Time for a Media Fast?

Have you noticed changes in your children’s personalities -- increased irritability, impatience, even hostility? Or have you seen these issues even in yourself? Do you notice that time seems to slip away from you? Has the contentment and peace you once enjoyed vanished?

Consider the amount of time you and your family spend ingesting the output of our major media: television, radio and printed materials. And if you believe as many do that the media is the source of many psychological ills, try a radical concept that’s gaining popularity: go media-free for thirty or forty days.

You’ve probably heard for years the familiar complaints about the effects of television. Well, the news is that these ill-effects have become more proven and more dire with every passing year. It’s now an established fact that TV watching leads to poor dietary habits, inactivity (and all the resulting health effects, even an increased risk of juvenile diabetes!), and a host of behavior ills, including a greater likelihood of teenaged viewers starting to smoke!

Yet, in our advertising-driven, sensationalistic, 24-hour-a-day news cycles, even the other forms of media can cause stress, anxiety, and a feeling of disconnection from our surroundings. Going “without” these time-wasting, attention-sucking diversions can actually add hours to your day and open up your life to the kinds of enrichments you always wanted to enjoy but “never had the time for.”

Your kids will tell you they’re bored at first, but boredom passes quickly and usually turns into creativity. Soon you’ll find your family taking hikes, playing games, engaging in conversation, and many more truly healthy activities.

Heavy Academic Load

It used to be that a carrying a heavy academic load meant a series of difficult classes. But these days, if your child is like many, he or she is carrying a heavy load of books back and forth from school.
 
Hauling a heavy backpack over one shoulder can worsen pre-existing postural deformities or spinal misalignments. Common sense tells us that a heavy load, unevenly distributed, day after day, can stress a still-growing spine. Consider the old adage “As the twig bends, so grows the tree.”

Compounding these postural distortions is research indicating heavy backpacks (25% of a child’s body weight or more) impair balance and increase slips and falls. In contrast, students who carried packs weighing 15% or less of their body weight were better able to maintain their balance.

If your son or daughter find themselves lugging books back and forth from school, consider these safety suggestions:

1. Make sure the backpack is sturdy and appropriately sized. Special child-sized versions are lighter and have shorter back lengths and widths that reduce shifting.

2. Look for padded shoulder straps to avoid nerve pressure around the armpits and shoulders. Select backpacks with stabilizing waist straps. (Make sure they’re used!)

3. The maximum weight of loaded backpacks should not exceed 15% of the child's body weight. If the pack forces the child to lean forward, it’s too heavy.

4. Avoid loading unnecessary items and balance the contents to prevent your child from assuming an unnatural, compensating posture.

5. Use both shoulder straps. Carrying the backpack on one shoulder may look “cool” but can lead to spinal imbalance.

6. Consult our office for regular chiropractic checkups. We’re experts at detecting and reducing spinal problems in children. Help avoid the often difficult-to-correct problems we see in adults.

Selling Sickness

You’re a publicly traded company. Analysts around the world monitor your stock. Your mandate is to produce a return on the investment made by millions of stockholders. If you fit this description and you manufacture and market drugs, you want as many “sick” people as possible.

If you sell blood pressure medicine, a way to sell more is to constantly lower the threshold of when someone has high blood pressure and supposedly “needs” your medication.

If you sell cholesterol-lowering drugs, you can sell more if you can lower the standard used to ascertain that someone has high cholesterol and has a cholesterol-lowering drug “shortage.”

If you sell medication to artificially alleviate the symptoms of poor digestion, you give it a name (how about acid reflux disease?) and hire a well-known celebrity (who doesn’t use the drug) to tout its benefits. And you sell more drugs. Stockholders are happy.

Many fall victim to the marketing trap set by these huge corporations. Think about it. Their profits come from selling drugs, not curing disease.

Turning more and more aspects of living, whether occasional depression, social anxiety, attention deficit or other symptoms, into a disease or medical condition sells more drugs. Wall Street knows that there’s a lot of money to be made by telling healthy people they’re sick.

You don’t have a drug shortage. Symptoms are merely signs something isn’t working correctly. What controls how your body works? Your nervous system, the true focus of chiropractic care. If you know someone who has been “sold” sickness, encourage them to find out about safe, natural and side-effect-free chiropractic care.