Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
Functional medicine means identifying earlier signs of stress on all of your organs and
tissues early enough that you can usually correct them with natural options instead
of waiting until you might need surgery or very likely ending up dependent on pharmaceuticals
for the rest of your life.
Do you know what the two most important things you and anyone you love can do to enhance
their health are?
Anybody?
The quality and quantity of the food you eat and the level of physical activity you incorporate
into your daily life.
These are almost always the two most important things anyone can do to enhance their health
and prevent and reverse chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, reduce your risk
of most of the things people end up sick and debilitated with as they get older.
And this is simply because most disease conditions are caused by things like stress, identifiable
nutrient deficiencies, lousy food, lack of exercise and general neglect.
So if you want to be truly healthy, you have to take responsibility for your own health.
But you don't have to do it alone.
You don't have to do it on your own.
I'm here to help.
And the functional medicine part, often the focus is on the results of when you go, when
we get your tests back, very often I will recommend some supplements because most people
have nutrient deficiencies, significant nutrient deficiencies that they just don't, they don't
know about it.
Most doctors don't test for these things.
And identifying specific nutrient deficiencies, deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals
and fatty acids and enzymes, things that your body is dependent upon, not to survive.
You can survive, a lot of millions of people survive without them, but they don't necessarily
thrive.
If you want to thrive, if you want to live long and live well, then getting tested, identifying
nutrient deficiencies and repleting them, correcting them, restoring them is really
the best way to do that for most people.
Today we're going to talk about a little bit more about blood pressure.
That was the focus of the last couple of shows, but I've got just a few more things to talk
about that.
But I had a question come in from a listener about menstrual cramps.
Somebody I called and asked if I could, or emailed me and asked if I could help someone
with menstrual cramps.
And the answer is yes.
I've helped, I don't know, I don't have a count, probably off the top of my head, probably,
I don't know, two or three dozen at least patients over the years with menstrual cramps.
I see a lot of, well, people of all ages, I treat newborn infants because a lot of times
infants who are colicky or crying or for no reason or who can't sleep or not eating properly
have tension in their neck, so that's one end of the spectrum.
And I have patients that are 100 years old or even older, especially people who have
people surprised.
I mean, obviously, if you don't know, anybody at any age can do the blood work that I talk
about all the time, and infancy all the way to as old as you live.
But I also have, you know, patients 100 years or older that come in for non-force chiropractic
because even if they have severe arthritis or severe osteoporosis, I don't do any snapping,
cracking or popping, so I can and do literally treat people of any age for physical complaints
as well as metabolic issues that show up on blood tests and other diagnostic testing.
So I don't have a lot of teenagers, for example, or younger women or just, well, women in general
of any age who are menstruating that come in to me specifically for menstrual cramps
because they just, I'm not the first person they're going to think of if they have that
issue, I guess.
But people who, I guess, so probably mostly people who are here for other reasons, other
physical complaints, neck pain, back pain, things like that, or perhaps come in for a
functional workup if they're, you know, still in their menstruating years, will, I ask them
always, it's on the questionnaire, I'll ask them if they have menstrual pain or heavy
flow, you know, the details of that and whether or not everything is problematic or smooth
sailing or somewhere in between, and so sure, yeah, lots of women, I mean, menstruation
is never going to be painless, rarely is it completely painless.
I've never experienced it obviously, but based on a survey of hundreds of menstruating women,
it's usually, you know, pretty uncomfortable, at least for the first two or three days,
but sometimes much longer, sometimes it's severely painful, that's important to know
about and sometimes it's just painful for way too long, much longer than just the first
two or three days of the cycle, and that's not normal.
So if you've been told that's normal, it's not.
If you think it's normal because that's been your experience for years, that still doesn't
make it normal.
If you know 20 people who have the same experience, that doesn't make it normal.
Normal is normal human physiology, the fact that something is common even doesn't make
it normal.
Because a lot of common things happen, lots of people are overweight, that doesn't make
it normal, lots of people have anxiety and depression, doesn't make it normal.
So if you have, or if someone you love has severe menstrual cramps or, you know, just
any discomfort with their menstrual cycle that they suspect is worse than it could be,
then yes, I often can help them.
And how do I do that?
Well, menstrual cramps are the result of the sloughing off of the lining of the uterus.
So you're literally shedding living cells and the bleeding that goes along with that,
and so that's always going to involve some pain.
But sometimes, often, people who have severe menstrual cramps, that's almost always caused
by spasm of muscles, spasming of the muscles of the uterus, spasming, spasm of muscles
in the abdomen next to or near the uterus, spasm of the muscles of the abdominal wall,
spasm of the psoas muscle.
Most people have never heard of the psoas muscle, and when I show it to them on a model,
when I do an exam, the psoas is spelled the Greek, it's a Greek word, so it's spelled
P-S-O-A-S.
The P is silent, psoas muscle.
This is a muscle, it's one of your core muscles, it's a hip flexor, it lifts your legs when
you're climbing stairs.
It's right next to your spine, so it's really deep inside.
You can't feel it from the back because there's other muscles in the way, but you can feel
it if you gently, deeply stick your fingers into your belly, going kind of a 45 degree
angle towards the spine.
You can palpate or feel whether or not there is tension in that muscle, and a lot of people
are surprised.
Well, anytime someone has tension in that muscle, they're always surprised about it
because they didn't even know that muscle existed, and it is a very common place to
carry tension, emotional tension, the tension from stress.
If you're stressed by anything, including a normal menstrual cycle, then you can have
spasm in the psoas muscle, in the uterus, in the abdominal wall muscles, near the surface
of the abdomen, all the way around, front to back, and even in the walls of the muscular
linings of the intestines.
So your intestines have several layers to them as well, the connective tissue that makes
the structure of the pipe itself, then a muscular layer that provides the contractions to move
through, move food through the intestines, and then the innermost lining that does all
the absorption of the nutrients and where the microbiome that you hear about all the
time hangs out.
So if you have spasm in any of these muscles, that can be often the overlooked cause of
severe menstrual cramps.
People know cramps are muscular, but it's not always just the uterus, and even if it
is, there are ways to get the uterus to realize that it's cramping more than necessary.
Sometimes a little cramping is normal when the first part of the cycle starts to help
flush out the endometrium, the lining of the uterus, but sometimes it just gets stuck on
or it's cramping too much or because of stress that normal muscle contraction that is there
for a reason just gets overdone and your brain is hardwired to that muscle.
It's constantly getting feedback in real time, in nanoseconds, feedback going up and down,
up and down between your brain and every muscle in your body.
And that means that there is always a way to see if your brain is still fully communicating
with that muscle.
Well, if the wires are always there, if the communication is always available, then how
could your brain not be communicating with any of your muscles?
Well, because your body is constantly switching between one mode and another.
One mode is to contract muscles to do a job, in the case of menstruation to flush out the
lining of the intestines.
But your body also wants to protect itself from any perceived threat, anything that seems
that it might be a threat to your survival or might be about to tear a muscle.
And your body's natural reaction to that is to tighten up a muscle to protect it, to keep
it from tearing.
And often the result of that is a muscle spasm or, you know, in the medical profession, especially
people, doctors who are not chiropractors don't understand that chiropractors and body
workers use the word spasm a little bit differently.
It's sort of a continuum.
You can have a continuum of muscle spasm.
If you go to an orthopedist and they do a physical exam, they think spasm means full-on,
100% contraction of a muscle or nothing.
And there's obviously, you know, that's not how muscles work.
There's gradations of spasm, gradations of muscle contractions that are abnormal.
So I'm going to use the word spasm to mean any contraction of a muscle that's not normal,
that's not necessary for the normal function of that muscle or that part of the body.
So this happens in the uterus and other muscles in the abdomen.
They get stuck on and that's what causes this horrendous pain that's very, very difficult
to get rid of.
And there's always a way to get those muscles to relax.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
So how am I going to help someone if you yourself or someone you know, someone you love who
has abnormal or severe or just way too much pain during their menstrual cycle, how do
I help someone with menstrual cramps or with other problems with their menstrual cycle?
Well, with the pain part at least, the most important thing is to check for tension on
the spine.
So these muscles that become tense and then get sort of stuck on for no reason, that account
for most of the pain, most of the cramping, cramping anywhere in your body, is a sign
that there's a lack of the ability for your brain to normally relax a muscle when it should
be relaxed.
Instead of, it's fine, all your muscles should be able to contract whenever they need to,
but they should also be able to relax whenever they need to.
All muscles in your body should be able to relax whenever they need to.
All muscles in your body should completely relax.
Ideally, when you're not moving, if you're just, if you're sitting, you need a few muscles
to hold you upright to keep from slumping over, but if you're lying flat on your back
in bed or on the floor, every muscle in your body should be relaxed.
Except for your heart, of course, to pump your blood and your diaphragm and some rib
muscles to breathe, every other muscle in your body should be, ideally, completely relaxed.
So if any muscle in your body is not completely relaxed, if it's cramping, including menstrual
cramps, then the first order of business is to see if there's tension on this membrane
that surrounds the brain and the spinal cord.
So that's how non-force chiropractic works.
People ask me that all the time.
How can you do chiropractic without any force?
I thought chiropractic means cracking your neck and cracking your back.
No, chiropractic means done by hand.
Anything a trained, licensed doctor of chiropractic does with his hands to release tension from
your spine is, by definition, chiropractic, because chiro means hand, practic means done
by, chiropractic.
So non-force chiropractic, you can actually get tension released throughout your spine
by first identifying tension on the membrane that surrounds your brain and spinal cord.
Your brain and spinal cord are about the consistency of overcooked pasta or jello, even.
Very delicate.
And so they're very well protected.
The brain and the spinal cord are surrounded by a fluid-filled sac called the meninges.
It's plural because there's three layers to it, but it's basically like a water balloon
up in the skull, filled mostly with the jello brain with a sleeve-like extension that goes
all the way down to your tailbone, and it surrounds the brain and the spinal cord.
The fluid inside is the cerebrospinal fluid.
That's what doctors check when they do a spinal tap.
That is where the medicine goes for an epidural around that sac.
And so tension on that membrane is identifiable on a physical exam.
And there are non-force methods of releasing that tension, identifying it and releasing
it.
And when we do that, it makes it easier for, number one, any other treatment you might
be doing, stretching, exercises that you might be doing.
It makes massages work better, last longer, a whole host of things.
But I always start with that because everything else works better when you restore the communication,
the ability of your brain to fully communicate with every muscle in your body.
And how's the best way to know?
What's the best way to know if that's working or not?
All of your muscles stay relaxed when you're not using them.
If your shoulders are up or around your ears and your neck and shoulders are hunched forward
and tight, if any muscle anywhere in your body is tight when you're not intending it
to be, then there's been a loss of communication because your brain always wants to relax your
muscles when you're not using them because keeping them tense is a waste of energy.
When you have tight muscles anywhere in your body, it wastes a lot of energy.
It can contribute significantly to fatigue, to tiredness, to a sensation of just having
a lack of energy because you're wasting all this energy unconsciously, unintentionally,
maintaining these tight muscles throughout your body.
So that is almost always reversible.
It's always reversible to a certain extent and often completely reversible by identifying
the tension, which muscles are tight, sending signals to the brain.
It's kind of hard to describe, but it's very easy to demonstrate, sending signals to the
brain that enable it to figure out that this muscle is tight and doesn't need to be.
So that also works.
We've been talking about menstrual cramps today and identifying tension.
It's not so easy to relax the uterus itself, but you usually don't need to.
Oftentimes the persistent cramps are in muscles nearby the uterus, in the psoas muscles that
are on either side of the spine, right next to the uterus, in the abdominal wall muscles
on the surface of the abdomen, and even in the muscular layer of the intestines.
So these are all muscles in the abdomen around the uterus that can hurt.
A lot of people experience the muscles when they're having really bad menstrual cramps,
they feel it in their back.
So the back muscles that can refer spasming in the uterus can refer pain and cause the
muscles in the back to spasm as well.
And this is also partly to do with the way the nerves work.
So all the nerves in your body start out in your brain.
There are 12 pairs that stay up in your head called the cranial nerves that go to your
eyes, ears, nose, and throat.
All the rest of them come down through the hole in the base of your skull and the brain
stem then becomes your spinal cord.
Spinal cord goes all the way down to the tailbone and nerves branch off from both sides of the
spinal cord in your neck, in your back, in your low back, in your tailbone area to travel
to all the other parts of your body.
So if there's tension on any of those nerves, again, interfere with your brain's ability
to relax those muscles that would otherwise stay relaxed.
So identifying tension in these muscles I'm talking about, identifying tension in the
psoas muscle, in the back muscles, in the walls of the, in the linings of the intestines,
and in the abdominal wall near the surface tension can be identifiable.
You can feel it, technically called palpation on a physical exam.
It's very easy to identify whether or not there is tension there, either there is or
there isn't.
And if there is, then relaxing those muscles will often alleviate the menstrual cramps.
So that's what I do in the office.
That's very effective.
I can't think of any patient I've had that had really bad muscle cramps that we weren't
able to completely reverse it, to completely change their experience, to reduce their,
if they're having, if their menstrual cramp pain is more than the first couple of days
or if it's a 10 out of 10 as opposed to a five or a six, almost every time, I can't
think of a time basically that we can't, nearly every time, I can't think of an exception,
can almost always find some pattern of tension that's different for everyone, but some pattern
of tension in these muscles around the area of the abdomen in the back that are tight,
that are effects of a menstrual cycle that's triggered spasms and tightness in muscles
that doesn't need to be there.
There's nothing to protect.
There's nothing that your body needs to use a tight muscle for.
They just get stuck that way.
And when we find those and release them, then the pain goes.
And I can then show you some, usually some stretches or some things that you can do at
home to keep them relaxed.
So let's talk about that.
Anything, anyone can relax the muscles of the abdomen, the lower abdomen, especially
if they're having severe muscle cramps by simply using moist heat.
So my favorite way of using a form of moist heat is called a hot cherry pillow.
I carry those in my office.
You can look them up online, hot cherry pillows.
They're the best.
They have their denim bags, red denim cloth bags, handmade by a woman owned business in
Santa Barbara.
I love supporting her.
And they're filled with washed cherry pits from the cherry industry.
And when you put them in the microwave, this little bag in the microwave for about three
or four minutes, they heat up and they actually absorb moisture from the air.
So they always come out moist.
Even I have some of them that are 10 years more older or more, and they always come out
of the microwave moist.
And for those of you who don't have a microwave, you can also heat it up on low heat in an
oven or even a toaster oven on 160, 200 degrees.
Low heat takes a little bit longer.
So yeah, that's a great form of moist heat.
But if you have an electric heating pad, that's fine too, or a hot water bottle or any kind
of thing that you heat up.
That's fine.
They don't work quite as well.
If you're going to use an electric heating pad repeatedly, I strongly recommend heating
the electric heating pad up full blast till it's fully heated, then turning it off and
putting it on your body and covering it with some thick towels or blankets to retain the
heat if you're going to use it repeatedly so that you're not getting the EMFs, the electromagnetic
frequencies unnecessarily from an electric heating pad repeatedly.
So heating, moist heat, any kind of heat directly on the abdomen is a great way to relax cramps
in any part of the abdomen for menstrual cramps, for the cramps in the muscles of the abdominal
wall near the surface where you can feel near the outside of your stomach hurts, relaxing
your back muscles.
If you have a sharp pain in your back, that's when you want to use ice instead.
I'll even have people do both.
So if you have severe back pain and pain in your stomach at the same time, lie on your
back, put an ice pack underneath your back to calm the inflammation that inevitably accompanies
pinched nerves and pain in your back, and then put the heat on your abdomen on top.
So you're relaxing the muscles, the abdominal muscles and the psoas muscle that I was describing
earlier, and even the uterus itself.
Even the gallbladder, people who are having gallbladder attacks can relax the spasm of
the muscular walls of the gallbladder by putting a warm heating pad on their abdomen.
And then if you have back pain at the same time, put an ice pack, a soft ice pack underneath
your back.
And if that doesn't work, then obviously you come in to see me.
I've helped lots of people with severe menstrual cramps.
I'm thinking of a particular of a teenage girl who came in one time whose cramps were
so severe that she was expressing wanting suicidal ideation is the technical term.
She was, I don't know, her mother found out about it from a friend of hers or a sibling
or something.
They were so bad, she literally wanted to die.
And she'd been to doctors, she'd been to her pediatrician, family doctor, nobody, they
gave her pain meds that would stop the pain temporarily and muscle relaxers.
That's the typical medical therapy.
But muscle relaxers and painkillers have side effects.
Muscle relaxers make you drowsy and just feel sort of woozy and painkillers, you hear it
in the news all the time, painkillers are addictive, most of them.
And so none of those are really long term solutions.
And there is a long term solution.
So anyway, this teenager, she had, I was talking about this psoas muscle, I'm sorry most people
don't know what that is.
You can Google it, look up the psoas muscle.
It's a Greek word spelled P-S-O-A-S.
She had a severe spasm in her psoas muscles on both sides.
And that was making, that was most of the cramps that she was feeling during her menstrual
cycle was from spasm in the psoas muscles.
Because the psoas muscles are right next to the uterus, they're in the lower, they're
right next to the spine, they go along the spine and then down through the hip and connect
to the inside of the upper thigh bone and lift your leg, they're hip flexors.
So when we identified the tension in those muscles, all I had to do was just gently push
into their abdomen and she's lying on her back on what it looks like, she's lying on
her back on the table and I'm finding, gently pushing in to find the spot where that muscle
is the most sore.
So I always show patients how to do this themselves at home as well.
It's difficult to do it on yourself, but it's possible if you practice a little help or
you can get somebody else show, your parent, spouse, sibling, anybody else at home can
do it with you as well.
There's always a way to identify where that spasm muscle is and which specific part of
that muscle is spasming the most.
That's the key.
When you find that very worst part and identify it and release it, then you can get the muscle
to stay, to relax and stay relaxed.
So this teenage girl, I believe she was about 14 years old, this 14 year old girl with severe
cramps during her cycle got back to having a normal cycle with a pain level of three
out of 10 instead of 10 out of 10 and only for the first two or three days of recycle
versus often a week and a half or more.
So she was very happy.
Her mother was very happy.
Both literally had tears of joy at how much of a difference it had made.
And this was only after about maybe a half a dozen sessions of non-force chiropractic.
Thank you for listening.
As always, remember the condition of your body is far more important than any disease
you've been diagnosed with.
Do something this weekend to be a little healthier than you were last weekend.
Plant a garden, call someone you haven't talked to in years, forgive them if you're still
mad at them so that you can live long.
Have a fantastic weekend.
You've been listening to Safe Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones, because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe Effective Natural Solutions, right here on 98.3 The
Word, KDAR.