Click Here to Request An Appointment or Call 503-554-0661

Schedule Now

The simple act of deciding to be happier and focus on the positive will improve your health. Just as negative emotions can weaken the body's resistance level, positive emotions can give us strength, or at least allow our bodies to function normally. Therefore, the simple act of deciding to be happier and focus on the positive will improve your health. In fact, the phenomenon of your thoughts affecting your physical health is so strong that all medical studies have to be designed with it in mind. Researchers call this 'the placebo effect.'

Many people believe that the term 'placebo effect' means that the effect is only imagined - that it is not real. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Medical studies have to include a control group - people who receive placebos instead of the medicine being studied - because the simple act of people making the decision to take action to improve their health leads to measurable physical improvement in their condition. To determine the effects of a particular medicine, researchers have to measure the change in the group who underwent therapy and subtract out the amount of change seen in the placebo group. Otherwise, there is no way to know whether a particular treatment was beneficial or whether it was merely the change in attitude in the study subjects that made the difference. In many instances, the placebo effect turns out to be stronger than the treatment itself! The point is that if you want to have a healthy body you also have to have healthy thoughts and emotions. Just as it is important to avoid toxic chemicals, it is also necessary to avoid toxic thoughts to enjoy optimal health.

  • Wildfire Inside of You

    Comparisons between the inner world and the outer world have been frequently drawn by philosophers, nature writers, and visual artists. For example, "seeing the universe in a grain of sand" is a well-known aphorism. The number of neurons in your brain has been compared to the number of stars in the Milky

    Read more
  • Hitting for the Cycle

    In baseball, hitting for the cycle means that a batter hits a single, a double, a triple, and a home run during the same game. Hitting for the cycle is a rare baseball event, occurring about as often as a no-hitter by a pitcher. Certainly, a great deal of skill is involved in accomplishing such a feat.

    Read more
  • Find Inspiration in Walden

    In this 200th anniversary year of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, each of us can increase our health and well-being by applying his guidance to our regular exercise activities. Thoreau, one of the United States' greatest writers, naturalists, and philosophers, not only walked the length and breadth

    Read more
  • Yoda and Yoga

    In the film classic "The Empire Strikes Back," the iconic Jedi master Yoda inscrutably refers to "the Force" during training sessions with his disciple, Luke Skywalker. Yoda informs Luke that he "must feel the Force around you." Yoda himself is frequently seen assuming what may only be described as intergalactic

    Read more
  • Hip and Knee Security

    Everyone knows someone who has undergone hip or knee replacement. These surgeries are no longer exclusively performed on older persons and are now not uncommon procedures for many patients with persistent, significant hip or knee pain. Problems that lead people to be willing to undergo joint replacement

    Read more
  • Making the Grade

    The recent school year has long been over, but the echoes of learning, striving, and achieving persist. We may, if we choose, apply these remembrances of ourselves when we were in school to the circumstances of our health and well-being. We all want good health for ourselves and the members of our families,

    Read more
  • The Sounds of Summer

    The variegated songs of the mockingbird. The crack of the bat on the baseball diamond. The screaming of little children at play in the community pool. Wherever we turn, the sounds of summer surround us in a joyful uplifting cacophony. Summertime may mean barbecue and it may mean the beach, but it also

    Read more
  • Double Indemnity

    In the classic 1944 film noir, "Double Indemnity", insurance salesman Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray), gets into some pretty hot water involving his client (Barbara Stanwyck) and his co-worker (Edward G. Robinson). Neff tries to misuse the concept of double indemnity and he pays a heavy price.

    Read more
  • Health Statistics and You

    We are awash in numbers, thanks in large part to the proliferation of personal mobile devices and the wrong-headed use of so-called big data.1 But applying statistical tools to the same set of data can support competing theories and lead to contradictory results. Such conflicting outcomes, known as antinomies

    Read more
  • Helping Your Chiropractor Help You

    Your chiropractor has many powerful tools at his or her disposal to help you get well. These powerful tools include chiropractic care itself and specialized knowledge in nutrition, exercise, and rehabilitation. There are some things that you, too, can bring to the chiropractor-patient relationship in

    Read more
  • Meditation and Me

    For many of us, the practice of meditation seems like a totally foreign notion. In an era of full-time, morning-to-night distractions and distractibility, the concept of quietly sitting with nothing else to do seems impossibly ridiculous. Why would anyone do that, we ask, as we text message with one

    Read more
  • New Beginnings

    The time is always right to begin returning to good health. Regardless of whether your issues involve weight, exercise, diet, blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic pain, now is the time to begin taking action on your own behalf. You are not alone. Literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide have

    Read more
  • Remember to Schedule Your Spinal Screening

    Most of us have undergone some type of screening exam in the last several years. Depending on your age, personal history, and family history, you may have needed to go for a periodic mammography, colonoscopy, or cardiac stress test. If everything was fine, you have probably been instructed to follow-up

    Read more
  • The Circle of Life

    Many people - adults and children - are familiar with the marvelous animated feature "The Lion King". Most have found themselves humming the film's theme "The Circle of Life" long after they've stopped actively thinking about the film itself. "The Circle of Life" is not only a terrifically catchy tune,

    Read more
  • The Light Within

    What animates us? In other words, what is it that causes us to be living matter? For example, what distinguishes a living orchid from a tissue-paper-and-paint model of an orchid? Or what distinguishes a hawk from an airplane? What is it that causes the material that is us to hold together and function

    Read more
  • The Natural World

    The natural world functions very well on its own. Left to their own devices, members of the tens of millions of species on our planet thrive and prosper without relying on outside agencies. In order to grow abundantly, plants consume carbon dioxide, water, and nutrients from the soil. Likewise, herbivorous

    Read more