because I am an alternative Chiropractor, their options are almost never congruent with what I offer, this puts me in a situation where I am forced to either change my procedure or alter my fee system, both of which are unethical and against my values and beliefs. These boundaries and regulations take the responsibilities out of the Physicians hands, essentially take the practice out of the Physicians hands and becomes a third party filtering the quality of care you are entitled to. 

This is like the cliff notes of our reasoning, and some day I will write a book, but for now, this is the jist. When you come here, to Dedicated Wellness, You and I will decide how your care will go, You and I will decide the method in which you will heal. You will make the choice to pay and get better and I will make the choice to help you. And through this method we will get very very far. 

Their is no way to abuse this system, it works for all parties involved. Everyone here is here because they choose to be.

The Wellness Movement

What a great time this is!!! Huge communities of people all over America are making this shift. Perhaps it’s because of the “failing health care system”. It’s this wonderful choice to become accountable for one’s own health. To start thinking in terms of preventative rather than trying to take care of yourself after you fall ill. It’s a tangled web really, when you think about why the health care system is the way it is. It’s quite political and complicated. But I like the result, it means that we have no other choice but to love ourselves more. And take your health out of the hands of HMO’s and PPO’s. Those that are ultimately deciding what will become of you when you are ill, don’t really care about you and will never care and never have cared. And why should they? They’ve taken on a task that is proving to be useless. YOU  are the only one that will ever care about you. YOU are the only one who knows what you really need. And unless you don’t care at all, it’s time to start educating yourself about how NOT to get sick! And it’s a lot to know. But weigh your options.