Living A Full Life

Your aching joints are trying to tell you something about inflammation.

Full Life Chiropractic Season 3 Episode 39

Chronic joint pain doesn't have to be your life sentence. As a chiropractor with nearly two decades of experience, I've witnessed countless patients transform their health by understanding one critical connection: inflammation.

That nagging pain in your knees, shoulders, or hands isn't just "getting old" – it's your body's alarm system signaling a deeper issue. One in four American adults struggles with chronic pain, and at its core lies inflammation, the smoldering fire that breaks down cartilage, irritates tendons, and creates persistent discomfort. But here's the crucial distinction many miss: acute inflammation heals us, while chronic inflammation destroys us.

The fascinating part? Your inflammatory fires likely have specific triggers you've never considered. Beyond the obvious culprits like sugar and processed foods, hidden factors may be fueling your pain – from improper sleep patterns elevating cortisol to environmental toxins in everyday products. Even that plastic water bottle heating up in your car could be contributing to your joint issues. For those who've "tried everything," undiagnosed gut dysbiosis or autoimmune conditions may be the missing piece.

Through this episode, I share the three-pronged approach that has consistently helped my patients find relief: targeted mobility (even when it hurts), strategic elimination of inflammatory triggers, and evidence-based supplements that support joint health. You'll learn why conventional testing often misses the root causes and how functional medicine offers a more comprehensive approach to identifying what's really happening in your body.

Whether you're currently managing joint pain or hoping to prevent it, this episode provides actionable strategies to put out the inflammatory fires and restore comfortable movement. Ready to transform your joint health? Listen now, then reach out to us at info@fulllifetampa.com if you need personalized guidance on your healing journey.

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Speaker 1:

Ever wake up with stiff knees, sore shoulders or aching hands and wonder why it's getting worse and not better? Well, this episode's for you. I'm Dr Enrico Del Ciccori. We're talking about inflammation and the connection it has in the body. One in four adults in the US experience chronic pain and inflammation and is the common thread between all of them. Today we're diving deep into the inflammation connection why your joints hurt, the hidden sources of inflammation most people overlook, and natural ways to calm it so that you move freely again. We see it a lot, especially as chiropractors in our office people with joint pain, shoulder pain, knee pain, ankle pain and it's there and it happens in certain demographics for certain reasons. But the underlying cause for many, many people is inflammation, and inflammation is a blanket statement when it comes to overall health. Inflammation resides in all parts of the body. It can be subcutaneous, it can be in the gut, it can be brain inflammation, it can be nervous system inflammation, it can be joint inflammation, it can be all of the above. Inflammation can rage fires all over the body. So today's connection is about recently, a lot of patients dealing with joint pain and I was like hey, we got to talk a little bit deeper into this and what's going on. Just like the word stress, inflammation is the same. Stress is a relatively bad term. We negate it with negative connotations, and inflammation is too. But there is positive. Stresses like gravity keeps us on our feet and so we don't float away, and physical stress can be a good thing. On muscles, we can regenerate and grow bigger and stronger lean muscle Stress is a big word too. Same thing with inflammation.

Speaker 1:

Inflammation can be acute or chronic. Acute inflammation is how the body heals itself. So it is a good thing, it's designed to be a good thing. It's how we heal our tissue. So if we get hit with a hockey puck on the arm and we bruise up and we get that swelling and that discoloration, the body's using that time to heal and regenerate the soft tissue that was hurt and the blood vessels that were broken and the blood that was lost, to create that bruise and reabsorb it. And then it's gone. Within days to a couple of weeks it's gone and that's the body's way of healing and that's considered acute inflammation. Chronic inflammation is bad. It damages tissue over time. It's funny how good stress can help us and then bad stress can just deteriorate us over time. The same thing with inflammation how good inflammation immediately can help heal us, and long-term inflammation can actually break us down.

Speaker 1:

And that's what this podcast is all about. We need to connect it to how it's affecting people with joint pain, and ongoing inflammation breaks down cartilage, it irritates tendons and ligaments and it makes pain flare more often. So think of it like a small campfire in your knee Helpful if it's controlled, but damaging if it's left burning all the time. And that's what we're going to talk about. How do we put out these fires to the best of our ability to minimize or limit inflammation in the long run to the best of our ability to minimize or limit inflammation in the long run? And the hidden triggers are coming from. You know the usual suspects. We've talked about these on many, many podcasts, because it's just how the universe works.

Speaker 1:

Food-related stress is there. It happens because of the choices we make with the foods that we eat Excessive sugar, refined carbohydrates, processed oils or rancid oils and trans fats. They are the usual suspects when it comes to inflammation. So if you're dealing with inflamed joints, we have to start there. We have to use good oils to cook. We have to eliminate trans fats, maybe minimize or completely eliminate refined carbohydrates and definitely remove excessive sugars. The sugars that come in fruits or natural whole foods is great, but the excessive sugars or the refined sugars should be eliminated. See what happens to your body in 7, 10, 14 days and you'll know why I bring this up every single time. Many people get subsequent relief from joint pain by changing their diet. But what about the rest of us? What about the others that do eat really well and still have inflammation?

Speaker 1:

Well, these things can be lifestyle related, like poor sleep, chronic stress or inactivity, sedentary lifestyle. It could be environmental toxins as well, chemicals in household products that we just became unaware of, air quality and even plastics in the BPAs or the things that we drink. Maybe you drink bottled water from the plastic bottles. You buy those all the time, and here in the South, you know in Florida, things get hot If you leave that plastic bottle in your car for a little bit, heats up, you leave it overnight, it cools back down and then the next day you take a sip out of it. Those bpas, those plastics, are now in the water because of the drastic temperature changes when you heat up the plastic. Uh, a lot of drinks shouldn't be in plastic containers for long periods of time. Sometimes, even when we try and do the right thing and get clean canteens or metal containers to drink from, we don't clean the silicone straw in there. Very often we get mold and mildew buildup in there and we're drinking that continuously. So just these little things that we have to be aware of in our environment.

Speaker 1:

And then there's also undiagnosed conditions. This is probably the most stressful part for most people of trying to figure out when they go down the health journey of symptoms with joint pain is the undiagnosed things, and this is where functional medicine is probably the most vital tool you can introduce into your family's health is autoimmune disorders. Gut dysbiosis and low grade infections can really lead to this chronic inflammation that just wears the body down. So little things that we can talk about in this podcast. Get your brain stimulated on the next steps to help yourself live a healthier life. But there are natural ways and we're going to talk about some tidbits that you can take home right away and help protect your joints in the long run is nutrition we talked about the inflammatory things that we can avoid, but what about the things that we can help to act as anti-inflammatory foods, like wild caught fish, leafy green vegetables, berries like blueberries, acai raspberries, blackberries, acai raspberries, blackberries, all that Even strawberries are great Turmeric, curcumin, olive oil these things all act as anti-inflammatory foods. So you can easily stock your kitchen with these things in your fridge to help introduce these things to your diet.

Speaker 1:

Elimination trial Big fan of this to just eliminate or elimination diet. Cut common inflammatory foods, like we said, 7, 10, 14 days, even up to 30 days 30 days you'll get a greater effect. Cut them right out of the diet, eliminate them. Elimination diet's protocol is really to eliminate all inflammatory foods and then slowly reintroduce them after that 30-day cycle. So this can be the easiest and most cost effective way to do this because you can journal it at home and without any supervision or any type of medication or assistance on this is you just eliminate and then start adding them back Once you get inflammatory responses.

Speaker 1:

Let's say, you bring back creamer in your coffee and you're like, oh boy, don't tell me it's dairy. And you can kind of find out. Maybe you already know these things and this podcast is not about ignorance. If you know what your um, what your inflammatory markers are and you still drink the dairy and you do that stuff. Well, shame on you, right, that's, that's your choice and you're doing that to yourself. But we're talking about the things and people that are really hopeless right now about what to do next. This podcast is for you.

Speaker 1:

With inflammation, movement it's almost counterintuitive. When your knees hurt, what are you supposed to do? It's like, hey, go for a walk. Well, they hurt. But low impact exercise like swimming, cycling, yoga or stretching can really help get synovial fluid movement inside of the joints, which help pump waste products out of there along with inflammation. So movement is key, even though joints can be painful. It's almost like this double-edged sword with joint pain. We got to move and it's really important on doing this every day for a certain amount of time, because you have to build the consistency in the joint, whether it's shoulder, wrist, elbow, knees, ankles, hips, whatever it is. We got to have continuous movement in them.

Speaker 1:

So stress and sleep are almost like the kerosene that gets thrown on the fire. If we're not getting good sleep, cortisol's role in inflammation is quite large. And if we're not getting the seven to eight hours of proper circadian rhythm sleep, we then have a non-negotiable when it comes to inflammation Cortisol will just keep fueling inflammation in the body. So some supplements to help us with that are omega-3s these come in fish oils, those are the best sources of them Turmeric and curcumin, glucosamine, glucosamine, can dryden I recommend most and collagen peptides or collagen in itself. These are fantastic supplements to just start taking and help you along the ride of your anti-inflammatory journey. There's a lot of case studies that are out there on inflammation and using these types of supplements with movement and elimination type diets. So we help our patients in our office with all of these things.

Speaker 1:

Chiropractic adjustments of course, give immediate relief to the joints, or some relief to the joints by getting them moved and manipulated properly and realigned can help with the joint pain for an acute time. But if the inflammation is there, it builds right back up. So the best outcomes we have for our patients are chiropractic care because we have a bunch of modalities we can use with that physical therapy or chiropractic movement, which we have a bunch of modalities we can use with that physical therapy or chiropractic movement, which is that movement type physical therapies that are there. Anti inflammatory diet is to combine with the therapies with that time. So as we're working over the next week, two weeks, three weeks, and we have this elimination diet, it works really well, and then adding those good nutrition and supplements in there at the same time. It's a home run.

Speaker 1:

The only reason some of my patients don't succeed is because they don't follow through with the recommendations. But if you're listening to this and you do follow through with these recommendations, you're going to immediately notice relief and changes in your joint pain because you're minimizing the inflammatory effects of what's causing the pain in the first place. So do those three things. Try to commit to 10 minutes of mobility for those stress joints. I know you're saying they hurt, I don't want to move them, I don't want to do anything, but just 10 minutes. You can break these into three minute chunks for the day, three times. You can break them into 10, one minute chunks If you want, one minute walks on your knee just to just to help get that momentum going. But as you build up 10 minutes of movement of those joints, you, every day, you start to build a positive feedback loop for those joints to get the nutrition that they need pumped to them, the blood flowing to them, the waste products removed from them and overall healing to start taking effect because we're going to get better sleep. If you need help with joint pain and we dig deep into that.

Speaker 1:

Fourth topic I talked about at the very beginning, about the hidden dangers or the hidden diagnoses behind inflammation gut dysbiosis, autoimmune disorders. Now we have to take it to the next level with healthcare and, unfortunately, with allopathic medicine, your primary care, that we talk about it with medicine don't do the testing that are required to dive deep into the hidden causes of inflammation. What they run are standard testing to look for pathology. We call them surface-level pathologies. So you run a red blood cell count, a white blood cell count, a thyroid panel and a liver panel. That's typically how we start with our wellness tests and if we see something there hypercholesterolemia, increased blood sugars now we're leading down the allopathic model of the most common diseases and disorders of being like high cholesterol, diabetes, pre-diabetic thyroid issues, and that's what they're screening there for. Sometimes cancer can pop up in these markers as well high C-reactive protein, cardiovascular disease and that's the medical model. And if we're all millions of us pigeoned into that model, it's easy to miss the deeper levels of pathology. So getting the deeper tests are like a gut test, which is like a stool test, autoimmune panel, blood test, deeper panel in your blood markers, more endocrine markers and hormone testing. These are the things that can end up bringing more to the surface to tell a better picture of the story of what's truly going on. Tell a better picture of the story of what's truly going on.

Speaker 1:

Inflammation is a blanket condition on the body. It can affect many different aspects of the body and if it's joint pain that you're feeling and you've tried these things the next level is functional medicine. If you have questions about this, reach out to info at fulllifetampacom. We love helping people there and we'll find people in your region that might be able to help you with these things. I know our team's great with Dr Hafer in our office, so if you have any questions there, she loves answering them.

Speaker 1:

And the nice thing about functional medicine is it can be done virtually. It can be done anywhere. You don't have to come to a bunch of appointments. If you need the physical medicine, we love helping you there too. So if we can find someone close to you that's good with physical therapy or chiropractic, we love doing that as well. So reach out.

Speaker 1:

We'd love to help you guys get the get the momentum going, and what we've learned over our time is is the accountability is how we become better doctors and better patient care providers is because we hold our patients accountable, and that's the very that's the difference when it comes to medicines. They take care of so many people at so so much that it's hard to follow through and help each and every individual move forward, and I think we do a pretty good job, even though we help a lot of people, and we just enjoy it. We enjoy our jobs, we enjoy doing that. So reach out. It's the best way with these podcasts. It's great to listen and download information from podcasts, but if you don't take action, nothing really does change, and you're I'm giving you accountability right here. So so reach out to us, share the podcast with anyone that you know that might be having some inflammatory joint condition issues, um, and, and these are the types of patients that go in and maybe even seen an orthopedic doctor or have seen their primary care, gone for an MRI or an x-ray, and I have been told they have like arthritis or osteoarthritis or degenerative diseases in the joint and they're not quite a candidate for replacements.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's where medicine kind of ends there's no surgery. Maybe they've tried a cortisone injection and then they're left on the island to figure it out by themselves. Those are the people we want to talk to. Those are the people we want to try and help. So many cool things right now with instantly trying to help people with injectables, peptides, regenerative medicine you can dive right down that hole too. But the traditional way, the way I've been doing it my whole career, almost 20 years now, is physically mobilizing the joint elimination diet, increasing supplements that help with inflammation, and it's funny how, over 17 plus years, it just continuously helps people feel better. It works every single time. Stay well, stay healthy and if you need anything, reach out.

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