Displaying items by tag: Stress

Everspring Health approaches reproductive health in several different ways, the first of which is proactive. Come see us when you’ve just begun planning a family. It is actually quite common for healthy couples to face fertility hiccups and challenges. These often occur when lifestyle stressors inconveniently line up with natural shifts in hormonal rhythms that could temporarily affect either partner. Most often in this stage challenges are associated with expectations of planning and lifestyle related stress instead of clinical health conditions.

Engaging with us before planning becomes more targeted means that, at the very least, we can create a program where everyone involved is healthier, more comfortable, and more prepared to greet a new member of the family. Often couples come to us in the midst of their planning calendar which increases stress and often leads to further challenges. Our recommendation is at least 90 days of preparation to help allow for ideal alignment of expectations and natural hormonal rhythms. This time period might need to be increased depending influential factors like extended use of birth control pills as one example. With the right preparatory care, you can increase your chances of a healthy pregnancy, healthy birth and decrease the risk of postpartum challenges.

Should you already be experiencing challenges with a healthy conception, it’s important for you to know that nothing is necessarily wrong with you or your spouse: it may just be that you need tools to help reduce stress, improve your state of health and better regulate reproductive processes. We create a Foundational Care program inclusive of your needs. We may use therapies like acupuncture and massage, nutritional therapies, and lifestyle coaching to create a better environment for pregnancy without putting the large amounts of stress on the woman’s body that reproductive endocrinology involves. Using our integrative approach, we can give your body its best chance to create and foster new life.

Finally, for those already using reproductive support services (e.g. a Reproductive Endocrinologist) we can work to support your current program including providing acupuncture to support ovarian stimulation as well as for regulation before and after embryo transfer.

Chronic pain is pain that persists for weeks, months or even years. It can range from an dull annoyance to an overwhelming experience that impedes daily tasks and can even force people to miss work or family functions. Chronic pain can cause people to lose their appetite and experience exhaustion with the least bit of physical activity. For some, these experiences are episodic that can last for a day or two or even a few months and then seemingly disappear. This can make it difficult to diagnose and it is why it is some important for us to understand your history to develop an effective strategy for dissolution.

One of most well known sources of chronic pain is fibromyalgia, a disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain accompanied by fatigue, sleep and/or memory impairment and mood disorders. A lessor known but fairly common condition is Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS) which is genetic in origin and can often present symptoms that include chronic pain similar to fibromyalgia. It is not uncommon for people with chronic pain straddle the line of many conditions, including fibromyalgia, CFS (Chronic Fatigue syndrome) and EDS, and often receive little support for a productive plan to reduce this experience in their everyday lives.

Many people suffer from chronic pain in the absence of any notable past injury or evidence of illness, which can make it hard to find a resource to definitively offer a viable solution. With so many different approaches to treating chronic pain, finding a clear diagnosis from which to develop an effective treatment plan can often be confusing or frustrating. At Everspring Health, we immediately seek to reduce the stress of understanding your pain and begin treating your chronic pain right away. Our clients most often have a progressive experience where we are able to relieve at least some of the pain short-term while working on complete solutions in the long-term. One of the challenges of chronic pain is that often the condition has developed over years, even if symptoms may have only just begun, and it can take time for us to unwind all of the influential factors to provide long-term results.

We begin by looking at your history with pain: where it came from, what it feels like, if it changes based on movement, rest, digestion, varying temperatures, seasons, or times of day. We want to know everything we can about your experience in order to develop a treatment strategy that will work for you, specifically. Acupuncture and massage can be used to relax muscles and down regulate receptors to relieve pain, as well as positional release and other physical exercises as needed. We fully examine lifestyle habits (stress, diet, and sleep) and use our observations to improve your body’s ability to combat pain. If you have a current course of treatment – like physical therapy or surgery – we’ll work with you and your doctors to provide the best relief possible. This investment in yourself is worth it, and our co-op model makes it affordable and accessible.

Chronic fatigue is a syndrome characterized by extreme fatigue that is generally not linked to another underlying medical condition. The fatigue tends to get worse with physical or mental demands and is often not improved even with sufficient rest. Symptoms often include challenges sleeping, chronic pain, foggy head and digestive disorders. The CDC estimates that 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans suffer from CFS and about 90 percent of people with CFS have not been diagnosed.

There are three manifestations of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that one might see discussed.

• 1. Chronic fatigue - Generally as described above where the key factor is fatigue not linked with other known conditions. Causal influence is often labeled as chronic unpredictable stress from long-term overwork without the proper recovery and/or nutrition.
• 2. Chronic fatigue immunodeficiency syndrome - Often as described above but usually involves an experience where one gets sick regularly often after a more demanding illness (mono, Lyme, COVID, etc). This pattern may also occur while a latent pathogen is still present, so differentiation is important to improving long-term results.
• 3. Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) - This version of chronic fatigue syndrome (i.e. ME/CFS) is often the most demanding experience related to this category. It tends to be a long-term illness that can affect many body systems.

Chronic fatigue as a syndrome cannot be diagnosed by a single test and in many cases it is a diagnosis arrived at by ruling out all other possibilities. Often chronic fatigue is experienced in association with many other symptoms which furthers the effort to rule out other diseases or instigating conditions. Unfortunately, this also complicates progress as the individual is going untreated as the diagnostics continue.

The standard of care for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome focuses on symptom relief, whereas at Everspring Health our integrative strategy focuses on peeling back the layers of the root influences of your chronic fatigue to sufficiently dissolve the issue. Our treatment strategy goes beyond management of symptoms; we develop an Foundational Care program including nutrition, exercise, manual therapy (acupuncture, massage, etc) to provide you with a productive, progressive long-term solution. We start by understanding your past and current health history, in order to narrow down the primary influential factors. The benefits of Everspring Health’s approach is that most often something can be done to pursue a level of normal of function while diagnostics continue to rule out any other issues that may need to be addressed. One does not have to wait and see for us to support recovery.

The challenges one should understand when successfully addressing chronic fatigue is that progress may be slow and sporadic until certain benchmarks of time are met using consistent therapy throughout that time. One should be prepared to engage and invest in a program for at least 90 days so that enough progress can be made and then understood to create a lifestyle that can further the program and ideally dissolve the condition while seeking to prevent it from returning.

Back pain is the leading cause of workplace disability worldwide and one of the most common issues we deal with here at Everspring Health. From repetitive stress injuries to sprains and strains* to poor posture to back pain with unknown causes, we see it all. So, when you come in to see us we begin by looking at your history with back pain and all possible influential factors: where it came from, what it feels like, if it changes based on varying activities, body movements, temperatures, seasons, or times of day.

We want to know everything we can about your experience in order to develop a treatment strategy that will work for you, specifically. Acupuncture and massage are used to help relieve as much of the immediate pain as possible and begin the normalization the muscle tissue. We use therapeutic methods like trigger point release, positional release and physical exercises to seek to correct the impeded functional range and retrain the tissue. Our integrative approach partners chiropractic and physical therapy as a part of an effective treatment program. We fully examine lifestyle habits stress, diet, sleep, posture and use further observations to improve your body’s ability move through range of motion to ideally alleviate pain permanently. If you have a current course of treatment – like chiropractic, physical therapy or surgery – we’ll work with your doctors to provide the best relief possible.

*The difference between a sprain and a strain is that a sprain injures the bands of tissue that connect two bones together, while a strain involves an injury to a muscle or to the tendon that attaches a muscle to a bone.

The desire to break undesirable habits varies from person to person and thus the programs for helping one change their habits must meet their specific needs. The cornerstone of any program must include the motivation to actually create change in one’s lifestyle for the better. In any addiction, body chemistry is highly invested in the chemical pathways on which it has been trained over the course of months or even years. To relieve and retrain these chemical pathways one will inevitably be challenged by the body as it will prefer to reinforce the current habit versus deciding to break from these normalized patterns. It is for this reason that having the desire and motivation to change our habits is really a key component for changing our lifestyle.

The next key component is to make sure the body is well supported to reduce the demands from both the chemical withdrawal (body) as well as the habitual withdrawal (mind). At Everspring Health, we want to know why and how your habit formed and what enables it to remain a part of your daily life. Does it help alleviate stress? Is it something you do with friends? Is there a pattern to when or where your habit is strongest? Understanding how your habits influence your life helps us build a strategy that will be the most successful for you. As mentioned above we need to both break from the body chemistry as well as the mental or emotional connection with the substance. Everspring’s lifestyle, health and healing programs integrate well with any outside program you may be utilizing, including support groups.

Acupuncture, diet and sleep along with herbal therapies can all reduce the intensity and frequency of cravings, and even get rid of them entirely as we remodel the body chemistry. At the same time we educate you about what the cessation process will be like, and how you can position yourself to be most successful. Ultimately, we help you understand and identify what kind of life you want to create - one that doesn’t need to rely on addiction - and proceed towards creating that experience. By pursuing what we want it becomes much easier to let go of the things we don’t want.

Stress is one of the three primary influences of health we seek to address for every program we provide because it plays a role in everyone’s quality of life. Short-term demands of stress can influence how we feel which can influence how we carry ourselves (posture) and can further influence with how we sleep and eat. Long-term stress can lead to exhaustion and even more substantial experiences with depression and anxiety. Furthermore, experiencing adverse events is a challenge we all face over the course of our lives. How we react and how we are supported after those events can play a roll in how our bodies remember and protect us going forward. The way our bodies protect us might in turn impede our ability to process information and engage in meaningful experiences going forward.

At Everspring Health we seek to help you develop and cultivate your mental health program whether it be self directed, lead by us or facilitated by another provider. Many people who come to us don’t feel the need to go to a counselor, but are looking for a space to cultivate a more mindful experience in their daily life, increase energy while seeking long-term relief from the demands that stress and adverse events imposes on their day. Others come with a clinical diagnosis and treatment plan already in place and we create an integrative program working alongside your current program to support the progress you might already be experiencing.

Creating a balanced, integrative, whole person program begins by examining your past history and along with a series of constitutional diagnostics: some people may have experiences labeled as anxiety that are actually normal despite them not being ideal, some are experiencing discomfort that should not be considered acceptable and others have a little bit of both which often leads to compounding stressors. Integrative diagnostics will help us understand what’s normal for you and what can be improved upon thus leading to a more complete program customized to your needs. We can employ acupuncture and massage, as well as using herbal therapies to help ease stress and get you functioning at peak capacity. We also make sure to examine how your diet and sleep might be affecting your mood because these two components are crucial to a stable, productive mood. With proper diagnosis, patience, and persistence we can help you build a healthy foundation from which to find long-term solutions to what you’re experiencing and enable you to be in control.

At Everspring Health, our pursuit of healthy weight involves creating a solid awareness of how stress, diet and sleep influence our body composition. Too often we are made to believe that a healthy body is an extension of healthy weight, when in reality healthy weight is an extension of a healthy body and healthy mind. The people who are credited with the healthiest and longest lives focus on living good and fulfilling lives, they don't chase marketing fads. They eat real food, they relax alone and socialize with friends, they move as a natural part of their day and their weight naturally corresponds with this reality. There is no issue in pursuing healthy weight as a primary goal but the most successful people who pursue this goal embrace the fundamentals of health and build it into who they are and the lifestyle they lead. By creating a foundation of healthy fundamentals it allows us to understand the principles of healthy weight and a true reliable resource evolves, one where we can always return to for reliable results. The Everspring Health healthy weight program focuses on awareness in our daily lives, on nourishment of our body and mind, where healthy movement is a natural extension of our day.

The fundamentals begin with awareness. Awareness is focused on three lifestyle factors: stress, diet, and sleep because these three things influence all disease and are primary fundamental principles in the pursuit of healthy body composition. When discussing stress we are looking to reduce inflammatory burden on the body which is demanding on tissues and creates waste products that can interfere with healthy cellular function. Impaired cellular function then leads to impaired cellular metabolism, which plays a key role in our metabolism as a whole. As we are able to get waste out of the way, we want to leverage diet to make sure each cell gets the nourishment it needs to optimally function so the body can safely lose weight. Sleep then becomes key time to remove waste from the body and the to make sure the cells and tissues get a change to repair to function at their optimal level.

Once we establish a connection to our body and awareness of how our lifestyle habits influences our body then we seek to understand how movement influences our day. For many, we have the opportunity to move more in our day than we might realize. We should first seek to maximize this opportunity as this fits right into our daily life. From here we can begin to seek other opportunities to move in ways that are both enjoyable and productive. The key here is to seek to move in a way that is sustainable and productive. Too often, our ambitions lead to burnout or injury and our troubled relationship with weight continues.

At Everspring Health we talk about the value of a healthy life and the relationship with a healthy body, mind and spirit. We seek to help you create achievable health goals and create a lifestyle that results in long-term optimal weight and overall health. We use clinical therapies to help improve digestion, regulate metabolism and reduce stress. As movement and exercise plays a more key role, we help you develop a program that will balance workouts with proper rest because that is most productive. We help you develop a personalized dietary plan, which will help you sustain a long term healthy weight and empower you to understand how food influences your life. Ultimately, we create a space where you can be healthy, and then we let your weight adjust to your improved level of health.

The skin is the largest organ in the body and is often a reflection of our systemic health. When we observe how the skin reacts to stressors we can often catch chronic or even potentially serious issues early. The most common issues people face include acne, bug bites, cold sores, eczema, hives, ringworm, rashes, psoriasis and shingles. Many of us suffer from these common skin issues that can range from an inconvenience to something demanding enough to consume or interfere with our daily lives.

At Everspring Health, we’ll look at the health of your skin and any history you might have with your skin condition. Based on your diagnosis, we can make a plan that will seek to reduce symptoms and address any underlying systemic cause. Stress, diet and sleep will be the prime elements of an effective lifestyle focused medical program as well as a specific nutritional program to target the primary symptoms.

We often use therapies such as acupuncture and massage to help address systemic issues and help with the body’s normal system regulation. Since each case is unique, each treatment will be specifically tailored to you and your needs. Dermatological conditions are often the hardest to treat because of the daily commitment needed to support the healing process. We will educate you about these demands but it is important to understand that if these issue have been chronic for sometime it make take some time to appropriate repair the tissue not just eliminate the symptoms.

The Everspring Integrative Oncology program is dedicated to focusing on your quality of life before, during and after treatment. We work with any program with which you are currently engaged and support you throughout your treatment program. Our clinical focus is on therapy integration. Cancer is a complex disease and we need all resources on the table to make sure we optimize your experience throughout treatment. The foundation of our program is focused on stress, nutrition and your ability to sleep as these three key elements dramatically influence quality of life and overall success in any oncology program. The most challenging issue we have found during treatments is the demand on the mind and body. Exhaustion from both treatment and just life management is the number one demand we seek to reduce. From there we seek to make sure you understand your options for everyday living, how to manage these options and make decisions that bring you the most benefit. We work with individuals at any diagnostic stage and we have the experience of working in concert with any program your oncology team might be planning for your care.

We help you develop a strategic plan to help reduce stress, improve diet and improve sleep and to develop dynamic program modifications as we anticipate progression throughout the care plan. We often use acupuncture and similar therapies to reduce pain, nausea and neuropathy. We help you understand and plan for nutritional options to improve fatigue and endurance through both chemo and recovery stages. Further, we use nutritional programs to help make home life more productive and comfortable. This is very important as the digestive system is taxed throughout the treatment programs. Our practitioners also serve as a source of comfort during stressful or demanding times and help bridge the gap during times of waiting and recovery.

Symptoms we seek to help improve include - Fatigue • Insomnia • Stress • Dry Mouth/Difficulty Swallowing • Loss of Mobility • Constipation/Diarrhea • Hot Flashes & Night Sweats • Low White Blood Cells & Platelets • Weakened Immunity</>

Don't take your eyes for granted.

Our integrated eye health program is individualized to address the unique needs of our patients. Family history can play a key role in eye health, however, there are three general anatomical differentials for eye disorders - neurological, muscle and moisture regulation. Our goal with your program is to understand how stress, diet and sleep influence your current state of health and help build a strategy to address eye conditions and maintain eye health for as long as possible.

Stress – Ultimately, any eye condition is the result of stress. Too much demand on any part of the body will strain that part of the body, eyes are no different. Our goal with your program is to understand the demands on your eyes and develop a strategy to help them recover. Common stressors in our daily lives include smoking, sunlight exposure, impact injury (not wearing safety glasses) and strain from use (computers, focused labor).

Diet – Because our eyes are an organ and they require a substantial part of our brain to function properly, there is a distinct demand for nutrition regarding eye health. Good eye health requires nutrients like healthy fats, vitamins A, C and E as well as lutein and zinc for the organ itself. It also requires nutrients for a healthy brain and nervous system both of which includes keeping inflammation at bay. Our daily veggies are important for good eye (brain) health along with healthy fatty acids and proteins. The key for nutrition is nutrient density, which in turn results in lower inflammation because we are not taxing the body to digest more than it is necessary. Good nutrients then further reduce inflammation internally.

Sleep – Good sleep is imperative for the body to heal and most certainly for eye health. One way to check in on if you are getting enough sleep for your eyes is to see if your eyes water in the wind. If your eyes water when it is windy it is likely that your eyes are not recovering while sleeping. This could be related to age but most likely because your conjunctiva is thinning or is scratched and not getting a chance to repair while sleeping. Further, sleep is the time the brain and nervous system repair as well. So, for the eye organ and for the eye function sleep is a must for good eye health.

These three elements are the foundation to good eye health and we work with you to identify the needs within these three areas and develop an eye health program to reduce or eliminate eye conditions and improve eye health over the course of your daily life.