The relationship between chronic muscle and joint pain, inflammation and oxidative stress must be understood by any chiropractor seeking to minimize the time for healing and rehabbing injuries.
These chronic muscle and joint pain problems may be secondary to acute or repetitive stress, but typically they develop primarily from improperly managed inflammation and oxidative stress in body tissues. A major factor in the formation of chronic inflammation in your patients' tissues is the presence of free radicals occurring in greater abundance than the body's ability to remove them. This imbalanced condition is known as oxidative stress.
Oxidative Stress
Oxidative stress is caused by the release of free radicals and the inability of the cells to adequately detoxify and prevent free-radical accumulation. Oxidative stress is associated with more than 100 diseases.
Examples of conditions in which oxidative stress appears to play a role, based on research, include heart disease, diabetes, cancer and rapid aging. The presence of oxidative stress in your patients' myofascial tissues will automatically create an inflammatory response in their muscles and joints.
This inflammatory response will then cause the release of more free radicals in the affected tissues, creating greater oxidative stress and causing an increased inflammatory response. As you can tell, this forms a vicious cycle; but worse yet, this cycle can accelerate, creating what is known as a feed-forward cycle, making symptoms progressive with eventual tissue degeneration.
Free Radicals
Proactive lifestyle changes that include a healthy diet, exercise, stress reduction and antioxidant supplementation have been shown to reduce cellular damage and support the body's ability to produce more of its own antioxidant enzymes, allowing the body to naturally fight the damaging effects of free radicals from the inside out.
To limit the effects of free- radical damage, millions of Americans take antioxidants, making them a multi-billion dollar industry. Incredibly, studies show that more than 80 percent of people know antioxidants protect them from free-radical damage. What is not known is which ones really work and what lifestyle changes will most effectively reduce free-radical damage.
A Simple Breath Test to Measure Oxidative Stress
Lab testing, while not commonly used by chiropractors, is now being considered by many who are getting involved with oxidative stress, wellness care and nutritional supplements. Patients with chronic muscle and joint pain problems will typically have a significant level of free radicals in their system, which can damage cell walls. The byproducts of free-radical cell-wall damage are aldehydes, making them a highly beneficial biomarker for oxidative stress. In that regard, aldehyde testing can become a very important measurement of a patient's state of wellness.
There are two ways to measure aldehydes: one is a blood test called the TBARS Assay, which measures one aldehyde, MDA; the second is a non-invasive breath test that can measure up to 23 aldehydes. Chiropractors can conduct this breath test in their office.
Breath contains more than 1,000 different components that can be measured through spectrometry and gas chromatography in the parts-per-billion range. This makes breath testing as specific as blood or urine testing.
The breath-testing aldehyde score is extremely relevant to chiropractors who offer a wellness program that includes recommendations on lifestyle changes and antioxidant supplements. Since every patient presents with a different level of stress, each one will respond differently to a wellness program.
The key to a successful wellness practice is knowing how to adjust protocols based on individual responses to treatment; breath aldehyde testing can measure and track a patient's individual response to a treatment program. In fact a DC could use two testing options: the first consists of one breath test for existing patients under wellness care and antioxidant supplementation; the second includes two breath tests – a baseline test before a patient starts the wellness program and a 30-day evaluation to measure the effectiveness of the program and the antioxidants at lowering the aldehyde score.
Management
Science has known for a very long time that vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds are healthful foods. Researchers assumed that the substances which made these foods so good for us were the vitamins, minerals and fiber. Of course, they were right, but only partially. Over the past 20 years, scientists have discovered a whole new set of protective compounds packed within every whole plant food: phytochemicals.