Chiropractic Helps Tony Schumacher After 320 MPH Crash - Watch Amazing Video

World champion drag racer, Tony Schumacher was at the peak of his career when his car disintegrated at 320 mph. His wife Cara watched from the stands in horror.

Tony's 8000 horse power engine propelled him from 0 to over 300 mph in 4 seconds until he reached about 1000 feet down the track. Then tragedy struck. The rear wing, which prevents the car from becoming airborne, broke off. The car disintegrated.

When Tony's unconscious body was cut from the roll cage he was unresponsive and he was not breathing. Cara yelled out that she loved him as he was rushed to a waiting helicopter.

Watch the Discovery Health video below:
(Note: The chiropractic portion occurs about 5:30 into the video.)


Tony had suffered numerous injuries and received excellent medical care. Though his injuries were healing well, he was suffering debilitating headaches and dizziness that could end his career and no one knew why. At the recommendation of a friend, Cara took Tony to a chiropractor.

Tony described the result of his chiropractic care this way: "It was amazing, I sat up, every thing was gone, no pain, the color came back to my face and I thought to myself, that is like magic."Soon Tony was back at it and feeling better than ever.

Exercise as Good as Surgery for Knee Pain

An exercise regime is as effective as surgery for people with a chronic pain in the front part of their knee, known as chronic patellofemoral syndrome (PFPS).

PFPS is often treated with arthroscopic surgery, in which equipment is inserted through small incisions in your knee to diagnose and fix the problem. However, there is little evidence that this treatment is the best option.

The study, conducted by researchers at The ORTON Research Institute in Helsinki, Finland, compared arthroscopy with exercise in 56 patients with PFPS.

One group of participants was treated with knee arthroscopy and an eight-week home exercise program, while a second group received only the exercise program.

After nine months, patients in both groups experienced similar reductions in pain and improvements in knee mobility. A follow-up conducted two years later still found no differences in outcomes between the two groups.

The only difference discovered was in cost: those who had received the surgery had to pay over $1,300 more than the exercise-only group.

The researchers concluded that arthroscopy is not a cost-effective treatment for PFPS.

Sources:

Science Daily December 13, 2007
BMC Medicine December 13, 2007, 5:38

Magnets Not Helpful For Pain Researchers Say

Considering magnets for pain? According to research published last month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal: They are probably not helpful.

The study addressed a common patient question, namely "Would magnets help me?" I have generally replied, "Maybe. Maybe not." Though I have never used magnets to treat patients, many of my patients have anecdotally reported improvements with magnets. The researchers point out that this improvement is matched by the placebo (fake magnets) used in the studies. The researchers concluded "magnets cannot be recommended as an effective treatment".

But perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to draw conclusions. Seven years ago I attended a medical conference. It was the 19th Annual Geriatric Research Symposium. The keynote speaker was the world famous opiate researcher, and author of the book "Molecules of Emotion", Candice Pert, Ph.D. One of the memorable speakers attending the symposium was Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., an internationally known researcher. Dr. Rubik, who served as a member of the Advisory Panel to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has focused her career on exploring the strange corners of unconventional medicine. At the conference, she discussed magnets and electrical fields in general. She pointed out that the way lizards regenerate their tails (after researchers cut them off) is by altering the magnetic polarity of the injury site. She illustrated to the group that magnetic fields are almost definitely involved in our healing process as well. The question to her was not IF magnets could work, but rather, what strength of magnet, what polarity, what shape, what placement, and for how long? These questions have never been adequately explored.

In the future, when my patients ask me, "Would magnets help me?" I will still reply, "Maybe. Maybe not." I don't believe we have heard the final word in the magnetic debate yet.

Sources : WebMD, CMAJ

Chronic Pain May Dim Memory

Study Suggests That Chronic Pain Interferes With Memory-Making Process

By Miranda Hitti, WebMD Medical News

May 23, 2007 -- Chronic pain may distract the mind, hampering the memory-making process, according to a new Canadian study.
Learning more about chronic pain's effects on mental skills such as memory may one day lead to new treatments, note the researchers, who included Bruce Dick, PhD, of the University of Alberta.
They studied 24 adults with chronic pain who were in their mid- to late 40s, on average.
The patients' pain had lasted for at least six months. Their pain score was at least 4 on a scale ranging from 0 to 10, with 0 indicating no pain and 10 indicating the worst pain imaginable.
The patients, who were being treated at the university's Multidisciplinary Pain Centre, took memory tests twice -- once after getting a pain-relief procedure such as an epidural injection, and on another day when they hadn't had a recent pain-relief procedure.
The memory tests involved verbal memory (remembering specific words from sentences) and spatial memory (remembering how the letter "J" was shown on a computer screen).
Two-thirds of the patients performed worse on the tests on the days when they hadn't had a recent pain-relieving procedure. Spatial memory was particularly tricky for them, the study shows.
The results didn't seem to be tied to the patients' sleep problems, psychological distress, or age, note the researchers.
"Our findings suggest that pain may disrupt the maintenance of the memory trace that is required to hold information for processing and to later retain it for storage in longer-term memory stores," write Dick and colleagues.
They add that it remains to be seen whether attention training can offset those memory problems.

The study appears in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.

Reprinted from WebMD

Pain Relievers Raise Your Blood Pressure

As you know, drugs sold over the counter (OTC) can be just as dangerous to your health as those sold behind it. Common painkillers like aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen are no exception.
This new study, monitoring the health of some 16,000 male health care workers with no history of hypertension, discovered about one out of every eight patients over a four-year span were more prone to elevated blood pressures, with OTC analgesics as the common link, based on the numbers:
Anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen or naproxin presented the highest risk (38 percent) for elevated blood pressures among those who took OTC painkillers virtually every day, followed closely by acetaminophen (34 percent) and aspirin (26 percent).

The most interesting number of them all: Patients who took at least 15 pain-relieving pills each week elevated their risk for hypertension by almost 50 percent, compared to those who took none.

Remember, the best solutions for treating your pain have nothing at all to do with taking a drug, so don't waste your money or your health on them.


Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 167, No. 4, February 26, 2007: 394-399

EurekAlert February 26, 2007

Source: Mercola.com
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