An extremely large percentage of patients referred to us for chronic facial pain and TMJ disorders, sleep dysfunction, snoring and sleep apnoea, and headaches also have concomitant lifestyle issues that need to be addressed in an overall management plan that will help improve their medical and dental outcomes. Without doing so, modern medicine and dentistry has a strong tendency to treat ‘symptoms’ with medication or other narrow focused treatments, rather than attempt to provide people with sound overall strategies to better mental and physical health.
Holistic approaches to pain management, health and wellbeing often includes diet, weight loss, caffeine and nicotine reduction, exercise, stress and anxiety management, relaxation, meditation, and much improved sleep cycles. By addressing these incredibly important factors, many people have extreme life changing improvements to their overall symptoms and general well-being for the long term. After all, most people present with chronic disease symptoms from multiple causes, and not just a ‘single’ cause, so why do we continue to treat symptoms individually? e.g. You have regular headaches, here’s a pill. You cannot sleep, here’s another pill. You suffer anxiety / depression, so here’s another pill. You have high blood pressure, so lets put you on another pill, but in many people all of these symptoms are very much related to each other.
One of the cardinal features of chronic pain and disease is inflammation. And inflammation starts with our diet and nutrition intake.
As part of a long term management plan, chronic pain and disease reduction must start with a patients nutrition intake. If a person continually ingests a large daily proportion of inflammatory causing products such as sugar, processed foods, additives, preservatives, and grains, then how can we begin to treat disease? There has been a lot of talk in many mainstream circles and media recently about “caveman” diets and barefoot training and exercise. These terms Primal or Paleo are gaining in popularity as many thousands of people around the world experience huge life changing and often life ‘saving’ health benefits from addressing their daily nutrition intake and exercising like we used to rather than pounding away in gyms causing injury and ofter limited health benefits. This lifestyle rather than diet is being backed more and more by solid science, but in many cases ‘just makes sense’.
Many families suffer from sugar swings and chronic inflammation, and simply are not aware of what is actually causing them to feel cranky, irritable, unable to concentrate, tired and generally unwell. The answer may be as simple as too much excess sugar and pro-inflammatory ingredients in your diet. By significantly reducing or eliminating these products and in conjunction with well rounded and sound health and medical treatments, we are able to allow our bodies to begin healing and addressing the many symptoms that may be occuring.
Every person benefits from a well rounded lifestyle plan, and not just a ‘diet’
Dr Tony Eldridge has held strong interests in exercise physiology and nutrition for most of his life having competed in and continues to train in multi-sport adventure races, endurance off-road triathlons, martial arts, yoga, free-diving, surfing, mountain bike riding, and other sports. He thoroughly enjoys assisting people where he can on better diet control, exercise techniques, use of heart rate monitors, and nutritional supplements for weight loss. He also holds particular interests in complimentary therapies to assist people where ‘modern medicine’ fails to achieve results.
This advice and assistance is typically offered at no charge as part of an overall management plan during the consultation and review process appointments. For those people keen on improving their lifestyle it is absolutely never too much trouble to assist where we can.
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