In this 10‑minute video Dr. David “Dave” Koivuranta of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic delivers a daily health update for Thursday, July 29 2021. After a brief friendly greeting and a disclaimer that the information is not medical advice, he walks viewers through six recent research findings and practical wellness tips. First, a Pain Medicine study links having three or more chronic pain conditions in older adults to a higher risk of anxiety, suggesting routine anxiety screening. Second, a Journal of Pediatric Nursing article reports that a brisk 30‑minute daily walk reduces depression and anxiety in adolescents, a benefit likely applicable to all ages. Third, Medical Decision Making highlights the teratogenic risk of alcohol consumption during pregnancy, citing 2013‑2015 statistics. Fourth, a BMJ report shows that migraine sufferers who cut vegetable‑oil intake and increase fatty‑fish (omega‑3) consumption experience fewer and shorter attacks. Fifth, WebMD summarizes evidence that a combined range‑of‑motion, strengthening, and endurance exercise program eases arthritis pain, preserves joint function, and reduces inflammation. Finally, the Journal of Manual and Manipulative Therapy finds that six thoracic spine manipulations over four weeks lower neck disability in patients with cervical dysfunction. Dr. Dave ties these points together, emphasizing the interconnectedness of physical, neurological, and endocrine health and encouraging viewers to make daily, evidence‑based choices for long‑term wellness. He closes with a reminder to contact the clinic for more information and a promise of a written summary and future videos.
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Hello everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well, having a wonderful week, looking forward to your weekend coming up soon. Coming at you on behalf of the Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic with your daily health update for Thursday, July 29th, 2021. Gonna look at 6 areas of health and wellness news and information. As always, somewhere around this video you can read through all 6 areas, and if you have any questions or you just like to reach out, uh, or you'd like a copy, we can get you one of those too. Just DM us on social, give us a call here the clinic or send us an email. Always happy to help you out. Not going to treat, diagnose, prevent, or cure any illness or disease with our time together today. However, we will share some information with you that hopefully, and as always, will get you thinking about your own health and wellness today to keep taking care of yourself on the wonderful journey you're on, hoping for those great experiences every day. So good for you for being here. Let's see what we have today. The journal Pain Medicine, July 2021, talked about anxiety being linked to multiple chronic chronic pain conditions. Assessments over 1,600 older adults revealed that having 3 or more chronic pain conditions is associated with an elevated risk for anxiety. The finding suggests that screening patients with multiple chronic conditions for anxiety disorder is a good idea. So there might be some concomitant or concurrent treatments, not only for the pain but probably for other aspects of the per— individual's overall lifestyle that can help to support an environment in the body that can then better heal from not only those chronic conditions but perhaps some of the side effects of having had them. We want an upward spiral, not a downward spiral, when it comes to your health and wellness. The Journal of Pediatric Nursing, July 2021, talks about daily walks and how they're good for your mental health. New research suggests that regularly walking at a brisk pace for as little as 30 minutes a day is effective for reducing depression and anxiety in adolescence. So I bet that goes— speaks— is true for all people, all ages. Getting out for a good walk, always healthy in many ways, gets your body moving a bit, gets your respiratory and heart rates up a little bit, but also just forces you to get out and into the environment and see and do different things to take a break and hopefully let the digital world spin without you for a little while. That's always good. Medical Decision Making has an interesting perspective on something that we probably all know. In June 2021, they talked about alcohol and how it poses a threat to many pregnancies. They have some new statistics from 2013 to 2015. So if that's of interest to you, you can check that one out on your own. The British Medical Journal, July 2021, looks at food choices and how those may help to reduce migraine headaches. Migraine headache patients who limited their vegetable intake— vegetable oil intake, not vegetable intake, but vegetable oil intake, and increased their consumption of fatty fish experienced significant reductions in headache duration and frequency. The findings validate diet-based interventions that increase omega-3 fats and decrease linoleic acid sources to help those with migraines reduce the number and impact of headaches and possibly lower their use of pain medications. The researchers add that it's further evidence that the foods we eat can influence pain pathways. Good to know that our nutrition and supporting our body on the organ, tissue, and cellular level can help the body recover and heal and function better when it's faced with some challenges, including migraine headaches. So nutrition, uh, perhaps the underlying note here is very effective at supporting our body's healthy function. The WebMD July 2021 looks at exercise benefits for arthritis. A fitness program that includes range of motion strengthening and endurance exercise exercises can help reduce arthritis-related pain, maintain normal joint movement, protect the joints from further damage, increase muscle flexibility and strength, and reduce pressure on the joints through weight loss and reduced inflammation. With arthritis, depending on the degree and the nature of the arthritis, there's a happy amount of movement that's good for that arthritis. It's therapeutic. Having too little movement or too much movement, excessive movement, or misuse of any joint that may be starting to degenerate Those two extremes will probably accelerate the problem. So there's a happy medium where you nurture those joints and it actually helps them heal and could reverse some of the damage. Some of the previous research has shown, but the goal would definitely be to slow and stop the damage and also to have less discomfort and pain, which involves quite often getting the inflammation down. Finally, the Journal of Manual and Manipulative Therapy, July 2021, looked at mid-back adjustments and how adjusting the mid and upper back can help with neck problems and cervical function, neck spine, the part of your spine that we know is the neck and its function. Among a group of 48 patients with cervical dysfunction, researchers observed that those who received 6 thoracic spinal manipulation treatments over the course of 4 weeks experienced reductions in neck disability that did not occur among participants in a non-treatment group. The findings suggest that thoracic spine function can affect the neck and the mid-back and should be evaluated in patients with neck pain and disability. Of course, this wonderful creation of yours that you get to live in every day is more than the sum of its parts, and a lot of those parts work together. And when you influence one area positively, it can spill over and have effects on many other areas, not just physically, but neurologically and even chemically through the endocrine system and in other pathways. Even the energy in the body will flow differently when you improve one area. It won't be isolated just to that area. So taking care of yourself definitely has some exponential benefits and spillover effects that will help you stay healthy and get healthy if you need to. All right, and that's the purpose of the daily health update, just to give you a little bit of insight into some different aspects that you may want to think about each day. Your own thoughts, decisions, and actions, those choices you make every day supporting your health and wellness, are all very valuable. So we continue to do the best we can, right? So I hope you do that today. Enjoy your Thursday, enjoy the rest of the week coming up to the weekend. Another summer weekend for you to enjoy. Get out there and make the most of it. We'll print, we'll put up a written format for you tomorrow and we'll get back to our videos next week. We'll look forward to chatting with you then. Take care, have fun, all the best.
