Category Archives for Uncategorized

Sciatic Pain in Little Rock, Arkansas

Do you have a sharp pain that typically radiates from one side of your back down one leg?  What about numbness, tingling, or weakness in one leg?  If you answer yes to this question, you may be suffering from sciatic pain.

Sciatic pain can vary widely from patient to patient so let us at Omnis Rehab Joint Performance Center help you understand this common condition.  Sciatica can originate from one side in the lower back, or the buttock area.  It often travels down the affected leg, causing numbness, tingling, pain, weakness, or a pins and needles sensation.

Some of the primary symptoms of sciatica include:

• Leg pain that worsens when sitting, often times driving
• Tingling or burning running down the leg
• Numbness, weakness, or difficulties moving the foot or entire leg
• Loss of range of motion in leg
• A consistent pain on one side of your lower back
• An intense and/or intolerable pain that makes it hard or uncomfortable to stand up

What is Sciatica?

Sciatica (sometimes known as radiculopathy) is inflammation or irritation of the sciatic nerve.  This can be caused from dysfunction of the muscles and/ or joints surrounding this nerve.  These dysfunctions can be caused by an injury or joint misalignments/ joint restrictions putting pressure on the sciatic nerve.  Muscle weakness or muscle tightness can also contribute to nerve pressure causing sciatic pain.  Pregnancy is another leading cause of sciatic pain.  The sciatic nerve passes underneath the uterus and as your body changes throughout pregnancy, pressure on the sciatic nerve can increase.

Treatment of Sciatic Nerve Pain

Sciatic pain can be debilitating.  At Omnis Rehab Joint and Performance Center, our goal is to treat your pain through chiropractic and rehab treatments that are non invasive and safe.  Our goal is to accurately diagnose and treat the cause of the problem, getting you back into the swing of things through non invasive and conservative care.

At your first visit with your Little Rock chiropractor, we will determine through a thorough examination, which may include x-rays, what is causing your discomfort.  We will then work through some basic treatments of your sciatic pain in Little Rock, Arkansas that may include:

• Chiropractic Adjustment:  Your Little Rock chiropractor can apply spinal manipulations to allow your spine and joints to move freely and unrestricted.  Adjustments help realign the spine.  This allows nerves, joints, and muscles to function together correctly within the body.
• Heat and Modality Therapies: In our Little Rock or North Little Rock chiropractic offices, we often use heat for muscle relaxation.  We often pair heat with TENs units (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) which is a small battery powered, portable box that stimulates the muscles. It uses electrical currents at variable intensities to help control pain and reduce the occurrence of muscle spasms.
• Myofascial Therapies:  These types of therapies can help reduce trigger points and other muscle adhesions that can contribute to pain and underlying problems.  We use ART (Active Release Technique) as well as Percussion Massage.
• Spinal Decompression:  Spinal decompression utilizes a table that provides a gentle release to create more space within each joint of the spine.  This process takes pressure off nerves, relieving pain and symptoms in affected areas.
• Chiropractic Exercises:  Strengthening the muscles surrounding joints leads to better stabilization and healing of areas.  When your body and joints are properly aligned and muscles are firing appropriately, your body feels its best.

If you have sciatic pain, we can treat the source of the pain with our expertise at Omnis Rehab.  We have two locations for chiropractic care in Central Arkansas.  Call us today at 501-313-2844 or schedule your appointment today.  We accept most major insurance policies and you can check your insurance benefits here.

Chiropractic Adjustments: What’s that sound?

Ever wonder what that popping noise is that you hear during your regular chiropractic adjustment?  The sound is caused by small pockets of air or bubbles, which are fluid that surround and protect your joints.  When the joint tissues are stretched during your regular chiropractic adjustment, the pockets of air “pop” and create the noise or cracking sound that you hear.  The noise is a completely normal part of the adjustment process and can sometimes be heard when adjusting any joint in the body including back, neck, hip, or even feet joints!

Regular Chiropractic Maintenance

Just as we regularly go to the dentist or get our eyesight checked, we should do regular checkups with our Little Rock chiropractor at Omnis Rehab Joint and Performance Center.  Maintenance care is an important part of wellness within our body, especially for our spine and joints.  Regular chiropractic adjustments keep our joints moving better, which keeps joints, muscles and all surrounding tissues hydrated and functional.  We know we preach how important chiropractic care is, but here are some of the most common ailments that we can help treat.

• Back or neck pain
• Headaches or migraines
• Neurological conditions
• Sciatica
• Scoliosis
• Surgery prevention
• Blood pressure issues
• Colic or ear infections
• Shoulder pain or tension

To schedule a wellness checkup with one of our doctors in our Little Rock chiropractic clinic or our North Little Rock chiropractic clinic, call us at 313-2844 or visit our contact page.

Golf Tips from your Chiropractor

Spring is right around the corner and that means millions of Americans are about to be back on the courses in droves.  If you are a regular golfer, you know about a lot of the common ailments that can keep you from enjoying the game.  Here at Omnis Rehab Joint and Performance Center, we want to make sure you stay your healthiest so you can thrive in your golf game!  Here are some tips that may help you stay healthy as you get back into the swing of things.

Warm Up Properly

Golf may be a low impact sport, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t properly warm up.  Doing some simple mobility can help reduce your risk of injury, and increase blood flow promoting better play.  Here are some of our recommendations for warmup movements.

• Get your heart rate up for a few minutes with a brisk walk or some jumping jacks
• Do some arm circles rotating five big circles forward, then five backwards
• Mobilize wrists and hands.  Circle hands in similar way you did your arm circles, five clockwise, then five counter clockwise to active grip and wrist mobility
• Activate hamstrings.  Stand in your regular stance with soft knees.  Perform slight hinge (bend) at hips until you feel a stretch, or tension in your hamstrings.  Once you feel stretch, stand up returning hips to neutral position, repeat 6-8 times.
• Perform trunk rotations.  Hold golf club behind the neck or overhead and rotate torso slowly. As you warm up, range of motion should become less limited.  Hold positions for 20-30 seconds to maximize.

Strengthen Positions

As with any sport, strength training is important.  Strong muscles are less susceptible to injury and help protect your joints and musculature.  A tight core is a key component in keeping your back and spine healthy, as well as making your golf swing powerful and most productive.  These core strength exercises are recommended no matter what type or sports or activities you enjoy.  Your Little Rock chiropractor can help guide you on the areas that may need strengthening depending on your current physical limitations or ailments.

Learn Proper Form

No matter your golf skill, we can all benefit from learning better technique from a golf professional.  If you commonly have pain after playing or swinging your clubs, you may need to have your swing accessed by a professional to see if you have a form breakdown.  A productive golf swing incorporates significant torque and torsion throughout the movement.  With a proper swing, both your hips and back are rotating in a cohesive and smooth movement producing the proper force, while maintaining a neutral and healthy spine.  When there is a breakdown in form, injuries and pain can happen.

It is worth mentioning that you need to make sure you are properly lifting and carrying your golf bag.  Our golf bags can be quite heavy loaded down with all the equipment needed to play our best games.  If you prefer to carry your bag from hole to hole, make sure you are using a bag equipped with backpack style straps to limit shoulder and back stress.

Regular Maintenance

At Omnis Rehab Joint and Performance Center, we want our patients to feel their best.  We develop individualized treatment plans that offer patients the techniques and corrective movements and exercises to manage their health over time.  Our goals as Little Rock chiropractors are to give our patients the confidence and tools to manage their own success while using our services for support as needed.

If you want more information on chiropractic care for the athlete, check out this blog post talking about our approach with Chiropractic care and your athletic endeavors.

The Misdiagnosed and Uncorrected Shoulder

In recent weeks I find myself treating more and more shoulder injuries.  Most of the time it presents the same way.  The patient comes in, points to the front of their shoulder, and says I have biceps tendonitis.  They rested and took anti-inflammatories and still the pain returns.

First off just because you have pain at the front of the shoulder, it does not mean you automatically have problems with your biceps tendon.  The muscles of your rotator cuff can also be the issue.  Especially if you have been doing multiple overhead movements and pushing movements. The muscles of the rotator cuff come across the scapula and attach the the top of your arm.  These contract and act as a pulley system on the arm to take it through external and internal rotation.  Nine times out of ten when a patient comes in with the front of the shoulder pain, I can pin-point an area near the back of the arm pit that is very tight and recreates the pain at the front of the shoulder.  This should be the area we need to treat.

So how do we treat this?  If caught early and not ignored, this is typically an easy fix.  We need to make sure the muscles and tendons of the injured area are moving through the joint space with ease.  You can stretch a muscle all day, but if the muscle fibers, the fascia around the fibers, and even the skin above are not moving independently of each other,  pain and dysfunction will continue to arise.  Techniques like A.R.T (Active Release Technique) and Graston can help release these muscles and tendons and void any adhesions in them.  Along side this we can speed up the healing process.  TENS is one way to help speed this process by stimulating the muscle fibers to heal quickly.  Another treatment that has been shown to greatly speed up the process is using a cold laser therapy (K-Laser).  This can also be beneficial to many other types of soft tissue injuries.

Now that the shoulder is healed, we need to make sure the injury does not recur.  The most common way to do this is to strengthen the muscle of the rotator cuff.  The system we use and in my opinion the best program on the market is the Crossover Symmetry.  The next thing and the most often ignored is fixing the faulty movement that created the injury in the first place.  We need to have a movement evaluation to find out what ranges of motion are hypo or even hypermobile and fix this.  We also need to make sure we are putting the joints in the correct position to be able to perform the activities needed.

The purpose of this post is to not ignore even the most minor discomforts and to know that you cannot chase pain.  Just because an area hurts, does not necessarily mean that is the area to treat.  Find the cause, the root of the issue.  Fix that then correct what caused it in the first place.

There are no bad movements, there are only bad movement patterns.

Dr. Brady DeClerk, D.C., CF-L1