Today I want to talk about something that affects all of us from time to time. We get injured.
I myself have been injured many times. I’ve been an athlete my whole life, I’m very active. Sometimes stuff just comes up.
I actually had a recent injury where I injured my foot and my knee. And you wonder what do I do?
A lot of times when you have an injury, fear can come up.
- What’s this going to mean for me?
- What’s my long term prognosis?
- How bad is it gonna be?
There’s a lot of stuff that comes up and I certainly have those thoughts myself initially. But then I remember that the body is designed to heal itself. That our core nature is to be healthy and that there’s processes in place to repair damaged tissue and to restore function. There’s a natural healthy way to recover faster and have a better long term outcome.
Now, a couple of things that I want to help make you aware of.
How to Recover From Injuries Naturally
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Don’t Treat The Symptoms of the Injury with Medication
Number one is we want to do everything we can to not try to treat the symptom right away. So the most common thing that you would do, if you go to your doctor and you injure something, is start taking pain medications, muscle relaxers, or some type of symptom management thing.
In some cases when it’s very severe or it keeps you from just doing your daily activities, that may be necessary short term, but that is not a recipe for getting healthy and restoring function. In fact, a lot of research has been done that if you take medications for pain it actually slows down the healing process and prevents a full healing because it allows you to put more stress and pressure on an area that really shouldn’t have.
And this will lead to chronic problems.
Decrease Unhealthy Habits … and Increase Healthy Ones
Number two, is you want to start decreasing unhealthy habits. So when your body is trying to heal, it’s especially important to make sure you get a lot of rest and sleep. It’s especially important to make sure that you’re not eating processed foods, sugary foods, toxin laden foods, because now your body has to process the toxins and the stress of the food rather than heal your body.
So when you’re healing a damaged bone, joint, tissue, whatever it may be, you need excess nutrients. You need specific types of proteins, you need amino acids, you need vitamins and minerals. All these things are what’s gonna rebuild that damage.
So whenever I’m going through an injury, I recommend to a patient that they take extra collagen, and extra bone broth. We have a joint health supplement, we have natural anti inflammatory herbal supports.
I make sure I’m drinking more water, at least a gallon of water a day, and then I’m upping all my greens and all my nutrient dense foods.
The quality of the proteins is important. I start taking bone broth protein multiple times per day. This is to give the nutrients to your body that it needs to repair those damaged tissues. That means you’re gonna get better faster.
So I’m taking supplements and nutrients to build my body rather than taking medications or supplements to manage the pain or the symptoms. Big difference in healing now and into the future.
Get Support Through Chiropractic Care and Proper Therapy
You also want to have guidance through somebody who knows what they’re doing. So I’ve been getting more chiropractic care, I’ve been doing more of my home care, but I also work with other practitioners for soft tissue. Sometimes physical therapy to repair the damaged joint.
Because when you have an injury, you want to make sure it starts working properly. The biggest reason why people get reinjured is because they never repair what’s been lost. So anytime you hurt your foot or your knee or your hip or shoulder, it creates a new pattern in your nervous system and it creates a bio mechanical breakdown.
So eventually the tissues will heal and you won’t feel pain or symptoms anymore. But if you don’t fix the process, now it’s gonna be forever changed.
So by doing some rehab exercises, some therapeutic exercises, some soft tissue work, you’re actually able to restore the normal balance sometimes get even stronger than you were before. But that requires outside effort.
So these are the people that you want to be engaging in your care, practitioners that help and support your body, which is a lot of what we do here in the office. But also we’d be happy to share who some of those people are outside of our office.
Maintain a Good Mindset and Focus on Healing
And the last thing is maintain a good mindset. I think this is the hardest part for a lot of people and something I’ve personally struggled with.
It’s easy to think of all the negatives like, now I can’t go snowboarding, now I can’t go do this activity, now I gotta walk around in a boot or I’m limited in some way, and kind of get down on yourself. It’s easy to have the negative come in because that’s kind of our core operating procedure.
What I encourage you to do is look for the positive benefits in this. What are the opportunities now? What are some things that now you’ll be able to do that you couldn’t do before because maybe you have more time or you’re having to think about things in a different way.
- How is this situation gonna make you better overall?
- How’s it gonna improve your empathy for other people?
- How is it going to improve your communication?
- Maybe now you’re having to rely on other people when you wouldn’t before.
Whatever that may be, let’s focus on the positives and the optimism.
Research also shows that if you have a positive mindset, if you focus on healing, you’re actually gonna get better faster and have more positive outcomes.
So we are here to help support you – your team at New Life Chiropractic – and help you with your nutrition. If you have a new injury, let us know about it, we’ll make sure we address it in a proper way.
If you need help outside our office, we’ll make sure we refer you to the proper people. That way you can get better faster. You can get a more full recovery and get back to doing all the things that you want to do as quick as possible.
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If you want to learn more about how you can get to the cause of your pain, stress issues and your health problems and find a natural drug free solution check us out online or call the office. We have hundreds of videos on our Youtube channel that you can look at and there’s all kinds of other resources that we post to other social media channels to help you live a healthier life, naturally.
Have you had the opportunity to join us at one of our community education events yet? During the community education events, Dr. Tim sifts through all of the knowledge out there to bring you key information about how to get healthy and stay that way and shares answers to frequently asked questions on chiropractic care and healthy eating. Contact our office to learn about upcoming classes. Enjoy the clips of previous events here.