Advice for Allergy "Season"

Your Nose is Running…Better Go Catch It!

by Dr. Jerry Kennedy

Allergy season is a horrible time of year.  Here in the Midwest, if you want to find someone who suffers with seasonal allergies all you have to do is throw a rock.  You’ll hit one.  Actually, it’s likely that the rock you threw will hit another allergy sufferer on the ricochet.  It’s sort of normal around here.  Well…not normal.  It’s prevalent.  I even remember as a kid taking allergy medicine.  I didn’t have my own.  My mom had a prescription allergy medication and I would take that.  After all, what harm could come from taking someone else’s prescription?

So clearly I haven’t always made the best health care choices.  But thankfully things are different for me as an adult.  I can’t remember the last time I took allergy medication.  It had to have been more than 10 years ago.  Actually, I can’t remember the last time I took any sort of anti-histamine.  And my new found lack of allergies has nothing to do with some sort of quest to find the missing pieces to the allergy puzzle.  It has everything to do with the fact that I started doing things that would help my immune system function at it’s peak.

You see, a runny nose or watery eyes aren’t necessarily bad things.  Even when the body creates all sorts of gross mucus you can’t just jump to the conclusion that something is wrong.  Histamine reactions (ie: runny nose, watery eyes, drainage) are just your body’s way of protecting itself.  If your body determines that something you are breathing in is dangerous to your body, then your immune system reacts to it.  That’s what it is supposed to do.  That’s the way we were created.  The problem isn’t what your body is doing.  The problem is WHEN your body is doing it.

If your body is over-reacting, that’s not a good thing.  If your body reacts to every speck of dust or sliver of fresh cut grass like it’s a health terrorist that is coming to destroy your wellbeing, you end up living your entire life with a stuffed up sinuses and watery eyes.  NO FUN.  But if your body realizes that most of the time dust and fresh cut grass are not anything to react to, then you are considered to be one of the “lucky ones” that don’t suffer with allergy problems.

So the key to going from suffering with allergies and not suffering with allergies (or at least suffering less) is to build up your immune system.  Your immune system is like a muscle.  It can be strong or it can be weak.  And there are a lot of ways to strengthen your immune system.  Most of them are going to involve dietary and lifestyle changes.  Most people don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.

The thing that helped me the most was an area where allergy improvement was most unexpected.  It was after I became an Upper Cervical patient.  I didn’t start care with the intent to improve my allergies.  It never even dawned on me that it was possible that Upper Cervical could help.  I have since learned that my experience is not that uncommon.  One of the most common “unexpected” benefits of Upper Cervical care is an improvement in allergy and sinus problems.  I refer to it as an “unexpected” benefit because we have a lot of patients that, like me, started care for some other reason and the allergy and sinus improvement was a bonus to care.

Technically, Upper Cervical Care isn’t a treatment for allergy and sinus problems.  Upper Cervical is designed to correct misalignments in the upper neck that are causing irritation to the nervous system.  Because the nervous system and the immune system are so closely related, when a patient takes the stress off their nervous system through Upper Cervical Care, they consequently will have less stress to their immune system.  Less stress on the immune system means it becomes stronger and functions properly.  One thing leads to another…yada, yada, yada…and you may just end up living an allergy free life.  That is of course if you are willing to try something different.

The Master Builder In Us All...Amazing!

By Rose Panico / Bill Remling

DID YOU KNOW THAT...

* One cubic inch of the brain's cortex contains 10,000 miles of connecting tissue.

* Your brain gets signals from 137 million light receptors in your eyes, 100,000 hearing receptors in your ears, 3,000 taste buds in your mouth, 30,000 hot spots, 250,000 cold spots, and 500,000 touch spots on your skin.

* Electrical impulses flash along your nerves at 393 feet per second, or about 270  miles per hour.

* In nine months, 6,000 billion cells form an average baby.

* Your heart pumps about 2 1/2 gallons of blood per minute. If you could loan your heart to pump donor blood into pint bottles, it would fill so may bottles in one year that they could stretch from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio.

* If your blood cells were put in a single row, it would extend around the world four times at the equator. Every second between 2-3 million red blood cells are launched into the blood stream.

* There are more than 600 muscles in your body. Many muscles work in a team.

* Your lungs contain a half billion tiny air sacs with a surface area of 40 to 60 square miles.

* In 70 years, your stomach will produce about 60,000 quarts of digestive juice, it will digest about 40 tons or 80,000 pounds of food.

* Each kidney contains one million functional units that filter your blood.

* Your brain regulates, stimulates, creates and controls all these body functions and millions of others. When the body is functioning normal, we tend to forget about the very complex activities that are constantly going on. Nonetheless, the cells keep functioning and reproducing themselves.

* The organs and the glands keep regulating such diverse activities as digestion and growth, and the nerve system keeps receiving, reterpreting and sending messages. Without this continuing harmony and coordinating activities, this could be no psychological life as we know it.

* There are more than 100 billion nerve cells or neurons in the brain of an average human being. That is more more than 14 times the amount of people living on earth, and their are billions more in other parts of the nerve system.

We are quite literally amazing.  Be in awe of yourself and all the things you do every second of the day.

Immunity and Upper Cervical Care?

Skeptics of upper cervical care question how it can help the immune system in the absence of scientific studies. One could also question how physicians for the last 100 years could say to drink fluids and rest if you have the flu. Does fluid drown bacteria? Does lying down cause a virus to die? Of course not. Clearly rest and fluids do not affect the microorganisms. They are intended to help the sick person’s body, specifically his or her immune system. This helps the body fight the microorganisms and their effect. Doctors have found through common sense and experience that the ability to fight off microorganism (the immune system) is improved by resting and drinking fluids. No one had to do studies. It is a self-evident fact. (Actually when you are sick you really do not feel like doing anything else but lying down. That is the innate (or inborn) intelligence of your body saying “rest”). No one is about to suggest that doctors stop making that recommendation until a Harvard Medical School research program can be completed in which 1,000 people with the flu will be allowed to drink fluids and rest and 1,000 others with the flu will be made to walk around while deprived of fluids.

Upper cervical care is based upon the same logic. If there is an interference in the nerve system, the immune system, which is intricately linked to it, will not function properly or at least not as well as it should. If you shut down the nerve system completely (death), the immune system will not work at all. Therefore, if you interfere with its function, the immune system will work at less then 100%. It is not necessary to do studies. It would be ridiculous to demand that physicians do the study outlined above to prove the validity of rest and fluids for the flu. It is just as ridiculous to do research to prove that upper cervical care helps the immune system work better. It is a self-evident fact. If the nerve system works better, every system in the body works better, including the immune system. Notice that upper cervical doctors do not claim that their care cures the flu, the common cold or anything else. We just maintain that if there is interference in the nerve system, the immune system will not work as well as it should and if that interference is removed, the immune system will work better.

How much better? Well, we do not know. But then we really do not know how much benefit fluid and rest are for the immune system. All these individually or together could be the difference between getting well from the flu or not. The point is that we just do not know. There are a lot of things about health, the human body, proper function and human potential that we do not know. In fact, there is probably more we do not know than what we do know. That is one of the beautiful things about upper cervical care. We do not have to wait until we have proven data from research studies. We can know that upper cervical care is good based on logic, common sense and self-evident facts. That is how physicians knew that rest and liquids help people fight the flu. That is how we know upper cervical care will enable the immune system and every other system in the body, for that matter, to work better.

The Cancer Experiment: A Lesson Learned

An interesting experiment was done some years ago at Ohio State Penitentiary. Volunteer convicts were purposely injected with cancer cells. The scientists wanted to see if they could promote cancer in an apparently healthy person. They found that healthy prisoners, with no history of cancer did not develop cancer after the implantation. Within a few weeks every trace of cancer was gone.

Next, in those patients who had fought off the cancer cells, they introduced more thinking that while the body had fought off the first “dose”, it was now weakened and more susceptible. To their surprise, the patients’ bodies got rid of the second group of cancer cells even faster than the first!

The important lesson here is that the body has an inborn ability to resist cancer. So everyone and especially those with cancer should be finding ways to boost their immunity and resistance to cancer.

Likely cancer is caused by a combination of a number of factors that lead to a breakdown in the body’s ability to attack and kill cancer cells. But rest assured that these factors are all within the body and treatment and cures that come from outside the body are not the answer. The answer is in staying healthy, and Upper Cervical Care should be an important part of any program to help you stay healthy.