I saw this incredible story and had to share it.

The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden's trio of two-week-old Malayan tiger cubs is doing well.

“They’re fed by nursery staff six times a day and have already graduated from two to three ounces per feeding,” Mike Dulaney, the zoo's curator of mammals and the vice coordinator of the Malayan Tiger Species Survival Plan (SSP), said in a news release. “Before they open their eyes, they usually just eat and sleep. Now that they can see where they’re going, they will start to become more active.”

But one of the cubs needed a little help from an unexpected source: A local chiropractor. Cub No. 1, as it has been deemed until its gender is known and a name has been given, was having trouble holding its head up.

“It was obvious to me that something wasn’t right," Dawn Strasser, a 35-year veteran in the zoo’s nursery, said in the release. “The cub’s neck appeared to be stuck at an odd angle. Massaging the neck muscles helped with the stiffness, but the cub was increasingly lethargic and not suckling well.”

Strasser brought in Dr. Mark Sperbeck, a chiropractor who works on both humans and animals. He determined that the cub’s top cervical bone (C1), through which 95 percent of the body's nerve impulses travel, was out of alignment.
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After three adjustments, the cub's neck and spine are back in place. It's eating well and has actually gotten a little bigger than its littermates.
 

I posted this last year but it has come up again recently so I wanted to repeat then post.

Car headrests

In a motor vehicle accident where your car is rear ended, you suffer less neck injury if your head is touching the head rest at the time of impact.

The makers of expensive cars have noticed that in the population, forward head carriage is quite prevalent and now, they are making their head rests with the rest forward of the seat which in their mind is helping the buyers of their cars to suffer less injury.

However, they are in actuality causing them to have problems.

Forward head carriage has been scientifically proved to contribute to tension headaches, pins and needles in the hands, neck pain, mid thorasic pain, lower back pain, shoulder pain, dizziness and the list goes on.

Consequently I have had more people appearing to my office suffering these sorts of symptoms after having long drives in their nice new cars.

So what do you do?

We should drive with our seats in an upright position and the head rest level with the top of the car seat.  Your head should be touching the rest in this position.  Try and achieve this with your car, and if you are looking to buy a new car, make sure this can be achieved with the new car.  If you can’t achieve this with your car, contact your dealer – DON’T REMOVE THE HEADREST ENTIRELY – this would cause you severe damage should you be involved in an accident.
 
Additional note for women – hair clips and hair style while driving.
If your wear thick bull clips at the back of your hair, or have a hair style such as a thick pony tail or plait that starts at the back of your head, you should take this out while driving as it creates the same forward head carriage as would occur with the headrest forward of the car seat, and it will also promote the same symptoms.

Recent research at the George Institute for Global Health reviewed the findings of 35 clinical trials of 6,000 patients using anti-inflammatory pain relieving drugs.

The findings:
"Compared with placebo, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) do not provide a clinically important effect on spinal pain," Associate Professor Manuela Ferreira said.
Researchers found six patients had to be treated with anti-inflammatory drugs for one patient to achieve a clinically important benefit in the short-term, and the drugs have side effects.
Dr Ferreira reports, "Our safety analysis revealed NSAIDs increased the risk of gastrointestinal side effects by 2.5 times, compared to placebo."

The study was published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

Conversely, hundreds of studies expound the virtues of Chiropractic care and manipulative therapy in reducing back pain, so if you are a sufferer of back pain, it would seem a good idea to stop taking medication and call your local Chiropractor.

Recently a case came to me of a girl who was sixteen years old who had just had major surgery for her scoliosis.  The girl had needed to steel (Harrington) rods inserted into her back to prevent her scoliosis from advancing further and giving her catastrophic health issues.  There is no doubt that this particular girl needed this surgery as her scoliosis had advanced to the point where no other form of treatment we know about yet would have helped.

However, I am always sad to see these cases, and other scoliosis cases that are allowed to progress until people are in the mid-teens, mostly because that can often be helped and in many cases corrected if caught early enough.

Chiropractors are experts in the detection of scoliosis and this is a great reason to get your children checked at least every six months if nothing else.  If you have a history of scoliosis then you ABSOLUTELY should do this as there is a genetic link with scoliosis - it does run in families.  With early detection, you can be referred to the correct specialists who can often correct scoliosis PERMANENTLY without the need for surgery but only if it is detected early.

Please be aware that not all cases can be corrected with conservative care but all the research points to early detection and intervention giving the best hope of success.  Once a child is 16 or seventeen, it is too late.