Posts by BC

There’s a valve at the entrance to your stomach. It’s actually a ring of muscle and it closes as soon as food passes through it. Think of it like the door to your stomach, letting in food when appropriate. Now in your stomach there’s acid. If that valve doesn’t shut correctly, guess what can happen? The acid can sneak through and move up into your esophagus. When this happens, you’ll probably get a burning pain in your chest, known as...

High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is when the force of your blood pushing against the walls of your blood vessels is consistently too high. It’d be like trying to force a whole lot of liquid through thin tubes quickly and forcefully– the tubes can’t handle that for a prolonged amount of time, right? Eventually, they burst! Right now oxygenated blood is running through your body’s circulatory system. Your heart is...

Drama queens love milking their back pain for everything it’s worth. “Stuck” in bed, they’ll ask their significant other to wait on them hand-and-foot. But is bed the best place for those with a bad back? Conventional wisdom has had us all thinking, “Well, if I have lower back pain, then I should just stay in bed and rest.” Conventional wisdom, however, was/is wrong about this. It turns out that bed rest is not good for back pain....

If you ever wondered how people injured their spine, it’s likely that they were in a car accident. Indeed, according to the Mayo Clinic, car accidents are one of the leading causes of spinal injuries. So what typically happens to your spine after a car accident? Basically, your muscles and joints have received a quick and intense shock. This trauma moved them into odd positions. Thus, the person has pain. Most likely, a car crash ends...

We’ve got bones that help our bodies function properly. What happens when the body, though, loses too much bone, makes too little bone, or both? When then happens, it’s called osteoporosis. It’s a bone disease. Obviously, it’s not something you’d want to have, yet it’s all-too-common. Some 54 million Americans have osteoporosis! Did you know that osteoporosis means “porous bone?” Normal, healthy bones are dense. People with...