The Adrenal Salivary Index test is a critically important starting point for assessing the quality of your endocrine (stress hormone) function and determining how well your adrenal glands handle stress. Each of your two adrenal glands are the size and shape of an almond. They sit above each of your kidneys, and are responsible for the manufacture and release of stress hormones such as cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine into your blood stream. These hormones are released in response to mental, emotional and environmental stresses.
When your adrenal glands release stress hormones into your bloodstream, the stress hormones produce a "fight or flight" response in your body. This primitive response, as the name implies, prepares you for fighting off aggressors or running away. Your adrenal glands support fight or flight by increasing your heart rate and blood pressure to supply large amounts of blood to your large muscles and your brain. Your pupils dilate to heighten your vision, and your bladder empties to decrease your body weight. Large amounts of sugar from your liver, and insulin from the pancreas, are released into the bloodstream to supply your muscles with fast burning fuel.
This "emergency metabolism" place a burden on the rest of your being. The energy required to drive the stress response is produced through catabolic metabolism. Catabolic metabolism tears down the tissues in your body for energy. Due to the stress induced catabolic metabolism, many of your body's long-term functions are suspended. Digestion and absorption of nutrients, energy storage, brain function (reasoning, memory, etc.), detoxification, relaxation, sexual function, and muscle repair are all shut down and sacrificed to fuel the body during the state of emergency metabolism.
Fibromyalgia patients tend to overreact to common daily stressors and remain in a constant "fight or flight" state. Prolonged stress causes your adrenals to either fatigue or lose their function and burn out. Constant insulin secretion wears out your pancreas. Prolonged high levels of insulin cause the tissues in your body to adapt to the constant "state of emergency" by decreasing their sensitivity to the insulin and you become insulin resistant.
Insulin resistance impairs your ability to convert sugar to energy and promotes storage of fat. Prolonged stress on the pancreas leads to diabetes and hypoglycemia. Stress hormone imbalance affects all of your endocrine glands, including your pituitary, thyroid, and pancreas.
Prolonged adrenal stress is detrimental to all of your body's systems. As a component of Fibromyalgia, adrenal stress causes you to become increasingly sensitive to environmental stresses. Not only are you battling constant stress arousal, but your over-sensitivity to your surroundings traps you into a vicious cycle. Inflammation, toxic accumulation, nerve irritation, nutritional deficiency, organ and gland dysfunction, and pain are all symptoms of being severely stressed out.
Functional Endocrinology Assessment allows us to examine your endocrine gland function and balance. By analyzing salivary samples we are able to gain broad view of the functional balance of your endocrine glands. This allows identification of the underlying weaknesses in this delicate, complex, and powerful system.
Your endocrine glands release hormones that regulate your body's metabolism (the supply and storage of energy). Hormones are powerful chemical messengers. The power of one hormone molecule being released into your body's environment is analogous to an atomic explosion within the earth's environment. Each of your endocrine glands secretes (releases) one or more essential hormone. The secretion of hormones by endocrine glands are controlled by feedback loops. High or low levels of the hormone being secreted or other related hormones can inhibit or increase a gland's secretion of that hormone. All of your endocrine glands communicate with each other using these feedback loops. Each gland is able to communicate with the other glands to determine proper timing and amount of hormone secretion.
A balanced endocrine system creates a balanced physiology. Balance within your endocrine system is regulated by the delicate glandular feedback network. Ingesting exogenous hormones (hormones introduced from outside your system, both synthetic and natural) upsets this balance. Exogenous hormones are typically ingested in extremely high doses when compared to normal physiological levels. Stressfully high hormone levels are sensed by your endocrine system's feedback mechanisms and your glands are instructed to stop producing the body's own endogenous (naturally produced) hormones. Glandular function is halted due to this artificial suppression. Exogenous hormones not only inhibit endocrine function, but they influence hormone action.
Endocrine hormones regulate your cellular metabolism by binding to cellular receptor sites (peptide hormones) or by acting directly on your DNA (steroid hormones). The binding of a hormones to cell receptors allows for transfer of information from the hormones to the cells. When exogenous hormones are ingested, your cellular receptor sites are overwhelmed, and quickly become desensitized to protect your cells from over-reaction. The higher level of exogenous hormone ingested, the more receptor sites desensitize. Increasing receptor site desensitization increases the hormone level required to stimulate a cellular response. Exogenous hormone dependency is inevitable, due to endocrine system feedback interference and loss of receptor sensitivity. Exogenous hormone use creates hormone dominance that disrupts your endocrine and metabolic balance, creating the need for more diet, lifestyle, and nutrition support.
Our Functional Endocrinology Assessment pinpoints your glandular deficiencies. This assessment allows for the design of specific nutrition, diet, and lifestyle protocols that will strengthen your glands and restore balance to your endocrine system and metabolism. Functional Endocrinology Assessment is critical for treating the metabolic malfunction that accompanies Fibromyalgia.
Gastrointestinal Testing allows understanding of one of the most overlooked and mismanaged disorders in healthcare today. Gastrointestinal (GI) dysfunctions severely affect every system in the human body. More than 60% of your immune system is located in your GI tract. 99% of your neurotransmitters are produced in your GI tract, and absorption of nutrients, detoxification, hormone production, and metabolism are centered in your GI tract.
Gastrointestinal Testing identifies many of your causes for pain, inflammation, oxidative stress, functional hypothyroidism, autoimmune disorders, adrenal stress syndrome, estrogen dominance and metabolism, anemia, problems with mood, inability to lose weight, food allergies, cardiovascular risk, neurodegenerative disorders, chronic fatigue, and problems with kidney detoxification. Most people have GI problems even if they are unaware of any symptoms.
Gastrointestinal testing helps optimize GI function by providing valuable information for lifestyle, nutrition, dietary support, and occasional medical intervention. This holistic method of GI treatment can reverse the damage done to your gastrointestinal system by prescription drugs.
Your Diet Will Be Good Medicine.
Proper dietary changes will reduce your inflammation, degeneration of your nerves, the acidity of your body, and help regulate your immune system. Abnormal inflammation taxes your immune system, irritates and degenerates your nerves, and interferes with healing. Nerve degeneration interferes with your brain's relationship with your body and your environment. Nerve degeneration significantly interferes with your body's function and healing.
Consuming acid forming substances disrupts your body's acid-alkaline balance. Essential minerals are required to restore this pH balance. The standard American Diet (SAD Diet) is responsible for disrupting your body's pH and creating an entire book full of standard American ailments.
We will educate you the cause and effect of your biochemical imbalances. You will receive guidelines for changing your diet. Your dietary modifications will address pH balance, hormone balance, endocrine function, food allergies, and immune dysfunction (Hashimoto's Thyroid Condition). The anti-inflammatory, alkaline forming, nerve regenerative, and autoimmune enhancing qualities of your diet will promote balance between your body's systems and increase your health.
Your Body's Cries For Water Should Be Over.
Dehydration is one of life's greatest stressors. Dehydration causes or contributes to every disease. All of your bodily functions require significant amounts of water. When you become dehydrated, the fluid surrounding your cells becomes abnormally concentrated, and water rushes out of your cells to dilute the outside fluid. Now that your body's cells have squeezed out all of their fluid, they become weak and lose function.
When water is in short supply, it is rationed based on your survival needs. Organs and systems necessary for immediate survival such as your brain and blood receive water before your digestion (stomach, intestines), elimination (colon), energy production (mitochondria), detoxification (liver, kidneys), and repair systems. Long term dehydration contributes greatly to chronic diseases such as Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue.
Drinking enough water is a critical element of healing. 70% of your body is water. Our staff will evaluate your current hydration level and suggest a hydration program to ensure your proper fluid balance. The Groover Clinic Hydration Protocol is based on a variety of detailed factors including: body weight, altitude of residence, humidity, diuretic intake, and activity level. By following your Hydration Protocol will reduce your inflammation, wash away toxins, improve your bowel function, increase your energy, reduce stress, and improve the overall quality of your life.
You Should Sleep Peacefully.
Your sleep should become restful, refreshing, and restorative. Improved adrenal gland function will balance your circadian rhythm (your cycle of cortisol production from your adrenal glands throughout the day). Normal circadian rhythm determines how awake your are during the day and how restful your sleep is at night.
Difficulty sleeping is related to inverted cortisol production. High cortisol levels in the morning wake you up. Low cortisol levels at night allow you to sleep. Inversion of these cortisol levels causes cortisol levels to be high at night and creates difficulty falling and staying asleep. Low cortisol levels in the morning make it hard for you to wake up and get started with your day. Overproduction of cortisol causes insulin resistance, obesity, and other degenerative conditions.
Decreasing your total stress with our Holistic Fibromyalgia Treatment Program will help your adrenal glands heal and your cortisol levels to normalize. We consider the sum of all of your stresses to be your total stress. These stresses include psychic (mental, emotional, spiritual), physical (pain, tension, organ and gland dysfunction, infection, etc.), chemical (toxicity), and nutritional (excess, deficiency, endocrine imbalances, improper sugar metabolism, anemia, etc.). Each of these stresses may be reduced through the comprehensive care your receive at Groover Clinic and the improvements in your activities of daily living.
You Should Feel Physically Well.
As you heal, your joint mobility will improve, nervous system will stabilize, muscles will balance and strengthen, the overshadowing stress related to your pain, weakness, and immobility will disappear, and your movement will become strong and fluid.
Your Upper Cervical Spinal Correction is the starting point for successful nerve, muscle, and joint recovery. As part of our Holistic Fibromyalgia Treatment Protocol, you will receive uniquely powerful combinations of spinal corrective procedures. These corrective procedures eliminate massive amounts of the mechanical, neurological, muscular, and gravitational stress coming from abnormalities in your spine.
Your Brain Should be in Control of your Body.
One of your greatest sources of physical stress originates from miss-alignment of your upper cervical spine. Accidents and injuries push your head off the center of your neck. All of our Fibromyalgia patients have had this enormously destructive joint miss-alignment. This misalignment occurs at the only place in your spine where joint misalignment interferes with the functioning of your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord).
The neural canal is the pathway through which your brain stem and spinal cord carry central nervous system information up (from your body to your brain) and down (from your brain to your body). It is essential that your brain have a clear pathway of communication with your body. Nerve roots stemming from the spinal cord carry your creative intelligence from your central nervous system through your peripheral nervous system to all parts of your body.
The origin of the neural canal is your Foramen Magnum (the hole at the base of your skull). This hole is intended to line up exactly with the rest of your neural canal formed along the back side of your spinal vertebra.
Two knuckles at the base of your skull, each join with receptacles on both sides at the top of your C1 Atlas vertebra. These joints hold your head on your neck, allows for your nodding ("yes") motion. Your second neck vertebra, C2 has an axis that provides a pivot for C1, allowing for head rotation ("no" motion). C1 is aptly called the Atlas vertebra after the mythological character that holds the earth on his shoulders. Your head (12 - 16 pounds) sits on your Atlas vertebra and your neck muscles hold your head above your body.
Falls and other injuries may knock or shove your head off the center of your neck. The resulting abnormal head position triggers switches in your brain stem to signal muscle contraction. Your muscles contract to create postural changes that shift your pelvis under your head to support your head properly.
For you to maintain proper balance, orientation, and safety, your brain cannot allow your head to hang out over to one side of your body. Your brain protects itself by distorting your posture to compensate for your head being abnormally positioned off the center of your neck. However, this compensatory postural distortion creates tremendous mechanical, neurological, and muscular stress. These stresses wear out your spinal and extra-spinal (ribs, elbows, hips, knees, and shoulders) joints. The compensatory stress causes inflammation, pain, muscle spasm, and depletes your energy.
After receiving the alignment of your upper cervical spine, you should begin to see amazing improvements in your Fibromyalgia. Establishment of proper spinal and pelvic alignment is the foundation of our Holistic Fibromyalgia Treatment Program. Our unique methods allow us to succeed where other forms of healthcare fail.
Positioning your spine and pelvis onto your center of gravity, leveling your pelvis and balancing the lengths of your legs forms a truly balanced central core for the rest of your body to conform. Elimination of postural distortion enables the rest of your spinal joints, extra spinal joints, muscles, nerves, organs, and systems to respond to treatment quickly and permanently.
Your Body's Foundation Should Be Strong.
Groover Clinic has discovered major miss-alignments of the pelvic joints (sacroiliac and pubic symphysis) in all of our Fibromyalgia patients. The correction of your pelvic misalignment is often the first structural change that you will experience at our clinic. Our patients report great pain relief from this procedure. Proper pelvic alignment provides a solid base of support for your spine, and powerful, harmonious function of your legs.
Pelvic miss-alignment places significant stress on your body, including muscular compensation, nerve dysfunction, and low back pain. Muscular compensation means some of your primary joint movement muscles contract and others turn off to prevent joints from functioning. Through muscular compensation, your body attempts to protect your misaligned pelvic joints from further injury during movement. This protective mechanism requires inefficient secondary and tertiary movement patterns to move our spine and other joints. Inefficient movement wears out our joints, wastes energy and leads to tiredness and fatigue.
Your sacroiliac joint area is one of the two outlets for your parasympathetic nervous system. Your parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for relaxation, digestion, sleep, and sexuality. Sacroiliac joint misalignment may severely interfere with these vital body functions.
Sciatica (shooting pain down the legs), pelvic and hip pain, and low back pain are the most common symptoms of pelvic misalignment. Restoring joint alignment of the pelvis is essential for restoring your nerve function, your mobility, relieving low back and leg pain, and for preventing pelvic, hip, knee, ankle, and low back arthritis.
Or extensive experience with treating pelvic injuries and pelvic misalignments insures successful diagnosis and treatment of your pelvis. Pelvic problems are caused by direct pelvic trauma from accidents and injuries. Pelvic problems also arise from the postural distortion created by upper cervical spinal misalignment. At Groover Clinic, we understand the relationship between the upper cervical spine, posture, and pelvic alignment, and frequently treat previously misdiagnosed and overlooked pelvic and sacroiliac joint dysfunctions.
All of your Joints Should be Pain Free.
Extremity joints (ribs, shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, feet, jaw, and cranium) frequently misalign, causing muscle spasm, inflammation and pain. When extremity joint misalignments are detected, we perform a thorough history of the problem, orthopedic exams, x-rays, treatment, and rehabilitation. Our thorough approach to diagnosis and treatment greatly increases the probability that we will provide you with immediate and lasting relief from joint pain and improve your joint function. Relief from extremity pain and restoration of extremity function is greatly beneficial for reducing your total body stress. Inflammation in one part of your body causes inflammation elsewhere. By improving your extremity functioning, we can help you to reduce your total body inflammation.
Gain Knowledge and Techniques to Help Yourself!
You deserve to have the knowledge to take care of your own health. Our Specific Corrective Rehabilitation Exercise program specifically addresses your needs, helping you restore the function you have lost from your Fibromyalgia. It is important to establish lifelong self-care habits to enhance and stabilize benefits from your Holistic Fibromyalgia Treatment Program. Long term, continuous improvements in your strength, flexibility, muscle balance, diet, nutrition, and lifestyle will keep your health growing.
Maintenance of your spinal and joint alignment is controlled by the strength and balance of your musculature. Your muscles hold the parts of your body in balanced relationship with each other and with the Earth's gravitational field. Muscle weakness, abnormal muscle length, abnormal muscle tension, and poor or imbalanced neurological muscle control cause muscles to lose their ability to support your posture and joints properly.
Postural distortion from abnormal muscle contraction patterns places considerably large demands for more energy to support your body in a standing position. Our Specific Corrective Rehabilitation Exercise program will identify your abnormal muscular patterns, teach you specific corrective exercises to normalize your musculature, stabilize your spinal and extra spinal joints, and balance your posture.
Restore Your Proper Nerve Function.
Neuromuscular Acupuncture and Low Level Laser Light Therapy will reduce your stress from altered nerve function, muscle tension, spasm, tissue damage and inflammation. Neuroplasticity is a condition of altered nerve functioning occurring when nerves are trained to contract abnormally. For example, a problem with joint alignment causes abnormal nerve activity, signaling abnormal, compensatory muscle contraction. After the joint alignment problem has been corrected, the trained nerve pathway will continue to cause abnormal muscle contraction. Unresolved neuroplasticity will cause muscle imbalance, joint degeneration, inflammation and pain. Altered nerve function must be treated by resetting the nerves to achieve neurological balance.
Corrective exercise, Neuromuscular Acupuncture, and Low Level Laser Light Therapy accelerate your healing by balancing abnormally trained nerves and muscles. Neuromuscular acupuncture and low level laser light stimulate energy production in your cells, accelerate cell division, speeds up tissue healing, reduces inflammation, and reduces pain.
Your Need for Medication Should Be Gone.
Prescription medications do not address the cause of your Fibromyalgia, but treat symptoms. Many medications create their own unwanted symptoms (side effects) that will increase your total stress. Once you have started our Holistic Fibromyalgia Treatment Program, the cause of your Fibromyalgia will be addressed. In a short amount of time, you will realize that many of your medications are unnecessary and are preventing you from recovering fully.
With a medical doctor's assistance, you should be able to discontinue many or all of your prescription medications. If needed, we may refer you to one of our holistic MD resources to help you come off your medications safely. This is particularly helpful if you have been using addictive opiate pain medications (Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Percocet) and have dependency issues.
Our Approach.
Groover Clinic is comprehensive, detailed, and thorough. Your history and exams encompass all of your organs and systems. We will offer you more original, detailed explanations and solutions than any other healthcare provider. Your care plan is created individually to exactly match your needs and goals.
Our thorough patient education will keep you involved. Your understanding of our findings and procedures is critical. Your partnership in your health care will ensure maximum benefit. We will motivate you to continue on the path to health and happiness. Our positive attitude about your potential recovery will enable you to easily maintain your appointment schedule and home care program. We are open to your opinions and concerns and strive to provide you with control of your own health.
What makes us unique?
We take care of you holistically, naturally. You will not experience the disappointing results of symptomatic care. Your symptoms will vanish after we have identified and corrected the breakdown in function that causes your symptoms. All of our treatment protocols are drug-free.
We are the only clinic in the world providing our Holistic Fibromyalgia Program. Our vision of wellness and our combination of diagnostics and effective synergistic treatment procedures do not exist elsewhere.
We solve more of your problems. Our goal is to eliminate as much stress in your life as possible so your True Self may shine. Happy, healthy, successful patients are our product.
We more completely solve your problems. Our skill and confidence with our Holistic Fibromyalgia Program helps you completely regain your health.
You get better faster. Identifying and treating the cause of your problems brings rapid results.
You have fewer appointments. We have helped our patients achieve tremendous relief from Fibromyalgia symptoms in 12 visits. After your period of intensive care is completed, your regularly scheduled visits will become less frequent. Within reasonable time, you should be maintaining and expanding your progress by scheduling quarterly visits including a yearly progress evaluation.
Now that you have a better idea about the results you can expect from working with us, our approach to healthcare, and patient care philosophy. Please Click Here to visit the "Our Programs" page to learn about the specific programs and services we offer.
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