B.D vs A.D - The World Before and After Devices
Today, more than ever we need to re-romanticise what it means to be strong, healthy and upright. I believe every family needs a Chiropractor on their health care team. Someone to care for your children’s spines, to mentor them in the art of good posture and what it takes to injury proof your frame and nervous system for life.
When I started practice when advertising meant not missing the cut off date for the yearly Yellow Pages entry. If you did you were sent off into purgatory for the year and bumped to the bottom of next year’s list. It was also B.D – “Before Devices” It was pre-smartphones, pre-tablets, pre-taking you laptop to school and pre-Fortnite. It was a time when kids had kids’ spinal problems and adults well…unfortunately had adult problems mainly in the form of postural stress and strain and spinal wear and tear. Fast forward 20 years and now we are seeing adult problems becoming kids’ problems.
During the years when children should be learning to support their growing frames against the forces of gravity, holding their heads high and shoulders back and proud, running around getting fit and strong, riding bikes, climbing trees and playing sport they are now increasingly heads down, shoulders rounded and sensorily over-stimulated with their newly acquired, never to be lost again appendages, their phones, tablets and computers. Where we used to have to pick our heads up to look someone in the eye to have a conversation, we now have children standing shoulder to shoulder eyeballs buried down into their phones. You’d swear they are almost trying to literally climb inside their devices. Don’t worry Elon Musk is working on that too!
The Western lifestyle hasn’t just left us grossly deficient in vitamins and minerals. It has left us grossly deficient in movement.
As our diets went south with toxic processed sugary and chemical laden foods…then our teeth followed. Our ancestors’ diets consisted of natural foods, fruit, vegetables and meat. They didn’t have the sugar and chemical that were harmful to your teeth. Also, with a balanced diet you get more vitamins, minerals and nutrients, all the things you need to make your teeth (well all of you) stronger and more resistant to dental (well all the problems) we see today. The foods they ate were also very fibrous which naturally kept their teeth clean and stopped dental plague building up. This is why the dental profession had to go full throttle on the idea of “Dental Hygiene”? To compensate for our altered and destructive eating behaviours.
Well, as with nutrition, your days need to be rich in a variety of movements to keep all your joints, muscles, tendons and ligaments healthy supple and strong. When was the last time that you think your day, week or month naturally had each of your joints explore their full range of motion. This lifestyle change initially had the biggest impact on our the working adults but now its got to our kids too, largely consequential to the ubiquitous uptake in technology. We have a huge postural pandemic on our hands.
So I want to claim it, we need to go full throttle on SPINAL HYGIENE.
Our children’s lives have changed and so too we must change what we do to compensate for this. Our children aren’t growing up the way we did so we need to consider that they need types of help and support that we did not. The best place to start is with a chiropractic check-up and regular maintenance, guidance and education to keep growing bodies in good alignment for the years to come.
We teach our kids to swim so they don’t drown, we now also need to teach our kids how to survive on dry land so their bodies don’t degenerate prematurely.