A stretch exercise program can prevent injuries

Not everyone’s idea of an exercise program will involve running 5km or lifting weights for 1 hour every day.  Everybody’s different.   For example, many of my patients have injured joints or have limited mobility due to pain.  Well, even though these things may restrict physical activity, stretching is a form of exercise that can be done by most people regardless of pain or injury.

Sure, you might think to yourself that stretching is just a warm-up or cool-down from actual exercise.  However, stretching increases flexibility and can be good for joints and muscles.  This is especially important for patients who experience chronic pain because a stretching exercise regimen can be critical to improving overall function and quality of life.  Best of all, you don’t need a lot of money or equipment and everyone can do it.

A good way to start incorporating stretching into your health routine is to plan a 15-20 minute stretching regimen that includes holding stretches for 5-10 seconds and repeating each stretch at least once.  As you progress, you can extended the length of your stretching regimen by holding your stretches for a longer period of time and incorporating more stretches overall.  There are many books and charts with stretches to get you started.  I recommend “Stretching Anatomy” by Nelson & Kokkonen.

Work your way up and you will see how stretching improves your flexibility and strength while decreasing your pain and preventing injuries.  Start stretching today!

Trigger point injections relax muscle spasms

A lot of my patients who are suffering from musculoskeletal pain come to me specifically for trigger point injection therapy.  Pain in these patients may result directly from injuries such as whiplash from motor vehicle accident or can be a result of unknown causes such as in patients with recurring headaches or fibromyalgia.

Trigger points are bands of taut muscle fibers that cause muscle tension and pain.  By using a fine needle and some local anaesthetic, however, you can release the trigger point and reset the muscle fibers back to normal function.  This can often result in tremendous pain relief without risk of side effects.

For more information about trigger point injection therapy, visit my website at www.drvictorchan.com.

Know people who can keep your injuries to a minimum

Injuries are a part of sport.  The training and the competition inevitable results in damage to the body.  In fact, you ask any athlete and they will tell you that they are never 100 percent healthy.

As you pursue higher and higher levels of athletic competition, the various gaps between you and your opponents in terms of talent and dedication become narrower.  So, eventually, the difference between elite athletes comes down to who is more able to prevent and recover from injury.

A strong mind is critical to being able to perform athletically.  At the same time, however, I often find that athletes push their bodies too hard when injured.  Athletes should definitely surround themselves with a trusted team of medical practitioners and get to know about therapies such as prolotherapy that can give them an edge over their opponents and prolong their careers.

A pasta meal the night before can improve your endurance

A common question that I get from athletes is whether or not they should be consuming increased amounts of carbohydrates prior to their endurance event.  This practice is carried about by many athletes and is commonly referred to as “carboloading”.

The idea behind carboloading is to ensure that the muscles of the body have extra glycogen (the sugars that fuel the muscles during exertion).  While some athlete swear the practice of carboloading give them extra energy for their workouts, the fact is that it is probably most beneficial for endurance events (such as marathon running) and can help the muscles to sustain high levels of workload for an extra 30-60 minutes.

The easiest way to do this is to increase the amount of carbohydrate intake and decrease the intensity of exercise during the last week of preparation for the event.  The results may vary depending on the athlete and the practice of carboloading is more appropriate for some athletes than others.  Also, if you are not going to be exerting your body physically for longer than 90 minutes, it is questionable as to whether carboloading would have any effect on your performance.

So, before your run your next big race, consider a nice pasta dinner the night before in order to load up your muscles with some extra glycogen.

Many an athlete has retired prematurely because of bad knees

Your knees take a lot of abuse.  So much so that some say the design of the knees are flawed because there is no way that they can stand up to the years of wear-and-tear that they go through.

Knee pain and injuries are a significant part of my practice and I see a wide variety of different patients with knee problems.  Some are young and have growing pains such as in Osgood-Schlatter’s disease.  Others are older and have various degrees of arthritis and degeneration of the knee joint and may be coming to see what can be done naturally to avoid having knee replacement surgery.

Common conditions I see are related to damage or instability of the connective tissues such as the ligaments or the meniscus.  Also, repetitive strain injuries from sports cause the development of bursitis or tendonitis in the knee.

The good news is that prolotherapy can effectively treatment the vast majority of these conditions.  Prolotherapy is so effective that after courses of successful treatments and healing, I have had several patients who have been able to cancel their previously scheduled knee surgeries.

So before you give up the sports that you enjoy playing or resign yourself to knee surgery, consider prolotherapy as a viable treatment option.

Chronic tennis elbow responds well to prolotherapy

According to Dr. Rodney S. Van Pelt, MD in his article in the Journal Of Prolotherapy, there’s about a 90% success rate using prolotherapy injections in and around the elbow.

Tennis elbow, also known as lateral epicondylitis, results from repetitive forceful extension of the elbow. As the name suggests, this injury occurs very commonly in tennis players who create injury of the extensor tendons by hitting backhand strokes with the racket. The injury is so common, that at least half of all tennis players will experience this injury at some point.

Because tennis “elbow” does not really involve the elbow, but rather the extensor tendons of the forearm, this can be a very chronic injury that is slow to heal. Even resting the arm (which is difficult because the injury almost always involves your dominant arm) often does not help, although supportive athletic straps can redistribute pressure on the affected area.
By using prolotherapy, you can achieve complete tissue repair and eliminate pain that results from chronic tennis elbow.

A number of factors combine to maintain healthy bones

Another gorgeous weekend in Vancouver and a fantastic atmosphere is continuing here as we are half-way through the 2010 Winter Olympics.  The fun is being had by all and you can see flags everywhere from downtown right out to the clinic in Burnaby!  I LOVE IT!!!

The topic of bone health has been cropping up in the clinic a lot as of late.  Most people think that drinking milk and getting adequate calcium is the key to maintaining bone health and preventing osteoporosis.  The truth is that while this has been marketed to the public very effectively, the truth is the bone density is affected more by other factors.

In terms of nutrients, Vitamin D is important.  Particularly in the Greater Vancouver area and the lower mainland, there are significant periods of the winter where there can be very little sunlight.  As a result, your body’s natural production of Vitamin D suffers.  There are many trace minerals that play important roles here too.

Because bones respond to stress, weight-bearing exercise is important to stimulating bone growth.  These types of exercise should be a focus for people at risk for osteoporosis.

Finally, and probably most importantly, the diet plays a vital role in maintaining good bone health.  The benefit comes from alkalinizing the body to prevent calcium and other minerals from being leeched out of your skeleton.  Your bones serve as a reservoir of minerals and they can be depleted if you consume too much pop, coffee, and red meat.  Perhaps your best defense against low bone density doesn’t have to come in the form of a pill, but more like a tasty plate of veggies!

Extreme athletics are hard on joints

The perfect recipe for osteoarthritis is repetitive trauma to your joints.  Well, imagine your knees absorbing the impact of 60 moguls and 2 jumps (each with a force of about 2000 pounds of pressure!) in under 24 seconds.  Now imagine practicing doing that hundreds of times day after day in the pursuit of becoming an Olympic champion.  That’s why it seems to be a forgone conclusion that freestyle moguls skiers like Canadian Olympic gold medalist Alexandre Bilodeau will wind up with premature knee joint damage.

Extreme forces like these cause incredible stress on the ligaments and cartilage in the knees.  That’s why the importance of  treatments such as prolotherapy for athletes and anyone with joint problems is so great.  Visit my website to find out more about how you can stimulate your body to repair your ligaments, eliminate pain, and avoid surgery.

Elite athletes use PRP prolotherapy for injuries

Sorry about the lack of activity on the blog the last couple of days. With the 2010 Winter Olympics kicking off here this weekend, I’ve been running around to the different events and enjoying being right in the middle of it all.
You know athletes will use any means necessary to heal an injury and return to competition as fast as possible. They don’t care about the scientific data collected from randomized control trial studies on various treatments. Athletes care about results. So when a recent Dutch study concluded that platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy was no more effective than placebo for the treatment of Achilles tendon injuries, it isn’t likely to deter athletes from continuing to pursue PRP prolotherapy treatment, especially since there has been so much positive anecdotal feedback from high-perfomance athletes who have been treated with PRP.
One such athlete is Canadian men’s Olympic figure skating national champion, Patrick Chan. However, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is not completely convinced that PRP prolotherapy is not somehow performance-enhancing. The fact is that PRP prolotherapy involves drawing a patient’s blood, spinning it down in a special centrifuge to concentrate platelets and growth factors, and then re-injecting the platelets at the site of ligament or tendon injuries to stimulate tissue repair. It has nothing to do with blood doping which involves reinjecting one’s own red blood cells to increase oxygen-carrying capacity in the blood which can be very advantageous, especially for endurance events.

So, the benefits of PRP prolotherapy are being questioned yet it is also under scrutiny by WADA as being a potentially performing-enhancing procedure. Is it really that hard for people to believe that you can stimulate the body to heal itself without using drugs or steroids? SHEESH!!!

VIDEO – Platelet Rich Plasma

Anti-inflammatories may be damaging your joints

The cover story of the most recent issue of the Journal of Prolotherapy features the connection between ligaments, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (known as NSAIDs), and degenerative osteoarthritis.

Common NSAIDs include Aspirin, ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin), naproxen (Aleve), and Celebrex.  Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is not included in this group of drugs because it is a pain killer but not an anti-inflammatory.

NSAIDs are some of the most commonly used medications.  About 20-30% of elderly people regularly use NSAIDs for conditions including osteoarthritis.  However, long-term use of NSAIDs has many negative side effects including liver toxicity, stomach and gastrointestinal damage, cardiovascular disease, and even death.

The irony is that NSAIDs actually accelerate the arthritis that they are being used for.  They stop the body’s ability to stimulate the building blocks for cartilage in the joints.  This causes the breakdown of joints and the progression of osteoarthritis in your hips and knees, thus increasing the need for more joint replacement surgeries.

Instead of using NSAIDs on a long-term basis to mask the symptoms of joint disease, consider eating a healthier diet free from trans fats, adopting moderate exercise, and using prolotherapy to stimulate joint repair and tissue growth.