I began my journey with chiropractic at the young age of 10. I suffered a bad fall that resulted in a lot of back pain. Unable to play outside with friends or go to dance class because of it, I was miserable. My parents decided to take me to a chiropractor to see if I could get some relief. With his adjustments and treatments, I was soon recovering and getting back to my spunky 10 year old self. After a while, I returned to dance and was able to play without any pain. Following this accident, I went back to my chiropractor regularly for wellness care and to keep my spine healthy. As I got older, my interest in chiropractic grew as did my love of science. By the time I reached high school, I knew this was my calling. I wanted to help others, was fascinated with the sciences, and had my own personal testimony to the power of chiropractic.

When I asked for advice from my chiropractor on how to begin my journey, he told me to go check out Logan College of Chiropractic in St. Louis Missouri. My junior year of high school, my family and I took the trip down to check the school out. I fell in love immediately and knew this was for me. Now all I had to do was figure out the path that would get me there. I decided on Truman State University for my undergraduate school and majored in Biology there. All my focus was set on getting myself to Logan and becoming the doctor I was destined to be.

I finished my time at Truman in three years and then headed off to Logan. When I got to Logan, I had only really associated chiropractic with pain. I had pain when I was younger, I went to the chiropractor, and he got rid of my pain. My mindset did a complete 180 when I started school. Up until that point, I had suffered from terrible allergies and sinus infections. Once I started getting adjusted regularly, those problems vanished! I no longer needed allergy meds and didn’t suffer through allergy season anymore. This is when I truly began understanding the power of chiropractic. It is not all about pain; it’s about maintaining a healthy nervous system so your body functions as it should. Chiropractic is about releasing your body’s own power to heal and correct itself.

Dr. Meghan

I just wanted to put into writing a few of the suggestions I mentioned in my video about things that you can be doing for your child if they have been diagnosed with ADHD.

Being the most common childhood health problem of any kind world wide and the most common childhood mental illness, children as young as 3 years old are being put on drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall. These statistics are making headline news! Is this really what we want for our children? And for out future generations? We should be asking why AHDH is on the rise and what can we be doing to help.

First of all, what is ADHD? To put it simply, it’s a brain imbalance. The “name” for it is Functional Disconnect Syndrome. Your brain should be balanced and working as one to create proper functioning of the body. Being imbalanced simply means that the two hemispheres of the brain are not electrically balanced or synchronized which can cause problems such as ADHD, autism, asthma, allergies and many other things. So what is the goal…. FIX the disconnect. By doing this we are getting to the root of the problem and not just chasing and treating symptoms. We can address this physically, mentally and emotionally.

First- What is your child eating for breakfast?? After all, the never ending stream of commercials for sugary breakfast items such as fruitloops, lucky charms, poptarts and many others have a huge impact on what your child desires to eat for breakfast. Starting their day off with a rush of sugar will be of no help to a child struggling with a hyperactive condition. Instead replace their breakfast with items high in protein such as eggs and try to stay away from excess sugar. Sugar is like a toxin to the body and is highly addictive, see my previous blog on how sugar is affecting people every day.

Second- How much activity is your child getting on a daily basis? Making sure that they are getting plenty of physical activity in is very important in brain function and development. If your child spends more time in front of a screen than they do physically active this is also something that you can change to have a positive impact on your childs behavior.

Third- As a chiropractor I feel the deep obligation to share how wonderful chiropractic care is for these children. I adjust the vertebrae in the spine to get to the brain, with each adjustment I am sending positive information to the brain and “re-calibrating” it. Adjustments directly affect the brain in a positive way by dealing with the spine which houses the spinal cord. Get your child to a chiropractor and have their spines checked. By clearing the pathway from the brain to the body of interference, the bodies function increases!

Watch my video here to learn more!

Also, here at YFC THIS Thursday August 25th from 6PM to  7:30 PM Dr Jessica will be discussing Natural solutions to ADHD in more details! Don’t miss this FREE event! Visit our YFC facebook page for more details!

Dr. Nicole Davis graduated from Logan University with not only her Doctorate in Chiropractic but her Bachelors in Life Sciences. After working with hundreds of clients a week in a busy Ohio Chiropractic clinic, she decided to head home to Des Moines to be closer to her family.  She currently specializes in family wellness care with advanced training in pediatric and pregnancy care, working alongside 2 other doctors in the only Wellness Center in Iowa to offer Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Specialized Pediatric and Pregnancy Care as well as Functional Medicine.  She loves spending time with family, friends and her dog, Maci. She is here to serve her community with love, support and enthusiasm.

Did you know that Chiropractic care can help with TMJ pain and discomfort?? After ruling out problems inside the mouth and with the teeth ask your chiropractor if they can help!

The jaw is a hing joint and the 2 joints work together simultaneously to open and close the jaw, however this doesn’t always happen correctly. Sometimes the jaw can be “off track” and one side may open before the other and vice versa. When the function of the jaw is off you can get discomfort in the jaw and even headaches. A chiropractor is trained to analyze this joint along with all other joints in the body for proper function and bio mechanics. If this is off a chiropractic adjustment can help! There are many different ways to adjust this joint, manually (with our hands), with an activator and with a pro-adjuster. Along with the adjustment there are soft tissue techniques that allow us to treat the muscles surrounding the jaw to decrease spasm, pain and inflammation. We can do this with our hands and we can also use ultrasound therapy to treat these muscles. Avoiding hard candy, hard foods and chewing gum will also help your jaw to heal properly and maintain proper function after it is restored!

Check out my video to learn more!

Dr. Nicole Davis graduated from Logan University with not only her Doctorate in Chiropractic but her Bachelors in Life Sciences. After working with hundreds of clients a week in a busy Ohio Chiropractic clinic, she decided to head home to Des Moines to be closer to her family.  She currently specializes in family wellness care with advanced training in pediatric and pregnancy care, working alongside 2 other doctors in the only Wellness Center in Iowa to offer Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Specialized Pediatric and Pregnancy Care as well as Functional Medicine.  She loves spending time with family, friends and her dog, Maci. She is here to serve her community with love, support and enthusiasm.

Hi everyone, I thought that I would take this week to talk about what drove me to become a Doctor of Chiropractic. When exiting high school and entering college I will admit that I was a little unsure of exactly what I wanted to do. The only thing I really knew was that I wanted to help people. Well wanting to help people isn’t very specific as there are so many ways to go about doing this.

I started my education at UNI very indecisive. Feeling ambitious I signed up for all science classes along with my general education classes. I have always loved science…chemistry, biology, anatomy.. you name it… those were my favorite classes to take in high school so I gave it a go. Shortly after signing up for these classes I became terrified of taking on such a heavy load my freshman year of college, with 3 of my classes having labs as well. I ended up in tears accompanying my anxiety about what I was getting myself into. At this point my parents set up a meeting with an adviser so I could go over my schedule and make it less scary. I ended up changing everything! I went from science to business classes because I figured that was “safer” and easier than what I was getting myself into before.

Upon starting my new schedule I did well in the business classes and enjoyed them for a while but became bored quickly. At this point I wanted something more fun, so I signed up for fashion classes my sophomore year. As much as I loved these classes and enjoyed them they just weren’t for me. My second semester sophomore year I decided to give those science classes another go, after all I had survived my freshman year and felt much more confident in my abilities as a college student. After beginning these classes I began to excel quickly being at the top of my classes in biology, chemistry, anatomy and physiology…etc. For the first time since my college career began I felt like I was finally in the right place. I loved was I was learning and I was good at it! Soon my friends starting making comments… you’re so smart you should be a doctor or something! Hearing this comment was the very first time that I had even thought of trying to achieve something that seemed so out of reach. That seed that was planted by my dear friends at UNI began to grow and my thoughts changed rapidly from negative and fear based to positive and motivational! I thought to myself,  how cool would it be if I could actually become a doctor.. I could help so many people! At this time my goal became to become a pediatric medical doctor because I wanted to work with kids and grew up in a medically based family.

In pursuing this goal I decided to work at a nursing home full time over the summer as a CNA. I loved working in a nursing home, every day I got to help people do the things they could no longer do on their own. These included things like helping them eat, helping them get dressed, and helping them bathe…to me this was the ultimate way of serving people.

That fall I got into a car accident that totaled my car. As you can imagine I had pretty bad whiplash and didn’t feel well at all. After going to urgent care I was given a pain prescription and told to rest. A few days later as I was eating a sandwich I was unable to swallow without difficulty, this scared me as I had no idea what was going on. I called up the doctor from the urgent care clinic that I went to after my accident and went in for another evaluation. The doctor wanted to test me for strep. Now I have had strep before and knew this was no what was going on but I complied knowing that the test would be negative and hoping for a better diagnosis after. Of course the test was negative, and instead of further evaluating me (he didn’t even examine me at all) he told me to eat ice cream and cough drops as it was nothing. This seriously happened! I was distraught and smart enough to know that there was something going on, probably related to the accident that he didn’t bother to look into.

At this point I was advised to go see a chiropractor by a friend so I did. And guess what, I was given a wonderful explanation as to why my throat was in spasm and why I couldn’t swallow food easily… AND it WAS related to my whiplash injury. This is how it was explained to me at the time so that I could understand…..turns out, the nerves to your throat and mouth come out of your neck, and because I had a significant injury to all the structures in my neck causing hyper-excitability and muscle spasms in my neck my throat was unable to function properly.

I was blown away, not only by the attentiveness of the doctor to my concerns but also through his thorough evaluation. Through that he was able to arrive at an explanation for what was going on instead of trying to chase the symptoms and treat those with.. ice cream  and cough drops lol. Once I started treatment not only were adjustments helping the neck pain and upper back pain that I was experiencing from the accident but the headaches and migraines I had suffered from for years were decreasing in severity and frequency. Chiropractic adjustments had helped me in more ways than medicine ever did and that is when I knew that I wanted to become a Doctor of Chiropractic. Two months into treatment I transferred to Logan College of Chiropractic in St. Louis and finished my bachelor’s degree in life sciences there while working on my doctorates in chiropractic.

There is a time and place for medicine and people’s lives are saved every day because of it. But when facing situations like the one I was in I think that medicine and drugs should be the last resort… not the first. And I am so blessed to have found my passion and a way to serve people in the very best way possible.

Dr. Nicole Davis graduated from Logan University with not only her Doctorate in Chiropractic but her Bachelors in Life Sciences. After working with hundreds of clients a week in a busy Ohio Chiropractic clinic, she decided to head home to Des Moines to be closer to her family.  She currently specializes in family wellness care with advanced training in pediatric and pregnancy care, working alongside 2 other doctors in the only Wellness Center in Iowa to offer Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Specialized Pediatric and Pregnancy Care as well as Functional Medicine.  She loves spending time with family, friends and her dog, Maci. She is here to serve her community with love, support and enthusiasm.

In the simplest form, we correct subluxations found in the spine.

What does this word mean? Subluxation….

A subluxation is an area in the spine that is misaligned enough or not moving enough to cause stress on the nervous system.

Contrary to what most people think we don’t “treat” low back pain, headaches, neck pain or any other symptom that may come along with poor health. We adjust your spine to correct subluxations. We are removing interference from the nervous system that these subluxations cause. So why do people get relief from things like low back pain and headaches? Your body is a self-healing organism and given the right environment it will heal itself. Think about when you cut yourself…. Your body heals it right?? Well what if you aren’t alive and you have a cut? It won’t heal. Why is this? Because when you are not alive your nervous system (brain, brainstem, all exiting nerves) isn’t either. And without them you cannot live. So if you literally can’t live without your nervous system just how important is it? Should you be taking care of it? What do you think happens when there is a negative impact on your spinal cord through subluxation? Not only can you get symptoms like back pain, neck pain, headaches, numbness and tingling in the arms and hands.. etc. But you are in a state of dis-ease. You are not well. And this alone can set you up for serious health problems in the future leading to a shorter and less enjoyable life.

This is why EVERYONE in your family needs to get their spines checked by a chiropractor….including children! Why wait for a crisis situation to take place before beginning care? Do you wait for your cavity to start hurting before you get it filled?? Do you brush your teeth to prevent cavities from arriving in the first place? That is what I thought. So get adjusted, prevent the onset of disease and keep your spine and nervous system healthy.

What cause these subluxations in the spine to occur? Physical, chemical and emotional stress.

So instead of sitting (negative physical stress), get up and move around (positive physical stress).

Instead of snacking on processed foods (negative chemical stress), eat whole organic foods and drink a lot of water (positive chemical stress).

Instead of letting your emotional stress build (negative emotional stress), do what you love to feel good and happy, take time for yourself (positive emotional stress).

 There are a lot of ways to care for your health to prevent subluxations from occurring. Please please comment and ask questions if you aren’t sure what you could be doing different.

If this blog has been helpful for you at all please click the like button and tag people in the comments section of facebook so they can read this as well!

Dr. Nicole Davis graduated from Logan University with not only her Doctorate in Chiropractic but her Bachelors in Life Sciences. After working with hundreds of clients a week in a busy Ohio Chiropractic clinic, she decided to head home to Des Moines to be closer to her family.  She currently specializes in family wellness care with advanced training in pediatric and pregnancy care, working alongside 2 other doctors in the only Wellness Center in Iowa to offer Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Specialized Pediatric and Pregnancy Care as well as Functional Medicine.  She loves spending time with family, friends and her dog, Maci. She is here to serve her community with love, support and enthusiasm.

Hey everyone 🙂 I just wanted to share some information about knee pain and how chiropractic care and adjustments can help!

Unfortunately the most basic of daily activities from bending down to pick up the grocery bag, climbing the stairs, walking from your car to the office, or just getting out of bed can feel so difficult when you are experiencing knee pain. Knee pain definitely has a negative effect on your ability to function optimally and isn’t fun at all.

I have great news for you! You do not have to decide to live with the pain, reduce your activity level, or even start taking more pain medication. Have you considered taking a new route and trying chiropractic care??? Chiropractic care is safe and very effective. 

The knee is a complex joint that relies heavily on ligaments and muscles for stability. When pain is perceived as coming from the knee, all the anatomical components need to be examined, and in addition to the knee joint, the low back, pelvis, hip, ankle and foot need to be examined due to the direct influence they have on the knee, and vice versa.
 
Our approach to assessing and treating the knee includes the evaluation of the other joints and muscles relating to the knee. This is for several reasons:

• Pain can often be referred from other structures in the low back, pelvis and hip into the knee.
• If other joints in the lower limbs are not working correctly they can put increased stress on the knee joint, resulting in injury over time. Therefore to resolve the knee pain, we may also treat other areas, to maximize long-term improvement.

So what do we do for you when you come into our office with knee pain!? Good question… our goals are:
Reduce joint inflammation and reduce pain.

• Avoid aggravating factors
• Use of support
• Ice to reduce inflammation, muscle spasm and pain
• Soft tissue healing with  ultrasound and interferential therapy

Normalize joint function.

• Specific chiropractic manipulation techniques to areas of restricted movement in the knee and surrounding joints, to increase movement, improve the function and reduce pain. Here at YFC we like to analyze the knee using the activator technique, it is very neurologically specific and the activator moves 300 times faster than anything that can be done with the hands! Check out my video on youtube demonstrating a knee adjustment at:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr-zTL1E2gA    

The video can also be found on our YFC facebook page! Feel free to like the video on facebook if the information was helpful for you! If you know anyone struggling with knee pain please tag them in the comments section below so they can check it out too!!

Dr. Nicole Davis graduated from Logan University with not only her Doctorate in Chiropractic but her Bachelors in Life Sciences. After working with hundreds of clients a week in a busy Ohio Chiropractic clinic, she decided to head home to Des Moines to be closer to her family.  She currently specializes in family wellness care with advanced training in pediatric and pregnancy care, working alongside 2 other doctors in the only Wellness Center in Iowa to offer Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Specialized Pediatric and Pregnancy Care as well as Functional Medicine.  She loves spending time with family, friends and her dog, Maci. She is here to serve her community with love, support and enthusiasm.