Chiropractic Family Center of Brick

MONDAY:    12:00pm – 6:00pm

TUESDAY:    7:30am – 12:30 pm

WEDNESDAY:    7:30am – 12:00pm, 3:00pm – 6:00pm

THURSDAY:    12:00pm – 6:00pm

FRIDAY:    7:30am – 12:30pm

SATURDAY/SUNDAY:    Closed

At the Chiropractic Family Center our number one priority has always been the health and safety of our patients. Often in times of uncertainty, there can be a wealth of misinformation spread, especially in today’s digital age. As a leading healthcare authority in our community, we wanted to reach out to all of our patients regarding the COVID‐19 virus, and to let you know the steps we are taking to alleviate any potential concerns. According to the latest reports from the CDC and other national healthcare providers, the current health risks are minimal for most age groups. We recommend all of our patients to wash their hands frequently, avoid close contact with people who are sick, and stay home if you aren’t feeling well. At the Chiropractic Family Center of Brick we follow strict cleaning policies for the protection of both our staff and our patients. Each staff member maintains rigorous personal hygiene standards as well preparing for every patient interaction. We use hospital‐grade disinfectants across the entire office, with extensive room cleaning after each patient to ensure a safe and clean environment. These processes have always been of utmost importance in our office and will continue to be the standards we uphold for our community. Please rest assured that we are following local and national updates daily, and will continue to maintain the highest level of safety and patient care that you have come to expect. If you have any questions regarding your future appointments, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Please advise us if you have traveled internationally in the last 14 days or have been in close contact with another person who has been diagnosed with or under investigation for COVID‐19, and whether you have a cough, fever or shortness of breath.

Today I am taking the time to urge everyone to be a little more physically active this year. We now live in a time of “man-made” diseases and conditions, which are often self-induced issues made from the result of sedentary lifestyle choices and decisions based on convenience rather than well-being. I am not going to go into depth about which conditions fall into these categories, but if you feel that you can make a change to improve your situation and health, I recommend you do so.

In health, movement is my favorite place to begin with change. It can be as simple and free as just getting up out of your chair and finding something that makes you happy and keeps you in motion. As a bonus, the whole body including your brain, heart, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints crave movement. Not only do they crave it, but they need it to function at their prime. I know that sometimes it may feel as though the body and mind must be pressured, but once moving for a few minutes you will feel energized and ready to keep it up.

One suggestion would be to find something you enjoy doing for 60 minutes a day. (The bare minimum is 20 minutes a day if you feel like an hour is too much as recommended by the American Heart Association). No activity should be continued if you feel like it “truly” hurts. If any movement causes a sharp, shooting pain, the activity should either be modified or you should find something else that you can do. Something is better than nothing. Find an athletic endeavor that is able to keep the body in motion, get the heart pumping, and gives you some level of enjoyment in the form of pride or community with others. Some ideas that I can suggest are: yoga, walking, tai chi, golf, yard work, high intensity workouts, biking, kettlebells, pickle ball, tennis, housework/cleaning, hiking, surfing, and stand up paddle boarding.

Like I stated above, something is always better than nothing. This goes for every day. Everyone is allotted to have one off day, but it should never be two in a row. Please make an attempt for 60 minutes a day, which doesn’t all have to be done all at once, you can split it up through out the day. To us at the Chiropractic Family Center of Brick, this is much more fun than a resolution because this is a life style change that you should stick with for the rest of your life. Good luck and have fun!

Lately at the office, I’ve been dealing with a lot of “gunky” shoulders which have been leading to patients complaining of neck pain, mid back pain and headaches. When I say “gunky” I mean shoulders that won’t go through a normal, full range of motion. Sometimes these issues can be age-related degenerative conditions but, most of the time these “gunky” shoulders are due to faulty postures that have not allowed for full range of motion due to “adaptive complacency”. Adaptive complacency is a coined term signifying when we stop paying attention to stimuli we encounter, we lose control over our health. How this relates to our “sticky” shoulders is that our muscles, ligaments and tendons all tighten to adapt to our poor postures (internally rotated shoulders). This is evident in our stooped, forward postures often seen not only in older population, but also in children and middle aged persons. Today we tend to spend so much time folded forward in our computers, tablets and phones, and the longer we hold these positions, the more fiercely the soft tissue around these joints adapts. These restrictions lead to muscle spasm, pain and/or limitations in ranges of motion the longer they are left untreated. As other muscles are recruited by the brain to make up strength or the range of motion of the affected joint, issue arise above and below the shoulder leading us to believe our shoulder “worked itself out”. A simple way to combat these soft tissue issues is to use the shoulder joint in every degree of motion on a daily basis. Reach overhead, reach behind, touch the opposite top of shoulder blade, then reach the bottom of opposite shoulder blade. If you can’t do these things, try as far as your body will let you just before pain. Over time, you will find yourself reaching further and further. Clean your windows, “wax on/wax off”, scrub the counters. When you go one direction, go the other. If this seems monotonous or repetitious good. If you hate this…good. Go figure another way to achieve the goal of “rolling” the shoulders back and preventing stooped shoulder posture. What I can promise you is that if you sit on Facebook, play video games, crochet, yell at the news/ president from your recliner and don’t give your body some TLC and challenge its ranges and ability, it won’t get better, it’ll get worse. And the longer you wait to do something about it, the longer it will take to bounce back. Hence the saying if you don’t use it, you lose it.