My name is Dr. Alex Hernandez and today we are going to talk about knee injuries. We want to start out by talking about the two most common knee injuries: meniscus injury and ligament injury.
Now, we want to explain a little bit about what meniscus is. Meniscus are soft discs on each side of the knee, the outside and inside. Meniscus injury usually happens in soccer practices, soccer games, tennis, and any kind of activity that involves a lot of twisting. The reason we get this kind of injuries is because we over stress the meniscus, and when the meniscus is over stressed, they can tear. When we tear this cartilage this will usually give people the sensation of pain when turning the knee or walking upstairs. This is the number one type of knee injury.
The second most common type of knee injury we are going to talk about is ligament injury. We have a ligament inside the knee and we have a ligament outside the knee. These are the ligaments that get commonly injured. This typically happens in contact injuries like in soccer, a leg gets hit and the knee goes inward or outward. A very common thing that happens is that you sprain these ligaments and then you end up getting pain.
The last thing I want to talk about is the famous ACL tear. This ligament is very commonly injured and this is probably one of the most common injuries in football and soccer. This causes instability of this ligament when it has torn completely. This often requires surgical intervention.
But, as far as meniscus injuries and ligament sprains, chiropractic care can help. We’re here, we’re experts at spine and sports injuries. So if you have any questions about knee injuries, feel free to contact Chiropractor here at Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture.
What is Carpal Tunnel surgery? That is when they basically do surgery in the wrist because somebody is experiencing numbness and tingling of the hands that is causing them to drop things and lose strength. Today we’re going to talk about if you should you do this procedure or if you should you do conservative treatments like chiropractic treatment for carpal tunnel.
So to address Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, obviously the first thing we do is we get a good case history of what the person is feeling, how they got their Carpal Tunnel symptoms, which include numbness, tingling, and burning that travels sometimes from the neck and affecting the wrist. People pay attention to what is happening to the wrist but they don’t focus on the root cause, which is pinched nerves in the neck, radiating down to your hand and creating those symptoms.
Today I decided to show you an x-ray of somebody who is experiencing Carpal Tunnel symptoms. The x-ray is the person’s face and neck from the front. We can obviously see that the neck is crooked, this person is experiencing pain on the right hand side of the body. The spine, all the bones of the neck, have shifted out to the right side. So this is creating the numbness and tingling going down this person’s hand.
So a brief anatomy of what happens here is when we look at the nerves in the neck, there’s a bundle on the left and a bundle on the right. So if you’re pinching the nerves, you can get symptoms radiating down into your hand. This bundle of nerves travels down to the arm and can produce those Carpal Tunnel symptoms.
So, what to do? Let’s analyze and see what’s happening with the person’s neck. In order to get to the root cause of the problem, we take it from the top, from the root cause, and many many times the problem is that the nerves are being pinched.
Are there times we do have to do a surgery? Absolutely. There are times when you have just damaged this nerve so much that it’s irreparable. For example, something heavy dropped onto your wrist and you crushed the nerve; that’s an appropriate time to do a Carpal Tunnel surgery. If you’ve had the problem for so long and you already tried chiropractic, acupuncture, physical therapy and you’ve exhausted all of that, then it may be time for you to do Carpal Tunnel surgery. But for the most part in general, there are a lot of these cases which can be solved by simply looking at the root cause which is, what is happening in the neck.
So if you have any questions about Carpal Tunnel syndrome or you need to know more information. Contact us and make an appointment and we’ll see how we can help you out. Thank you.
Dr. Alex Hernandez explains how you get disc herniation and how to treat it.
Disc herniation can happen in many ways, such as car accidents, contact sports injuries, falls. One of the most common ways to get a disc herniation is to pick up something heavy while twisting your back. Another common way to herniate a disc is to reach into the backseat of your car to pick up a heavy back pack.
The disc is a jelly-like substance in-between each of the bones in your spine. The discs are like the shock absorbers in your car. But, if the force is too high, the disc squeezes out and compresses, usually to the back but sometimes to the side. When that happens it will squeeze the nerve causing severe pain, tingling, or numbness. When this pressure is put on the nerves, people can become immobile.
How do you get better? You must have training in disc herniations because they range in severity from mild to severe. Some disc herniations require surgery or injections. However, about 80% of disc herniations can be treated by a chiropractor conservitavely through chiropractic treatment, laser therapy, swimming, acupuncture, and other treatment programs.
Good morning, my name is Dr. Alex Hernandez, Chiropractor here at Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. Today, we’re going to talk about headaches and the topic today is: "Why in the world am I getting all these headaches?"
So, we’re first going to show what happens in our computer program. There is a bundle of nerves in your neck, it goes to both the left and the right side. The bundle of nerves also shoots straight up, and they go into the head. So you've got nerves that control your face, you've got nerves that control the eyes, and you've got nerves that also control the functions in your brain.
Now, many people have headaches and they have no clue why in the world they’re getting them. People think that getting a headache two or three times a month is normal. No it’s not, headaches are not a normal thing. So we like to find out the cause of headaches. And one of the things that we’ve studied is what is happening with the neck.
I’m going show you a pretty bad x-ray of a patient who has had a lot of headaches for many, many years. We decided to take an x-ray of his neck, here’s his head, these are the bones, this is the clavicle. And obviously you can see here that this neck is not straight. The green line is where the neck is supposed to be, and the red line is where this patient’s bones in the neck are. You can see it’s really, really out of the line. There are eight bones shifted out of place. If you walk around with a neck like this, you’re bound to experience a lot of neck pain and a lot of headaches.
So, as a chiropractor we are trained to detect and find out the cause of these headaches. In research studies, about 83% of headaches are caused because of neck problems. This examples classifies as one of those. So what we do here at our office is we help to realign these bones. Once we realign the bones to the center, then these nerves can communicate properly across the neck and through the brain.
Good morning, my name is Dr. Alex Hernandez, here at Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. Today we are going to talk about Whiplash. Many people have heard of whiplash and it commonly occurs in car accidents and sports injuries.
Let's talk about what whiplash is exactly. With whiplash the head can snap forward or backwards and in the process there are injuries. You can tear muscles, ligaments or injure the spinal cord or nerves. Everything happens quickly with whiplash.
In a car accident that happens at 9.5 mph, a lot of injury can occur even when not a lot happens to the car. At Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture this is what we do for this:
Good morning, my name is Dr. Alex Hernandez, Chiropractor here at Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. Today we are going to talk about . Most people understand whiplash from car accidents when we get rear-ended or hit from the side or front.
In a whiplash accident our head gets whipped very violently. So you get injuries to the muscles and tendons in the neck and you can injure the nerves in that area. When the head whips forward, you can also get injuries in the spine and depending on how violently your head whips forward you can also cause injury to the ligaments in the spine.
Many experience "whiplash headaches" because of the injury to the brain. This is called Mild-traumatic brain injury" which can cause headaches or concussion. In a car accident everything happens in less than a second. But we can show you what occurs in the neck. You have a bundle of nerves on the right and left side of hte neck that can be injured. When they are injured this can cause pain, numbness or tingling even down your sides.
So if you have been in a car accident or have suffered a sports injury that has caused whiplash it is important that you are seen.
So, today I decided to show you an X-ray for a patient who suffers from extreme neck pain and we are going to see why. It is pretty evident. This gentleman has been experiencing pain for about a year. When you look at the X-ray you can see the basic structures. The green line is the normal way the spine should be in alignment. But, you can see that the spine is straight but then goes off to the right. there are seven bones in the neck that are out-of-place. So, of course you are going to get neck pain when the neck looks like this. Why? When the neck is crooked that way the nerves on the side get pinched.
When you pinch these bundles of nerves you are going to get pain. If you want a solution, it is important that you get proper X-rays and a proper assessment. If you want help with neck pain, give me a contact me at Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture.
Today, Dr. Hernandez focuses on the topic of inside ligament sprains. We invite you to listen and read along with Dr. Hernandez as he discusses this subject and provides insight about how chiropractic treatment can offer the most expedited path to healing inside ligament sprains. We take this moment to inform you that Life Chiropractic here in North Bergen, NJ treats a host of various sports injuries as well as a long list of back and neck injuries. Of course, we invite you to contact us anytime to learn the specifics of our approach to treat your specific ankle injury. Now, on to Dr. Hernandez’s video.
Alright everyone, Dr. Alex Fernandez here from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. What I want to discuss today is the common inside ligament sprain. In a previous video I talked about the outside sprain, which is the very common one. And today I want to talk about this inside ligament sprain. This is not as common, but it’s very painful. And basically, what happens is, let’s say you’re playing soccer and you decide to kick the ball and your ankle rolls inward. OK, so this is the inside ankle sprain. When you roll inward, you actually sprain one of the big ligaments here in the ankle - which, we’re going to look at in this poster. It’s very clear, this white ligament. This is part of the deltoid ligament. You have one right behind it, which is the posterior tibiotalar ligament. And then you have one more in this area.
Now, a very big, very strong ligament, and it does take a lot of energy to sprain your ankle this way. You got the calf muscles, they’re going to protect you, but the mechanism of this is similar to the one where you roll your ankle upward. And basically, what happens, once again, you have all the ligament fibers that are nicely in place. When you roll your ankle in, the ligament stretches, and it sprains, and then the fibers will pull out. Once again, if you leave your ankle to heal this way, it will become a weak ankle, and this is where the myth and where everything people say once you sprain an ankle, you sprain it over and over and over again. The reason for that is if you did not correct it, you left it this way, and now you’re walking around with a weak leg and with a weak ankle which you can sprain very easy the next time around.
So, on the next video I will show you exactly how to fix this injury so you can get back to playing the game that you love or the sport that you love.
Today, Dr. Hernandez focuses on the topic of inside ankle sprains. We invite you to listen and read along with Dr. Hernandez as he discusses this subject and provides insight about how chiropractic treatment can offer the most expedited path to healing inside ankle sprains. We take this moment to inform you that Life Chiropractic here in North Burgen, NJ treats a host of various sports injuries as well as a long list of back and neck injuries. Of course, we invite you to contact us anytime to learn the specifics of our approach to treat your specific ankle injury.
Now, on to Dr. Hernandez’s video.
Alrighty, Dr. Alex Fernandez here from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. Today, I want to discuss the mechanism on how we’re gonna fix an inside ankle sprain, and provide you with a review on basically what an inside ankle sprain is. Basically it’s when we roll our foot inward. So, let’s say that we’re running and we’re kicking a soccer ball and we got stuck on the turf. Or we’re running and we hit a small puddle and our foot rolls inward this way. This creates the sprain in the inside aspect of the ankle which is called your deltoid ligament. And the deltoid ligament, if we look closely, it’s a pretty large ligament in here. It also has a smaller ligament in this area - two smaller ones, and they’re all known as the deltoid ligaments.
So, I’m going to demonstrate here what we do to actually fix this thing. So, thce first thing I start out with is regular range of motion of the ankle. We go up and down and we go side to side. And we ask the patient which direction is causing you pain. When you have an inside ankle sprain, most of the time if I do this, it will generate pain to the patient and I know this is where the ligament injury is located. Usually they’ll be okay with me bringing it this way but not this way. And again, one of the ways we fix this is we begin with our soft tissue instruments, and we begin working the ligament throughout that whole alignment as you saw right in this area here. Ok? So we work all the fibers in all direction where there is pain. And as we do this we’re focusing on the major ligament, and we’re also focusing on this piece back ligament in here.
Now, the big question is: How long does it take to heal this ligament? Anywhere between four to six weeks before we can get somebody back to their function. The ligament takes a little bit longer per se to heal, but between four to six weeks, utilizing this, and of course one of our secret weapons is laser therapy. Ok? Laser therapy, what we’ll do is we’ll shine the light right into the ligament, in the frequency setting. And as we shoot this light, it’s going to allow the ligament fibers to heal a lot faster. So I can get you back to running, I can get you back to soccer, basketball, whatever your sport is, we get you back running.
So once again, four to six weeks, and that’s usually the therapy that we do here successfully. So until next time.
We continue our education series blog posts today with Dr. Fernandez breaking down exactly what is the sciatic nerve, what it looks like, and how you can fix it. This is part of our continuing public service designed to educate the general public about how and why Americans increasingly include chiropractic treatment in their pain management care plan. Dr. Fernandez owns and operates Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture serving Newark, North Bergen, and the surrounding areas.
Today, after Dr. Hernandez describes exactly what the sciatic nerve is, he’s going to explain to you the most common ways that people injure the sciatic nerve. He’ll follow that with a discussion about how chiropractic services combined with postural correction services offers a non-surgical solution to virtually every form of sciatic pain. Of course we welcome any and all of your questions regarding the treatment of sciatic pain, or for that matter, or neck, spine, or foot pain that robs you of a pain free quality of life.
Now, on to Dr. Hernandez’s video.
Alright, good morning everyone! Dr. Alex Fernandez from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture. Today I want to explain to you about the famous sciatic nerve. What it looks like, how you can fix it, and what causes these kind of sciatic pain problems.
So let’s look at some very basic anatomy. We’re here looking at the back of this person. Here’s the spinal cord, and you could see the sciatic nerve traveling down the butt, down the leg, right below the knee, and then it splits into two nerves, and then goes all the way down to your foot. This is the anatomy of the sciatic nerve. We have two sciatic nerves, one on the right side and one on the left side.
Now, I’m going to take you to the computer here. We’re going to see how this nerve distributes from the low back and travels down the legs. So again, left side and the right side. Sciatic nerve is very thick, it’s about this thick. So it has a lot of pain fibers which creates the pain that most people experience.
Now, how do people get these kind of issues? Why do they get sciatic pain? Number one, they do some heavy lifting in an incorrect way. So they go and they bend, and they pick something up, and then they twist. That can create sciatic pain. If we look here again at our poster, a disc herniation can press into the back of the spinal cord, and it can pinch that nerve as well. So, you can herniate a disc with trauma. You can fall down a ladder, you can fall down the stairs, you can get involved in a car accident, and that will create sciatic pain. One of the common things that I see in the winter is when people are shoveling snow. So when they’re shoveling snow, they’re picking up a lot of weight, and then they’re twisting their body to throw the snow. They can get sciatica. I see this here often throughout the winter time.
Now, what can you do about it? Chiropractors are very trained in taking care of sciatic pain. When you come to the office we’ll do an evaluation, we’re gonna examine what’s going on in your low back. We’re also gonna examine which sciatic nerve you have pain. We do special tests where we’re targeting to see what is causing the pain at the sciatic nerve. After we do our examination which includes taking your history, then we’ll take an x-ray. We’ll see if your misalignment is either to the left, is either to the right, and if it’s creating that kind of problem. So after we do the thorough examination, after we do the x-rays, then we’ll be able to tell you exactly how to fix your sciatic nerve.
Sometimes it can take up to four, six, or eight weeks for your sciatic nerve to heal. That’s typically the time that is taking me to get somebody to heal from a sciatic pain. So I hope that helps and provides value for you.
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