UPFRONT | News and events VALUE OF A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE Unleash Your Potential 2019 Put the Brain and Body Back Packed into a mini van and physical activity recommen-Together in Pain Research armed with bicycles, helmets and a passion for health, four students enrolled at the Ca-nadian Memorial Chiro-practic College (CMCC) are dedicating their summer to challenging Canadian youth from coast to coast to live a healthier and more active lifestyle. The students will take on a big challenge this summer: cycling across Canada! Se-frah Daviduck, Lauryn Friesen, Justin Reay and Garrett Duff are first-and second-year students who make up the CMCC team “Unleash Your Potential.” Unleash Your Potential is a national health and well-ness campaign and cross-Canada cycling tour seeking to motivate, in-spire and educate Canadian youth. This biannual student run initiative started in 2005. All recruits are students at-tending the CMCC in To-ronto. The students who were part of the cycling tour in 2017 took part in choosing the new candidates for the cycling tour of 2019. The team has spent the last year and a half fundraising through events held at the school as well as through donations from individuals and corporate sponsors. They will begin their trip in Tofino, BC during the last week of May, and expect to finish by mid August in St. John’s Newfoundland. According to Canadian statistics, childhood obesity rates continue to rise each year – the Public Health Agency in 2017 stated 60 per cent of children aged 5 to 17 years are overweight or obese, and only one-third of children are meeting daily 6 Canadian Chiropractor May 2019 CHRONIC PAIN dations. Throughout the summer, Unleash Your Po-tential members will dis-mount from their bikes and stop at schools and visit children’s programs in the hope of reducing these sta-tistics. The goal of Unleash Your Potential is to em-power youth to start taking control of their wellness by making healthy choices in their everyday lives. The team will present and dis-cuss with Canadian youth strategies that they can inte-grate into their own lives to become more physically active, gain more knowledge about nutrition, and strate-gies to incorporate these new habits into their daily routines. This year’s team is ex-tremely excited to have been chosen to participate in such an incredible and once in a lifetime experience. They feel privileged to have the opportunity to spend a summer being active while having the chance to explore our beautiful country from coast to coast. All team members are looking for-ward to communicating with Canadian youth the importance of staying active at a young age and continu-ing healthy habits through-out their entire life. They also hope to introduce an awareness of the positive influence that chiropractic care can create for them in the future. The team is diverse in their strengths and skills and look forward to collaborating to make this summer filled with education for youth, biking, and long-lasting memories. To learn more visit unleashyours.ca Advances in pain research are yield-ing new insights into mysteries lurking inside the brain and how brain mechanisms influence chron-ic pain. However, a senior official at the National Institutes of Health, says let’s not forget how muscles and other tissues in the body can be successfully treated to help alleviate low-back pain and other chronic pain conditions. Helene Langevin, M.D. serves as director, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. She has devoted her ca-reer to studying the benefits of various physical therapies, such as acupuncture, massage, yoga and stretching, to promote overall wellness and help improve quality of life for people coping with chronic pain. “Pain research in the past few decades has strengthened our view of chronic pain as a disease of the brain,” Langevin said. “As a result, some of the newer treatment ap-proaches focus on ways to target neural pain pathways to help achieve relief. While this is important research, the brain isn’t the whole story in pain management.” Langevin noted that more studies are needed to explore the benefits of mind and body therapies to re-duce inflammation and prevent long-term muscle and tissue dam-age that can lead to chronic pain. “When pain after an injury lasts more than three months, patients are often told the tissues have healed and the brain is responsible for the ongoing pain,” said Langevin. “But have the tissues really healed, and what tissues are we talking about?” Langevin is concerned about re-search gaps in the interface of growing neuroscience knowledge with understanding of the rest of the body. “Studies of mind and body therapies can give valuable insights into chronic musculoskeletal and low-back pain, for example, as a dynamic interplay between the nervous system and musculoskele-tal tissues,” she said. Langevin also said one of the reasons low-back pain is so difficult to manage may be that we are not paying enough attention to structur-al restrictions of connective tissue that can impair muscle function over time. Ultrasound studies in Langevin’s lab revealed connective tissues surrounding back muscles are thick-er in people with chronic low back pain. “Connective tissues surround-ing muscles in the back normally have alternating layers of fibers that handle substantial loads and glide easily. People with long-standing low-back pain have de-creased gliding motion between connective tissue layers, which could contribute to functional impairment,” Langevin explained. “Interventions that restore con-nective tissue mobility and mus-cle function may be important to prevent long-term damage to vulnerable structures such as joints and intervertebral discs.” According to Langevin, comple-mentary medicine clinicians have long emphasized the importance of connective tissues in health and disease. “Connective tissue is the scaffold that holds our body to-gether,” she said. “Stretching and other manual-and move -ment-based therapies are ground-ed on the assumption that connec-tive-tissue pathology contributes to musculoskeletal pain, and that mind and body approaches can help both reduce pain and improve function. We need to understand better how muscles, connective tissue, and the nervous system all contribute to musculoskeletal pain and how to address this in an inte-grative way”. —American Pain Society www.canadianchiropractor.ca
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