Balanced Health Care: Float Therapy & Massage

Float therapy is a form of non-touch therapy for relieving stress and it's symptoms in the mind and body. It's for people of all ages and a range of issues and purposes. A float tank is a large, covered bath-tub-like container filled with a water solution heated to skin temperature and is well saturated with approx. 800lbs of Epsom salts, hence why it feels silky and warm when you lie in it. You will simply step in, lay down and relax.

We recommend you try 3 floats within 10 - 14 days to understand how it feels and how it works. By consistently relaxing you help calm the mind and body, which in turn restores the body's own healing systems, allowing stress hormone levels to drop, enabling better repair of injuries, normalizes metabolism, improves circulation and cellular transport and absorption of nutrients, and reduces soft tissue and joint pain, all from relaxing.

With your first float you will familiarize yourself with the environment, salt water and buoyancy. You will also experience deep relaxation and probably sleep quite well that night.

The second float is when you will experience an even deeper sense of relaxation where you enjoy peace and quiet, and perhaps notice your aches and pains diminish or disappear completely. 

During your third float and having learned previously from the environment and float you will feel significant benefits of deep relaxation and can release yourself in to a calm state easily and sooner than before.

Some known benefits of regular floating:

• reduces anxiety, blood pressure (anxiety related), and inflammation (cortisol levels drop)
• excellent strategy for pain management and treatment of arthritic pain, joint pain, neck & back pain, Lactic acidosis, Sciatic pain, tension/migraines/headaches, PMS and whiplash.
• helps resolve PTSD, insomnia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MS (Multiple Sclerosis).
• improves circulation, tissue repair and mobility.
• prepares to the body for and relaxes it after physical activity or strain, like cycling, running, hiking, golfing, gardening, etc.
• helps to improve coping skills by physiologically clearing the body of stress symptoms.
• increases resistance to stress.

If you have been on your feet all day, Float Therapy reverses gravity's effects on your body. 

The buoyancy produced by the salt water solution helps relieve, release and expand joints to their normal spacing and position. The heated temperature of the water soothes soreness and helps expand blood vessels, improving circulation all over the body.

Enjoying one hour of Float Therapy is equivalent to a restful 3-4 hour sleep. Floating helps restore normal sleeping patterns.

The pressure from pregnancy is resolved and released during a float and is perfect for women in their 3rd Trimester for relieving heavy back and hip pain and reducing inflammation.

Float Therapy along with Massage Therapy offers a balance for resolving patterns of pain, relaxing tensions away, restoring health and improving coping skills in mind and body. Combining the two therapies is complete health care. 

Sports Massage and Float Therapy - Rest / Recovery, Pre / Post Training

Wear and tear and the inability to heal (well or quickly) is frustrating and creeps up if neglected. It holds you back and can cause debilitating problems for the future. These are quickly resolved with combining massage and floating.

Float Therapy helps accelerate restoration of tissue and recovery between training sessions, helping you build muscle and repair injuries. 

Relaxed athletes have better performance and mental stamina to keep up with the demands.

With regular floating, Float Therapy helps athletes overcome exhaustion, fatigue, poor sleep, fogginess, anxiety, depression and weak immune systems.

Rehabilitative Massage and Float Therapy - Restore strength and balance.

Chronic pain, old injuries, poor posture, accidents, lifestyle (changes), mental stress, anxiety, depression, PTSD all play a roll on how our body feels, endures stress and moves in it's environment.

Massage reduces tensions locked in muscles and helps realign joints and fascia to improve nerve communication, mobility, strength, and in turn increases flexibility, range of motion and balance.

By regularly floating you will restore your sense of well being, reduce pain and nurture your body to repair itself between massage appointments. Float Therapy will reduce stress hormone levels 

If you find yourself struggling with aches and pains that are a result of old physical/mental traumas, misalignment, injury or mental stress, by giving your body the opportunity to regularly relax will restore it's ability to heal itself better and improve your coping skills.

Floatation Tanks and Hygiene

Water is circulated by filtration pump through a 20 micron filter between each Float Therapy appointment and further sanitized with ozone, UV light, a safe, non-toxic pool-grade oxidizing solution, Peroxysan, and enzymes. Water quality checks are performed regularly.

Currently available at our clinic is a special maintenance package:

5 Massages + 5 Floats for $495 - regularly $800. This package is perfect for a year long maintenance plan. Float Therapy and Massage appointments can be made back to back or spread out. To purchase your package, follow this link to our online store.

What IBS, Crohn's Disease & GI Disorders Have To Do With Coping Skills

Health psychologists have begun treating gastrointestinal disorders that are strongly affected by stress, including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), Crohn's disease, functional heartburn, functional dyspepsia and ulcerative colitis.

Biochemical signaling between the brain and the GI tract, known as the brain-gut axis, can have a major effect on gastrointestinal disorders. The normal stress of everyday life can aggravate certain GI conditions. And in a vicious cycle, worrying about or dwelling on severe pain, constipation, diarrhea and other GI symptoms can make the symptoms worse, which in turn increases the stress, said Sarah Kinsinger, PhD, ABPP, a Loyola Medicine health psychologist who specializes in treating GI disorders.

Dr. Kinsinger offers behavioral treatments specifically designed to target brain-gut pathways. These treatments teach patients coping strategies to manage symptoms and reduce stress. She provides cognitive-behavioral therapy, an evidence-based treatment for irritable bowel syndrome. She also offers behavioral relaxation techniques, including diaphragmatic breathing (also known as belly breathing or deep breathing) and gut-directed hypnotherapy.

In many patients, psychological or behavioral interventions can be more effective than medications, Dr. Kinsinger said. She usually sees patients for five to seven sessions, and the treatments typically are covered by insurance.

"It is very gratifying to see patients get better after in some cases suffering for many years," Dr. Kinsinger said. "Psychological and behavioral interventions do not cure their disease, but the treatments can provide patients with safe and effective coping mechanisms and greatly reduce the severity of their symptoms."

For some conditions, such as IBS, psychological and behavioral treatments can be the primary treatments. For other conditions for which there are effective drugs, such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, psychological and behavioral treatments can be effective adjuncts to medications.

Dr. Kinsinger earned a PhD degree in clinical psychology from the University of Miami and completed a health psychology fellowship at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago. She is board certified in clinical health psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology.

This article originally appeared on Science Daily.

A Must Read For People in Pain: 'Explain Pain'

If I could make only one recommendation to individuals living with chronic pain, it would be to read the book Explain Pain by David Butler and Lorimer Moseley.

Directed at both clinicians who work with chronic pain patients and patients who live with chronic pain, Explain Pain shows how the discoveries of modern pain science can be put to practical use. Written in understandable language with a touch of lighthearted humor, Butler and Moseley take a complex subject and make it possible for the average person to understand and use. One client remarked that she thought it would be hard to read and was delighted that she did not find it difficult at all. 

Pain education can help

Research has demonstrated that pain education can help to reduce chronic pain. For instance, a recent study by the army followed 4,325 soldiers over a two year period and found that one session of pain education could help lower the incidence of low back pain. Understanding how pain works is not a magic bullet that will make pain go away immediately, but it can help to take some of the fear and anxiety out of the experience which can then begin to help alter the experience. With time, thinking a little differently about pain can lead to more successful strategies for reducing, limiting, and eliminating pain.  

Pain is useful and should not be ignored. Pain is a protective mechanism generated by the brain in response to perceived threat. However, when pain is chronic and there is no direct or immediate threat to the body, understanding how the body can get "stuck" in pain can suggest ways to help it get "unstuck." 

Butler and Moseley provide some amazing stories to illustrate the surprising discovery that pain is not directly related to tissue damage. While this concept may, at first, seem odd and difficult to grasp, they produce convincing evidence to support this idea. Consider this: a paper cut produces very little tissue damage, yet can cause a lot of pain. A soldier can get shot in battle, yet not realize he is injured until he is off the battlefield. Amputees may experience phantom limb pain in tissue that no longer exists. How does that happen? The part of the brain that corresponded to the amputated limb can still generate the sensation of pain, even after the limb is gone.

Pain can be influenced by context. If everyone around us seems to be in pain, we may also expect to be in pain. Athletes involved in vigorous sports ignore impacts that would upset most of us because to them it's all part of the game. In that context, it is expected and not a threat. 

Butler and Moseley describe how pain is generated by the nervous system. Understanding that pain is generated by the brain, rather than by damaged tissues, does not mean that pain is "all in your head" and should be ignored or dismissed as imaginary. In fact, understanding that pain is the body's alarm system highlights the importance of treating pain so that the alarm system does not become oversensitive. 

The book describes what happens in different systems of the body and how they may be affected by pain. Normal responses to painful stimuli are contrasted with what happens when the responses become altered. The influence of our thoughts and beliefs is examined for the role it can play in chronic pain.

Practical suggestions

The last few chapters of Explain Pain suggest practical tools that can be used to manage chronic pain. Using "the virtual body" is explained, as is the use of graded exposure to break the association between particular movements and pain and to cultivate successful movement without pain. 

Pain education should be part of every client or patient's rehabilitation.Explain Pain provides an excellent model for pain education.

One of my clients suffered for many years with a painful chronic condition and found this book immensely helpful. Although she had seen many doctors and therapists, she had never been given any pain education. After reading this book, she asked, "Why didn't anyone tell me this?" My response was, "They didn't know." Although Explain Pain was first published in 2003, pain science is still only slowly finding its way to practitioners. 

Since I've begun studying pain science, I've incorporated information the information presented in Explain Pain into my practice. It has been a useful tool for helping clients get out of pain and feel in control of their lives once again.

Additional resources

I've posted a fifteen minute TED Talk by Lorimer Moseley on Why Pain Hurts in a previous post. There is also, in the same article, a forty-five minute lecture to a professional audience for those geeky folks who want to understand details about the biology of pain. Recently, I've found a twenty-five minute video by Moseleywhich has become a favorite because he addresses how we think about conditions like herniated discs and how our thinking can feed and perpetuate fear, anxiety, and pain. If you watch only one of these videos, this is the one I recommend. These videos are educational and entertaining. Moseley, who is both researcher and clinician, has a charming Australian accent and a great sense of humor. Imagine Crocodile Dundee giving an introduction to pain science and you'll get the picture.

For more information about understanding pain, I also suggest the following: 

Painful Yarns by Lorimer Moseley (stories to help understand the biology of pain)

Also, check out this article about understanding how pain works by Paul Ingraham of SaveYourself.ca. 

Cory Blickenstaff, PT, has put together some useful videos of "novel movements." Here are links to the ones on the low back, neck, and hand, wrist, forearm, and elbow. 

This article originally appeared massage-stloius.com and was written by 'Ask the Massage Therapist'.
 

The Millennial's Doctor Releases a Handbook on Bodies

Radiologist and Atlantic editor James Hamblin provides the answers we’d hear “If Our Bodies Could Talk”

Hamblin's new book uses illustrations to help explain how the human body works—and sometimes doesn't work. (Hallie Bateman / Doubleday)

By Ben Panko

If millennials elected their own doctor, James Hamblin would make a good candidate for the position.

He does improv comedy. He has a YouTube series. He tweets frequently. He lives in Brooklyn. Recently, the former radiologist and current Atlantic senior editor has garnered attention for his series of quirky videos on medical topics that concern the average person, ranging from the health benefits of wine to whether you actually need to shower every day, as well as articles on more serious topics such as the dangers of SPF ratings and how rising incarceration rates can help spread disease.

So why would this digital maven decide to collect his wisdom in an old-fashioned book?

Hamblin believes that many people would enjoy reading about anatomy and physiology, if only they could find a book on the topic that wasn’t written for medical professionals. "I've long had this idea of doing an accessible, interesting textbook," he says. One of his inspirations was coming across the 2005 book Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini early last year. Hamblin's book, coming out next week from Doubleday, offers thorough and updated answers to the nipple question and more. Its title, inspired by the name of his YouTube series, is If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining the Human Body.

The book, excerpted in the January/February issue of The Atlantic, does more than answer questions about food and sex, however. Hamblin draws on his journalistic skills, interviewing hundreds of doctors and scientists, and weaving thought-provoking stories such as the saga of Beth Usher, who had half her brain removed to prevent seizures by former surgeon and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson. "She just has an amazing story and was an inspiring person to meet and get to know," Hamblin says.

How accidentally swallowing one's tongue ring could kill a person. (Hallie Bateman / Doubleday)

Hamblin is part of the newest generation of "popular doctors"—a category that hasn’t always been painted in a flattering light. Dr. Mehmet Oz, the cardiac surgeon who charmed Oprah and millions of TV viewers, has faced intense criticism for "relying on flimsy or incomplete data, distorting the results, and wielding his vast influence in ways that threaten the health of anyone who watches the show," as Michael Specter wrote in a 2013 New Yorker profile. Among other things, Oz has been critiqued for endorsing medical products and offering medical advice of questionable efficacy.

For his part, Hamblin says that his book isn’t aiming to give you all the answers. While he does respond to many common medical questions in his book, he says he ultimately wants to help people think logically about the "deluge of information" on health issues that they confront in their everyday life through television, the Internet and social media. Ideally, they’ll come away with more confidence distinguishing between fake science and real science.

"We have so much information," Hamblin says, "that the best thing you can do right now for a person is equip with them some kind of framework for understanding how science works."    

This article originally appeared on smithsonianmag.com and was written by Ben Panko.