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
by Dr. Merrill | Sep 14, 2022 | Guidance, Healthy Living
Here at Nightlight Chiropractic, we’re here not to help not only your spine but your overall wellness. Every once in a while, I will go combing through it because the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has all kinds of topics that are relevant to you. Why is it relevant to you? Because you eat food, right? If you’re eating food, you can wait for the research to come out, the different organizations or governments to spin that research or give you their version of that research, or you can read the study yourself so that you have some say in what’s going into your body and it, whether it’s good or bad or how it should all play out. I dove into the research and came up with some exciting nutrition trivia to help you make better choices. Beer,... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | May 26, 2022 | Accident/Injury, Guidance
I’d like to clue you in to a piece of who we are and what makes us a little bit different: we don’t take unnecessary x-rays. We’re going to delve a little bit into x-rays here, and why x-rays can be good or not so good. When we say we don’t shoot unnecessary x-rays, what that means is that not every single patient who walks in the door is going to get an x-ray. There are some chiropractic clinics out there where, if you walk in the door and want to get treatment, step one is that you need to get an x-ray. I’m not saying that that’s a bad thing, but that’s not how we practice here. Some patients come in and they have neck pain or lower back pain, which is usually a common neck or back... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Mar 24, 2022 | Guidance, Healthy Living
Have you ever had weird bouts of vertigo or dizziness that happened only when you changed position? You go from sitting to standing. You go from sitting to laying down, whatever it is. You get dizzy for a minute. It takes a minute for it to go away, but you’re fine. Well, that could be benign paroxysmal positional vertigo or BPPV. Let’s go over just those words. Benign means it will not hurt you. Paroxysmal means it comes on suddenly and is frequent. Positional means that you change positions, and then Vertigo means dizziness. So, BPPV is a common cause of this dizziness. BPPV happens because you have some crystallization of the fluid in your ear canal, and we don’t exactly know why that happens, but we’ve got some theories. But, when that crystallizes, it’s hitting different cilia and... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Jan 19, 2022 | Guidance, Healthy Living
As the pandemic began to change everything in 2020, I began seeing some new and different things in my office. We started to see a lot more neck pain, a lot more upper back pain a lot more headaches, and even some weird symptoms like dizziness and tingling into the hands and fingers. And what was all that coming from? Well, it’s because we all suddenly started working at home. And guess what? It’s two years later and some of us are still in the same boat, curled up on our couches with a laptop and trying to work. We’re seeing a lot of patients who are spending their days in hunched-over postures, either on their couch or at their tables, looking at their laptops for eight or 10 hours. And then what’s happening is they’re getting stuck like... Continue Reading
by Dr. Merrill | Dec 15, 2021 | Accident/Injury, Guidance, Pain
In our last blog, we discussed a variety of different shoulder complaints that we do very well at treating here at our Orlando chiropractic office. I want to share a little more about the rotator cuff. First, you need to understand what the rotator cuff is and does. A lot of people use this word completely wrong. I hear rotator cup a lot—rotator cup, like a cup of coffee. I don’t know what people are hearing when we’re saying this stuff, but the rotator cuff is four muscles that come across from your back across, and they all insert into your shoulder. These muscles allow you to move your arm out and in, and they are very easy to injure. Everyone thinks these are big, healthy muscles or big, thick muscles. Actually, they’re teeny, tiny strips of muscle that... Continue Reading
