by Dr. Merrill | Apr 25, 2023 | Guidance, Healthy Living
You may be wondering why a chiropractor would be writing about kidney stones. Here at Nightlight Chiropractic, we don’t treat kidney stones, but we see a lot of kidney stones here. And we know these kidney stones because back pain is the most common presenting complaint. So a patient comes in, they say, I’ve got some back pain. Can you help me? And then we’ll do an exam. And during that exam, we found some pain in their flank, and we determined that they had kidney stones and we couldn’t help them. And we need to send them off to a medical facility. So the medical facility typically will give you some medication for pain, and they might give you some medication to dilate your urethra so that you can pass this kidney stone. But today, I will talk... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Feb 23, 2023 | Guidance
I went across the street to an antique bookstore the other day, and I grabbed myself a copy of Hippocrates’ works from about 2,500 years ago. There’s a chapter called articulation where Hippocrates talks about joints, articulations and spinal traction. So we’ve been using this for a long, long time. The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, used traction to help his patients. Some of the devices he used to apply his traction are very scary as you can see in this illustration! But it’s fantastic to know that we’ve been using traction for a long time. We use cervical traction and lumbar traction here in our Downtown Orlando chiropractic office. We use traction because when we are dealing with a patient with a disc herniation, you’ve got your vertebrae with the discs in between. You have that disc that... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Jan 18, 2023 | Guidance, Healthy Living
Here at NightLight Chiropractic, we are always asking our patients about the types of things they want to learn about in our video and blog series. A while back, you decided on the topic of ADHD and brain exercises that you can do to reduce the symptoms. We’re excited to share some of the research we’ve discovered and to offer some ideas for you! It’s interesting how many people think that if you have ADHD, you have one choice and one choice alone, which is to start taking medications to reduce those symptoms. Truth be told, medications really offer no long-term benefit for ADHD. You take the medication, you feel better for the day. Tomorrow, you’re going to have to take that medication to feel better for the ADHD or to get rid of some of your symptoms. The... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Dec 19, 2022 | Guidance
Here at our Downtown Orlando office, we are pleased to be able to assist many Orlando-based transportation workers with their Department of Transportation (DOT) physicals. To make the process easy for you, today we’re going to cover with you precisely what you need to do to have the best chance of passing your DOT physical. Before we get to some of the secrets that the medical community doesn’t even want me to talk to you about, we’re going to cover some of the elements of the exam. What Happens in an Orlando DOT Physical? If you’ve had one of these DOT exams done before, you know that they’re all relatively similar. You’ll come in, and we’ll complete some forms and review your past medical history and medications you might be taking, along with any previous illnesses that you might... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Nov 25, 2022 | Guidance, Healthy Living
Here at our Downtown Orlando chiropractic office, we get a lot of questions regarding CBD oil and supplements. On today’s blog, we’ll talk about why you should or shouldn’t be taking it and what it does. Why is it important, and why is everyone talking about it? Let’s start with this: there isn’t enough research yet to fully support it or to say it’s not beneficial. The research has been slow to come out on this. However, we have been carrying CBD products in the office here for over four years, and there’s some value to it that we have seen. I haven’t seen any side effects yet, and in the research, there are very few long-term side effects. Even the short-term side effects are typically pretty minor. The top four conditions that CBD oil helps with are pain,... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Oct 12, 2022 | Guidance, Healthy Living
One question we get a lot here at our Orlando chiropractic office is whether or not chiropractic is safe for pregnant patients. For a long time, we’ve been seeing a lot of pregnant patients. At any given time, some of the 5,300 patients that we’ve seen over the past 10 years will come in with a new pregnancy and back pain related to pregnancy. When I was looking through research related to this, I was interested to find that a lot of chiropractors say they don’t have much contact with pregnant patients, while we do. For a long time, I was a chiropractor under a program called MomCare, which is the Florida state-run program for women who don’t have insurance and find out they’re pregnant. Their baby is put into state Medicaid so that they have benefits to make... Continue Reading
