Recently I have been pursuing my passion for empowering people to help themselves to better health – starting right from the basics. I have been running a series of free workshops along with my colleague Dr Simon Prince – a private GP at The Therapy Room in Cambridge. It has been really well received and we have had lots of great feedback, about topics that people would like know more about. I plan to record these sessions and post them to my blog very soon.
Anyway, one of the most common problems and topics of interest were stomach problems, and the number of people that suffer silently without help or knowledge how to help themselves is incredible.
I have written on Digestion , widely on this blog and on youtube clips, but some of the common causes for stomach problems are -
1. Selecting foods that are not right for you, that you can’t produce energy from or build or repair cells with, and therefore stress the body. Metabolic typing is a great tool I use to help people with stomach problems.
2. Eating the four white devils – white sugar – white pastuerised dairy -white flour – white salt (NaCl)
3. Parasites and fungal infections – I do lab tests with my clients if I suspect an infection, as even the greatest diet matched to your unique needs, will not make you better, if these pathogens are present. They literally eat your food, beofre you get a chance to, and then poop out their waste, causing inflammation, and toxicity amongst other things.
4. Food intolerances – With a diet as suggested by the food pyramid – high in starchy carbohydrates and grains, and pasteurised milk the small intestine’s ability to digest dairy and gluten along with other foods is often impaired. Rotating the protein in your diet on a 4 day cycle is often a place to start, but I use kinesiological and lab tests when food intolerance are causing a big stress on my clients immune sytems.
5. Water – Dehydration is so common, and drinking enough high quality water is vital for the function of all your cells and especially eliminating the waste from our colons.
I am running the Stomach Problems free workshop once a month on every second tuesday at 12.30 and 1.30, and every second saturday at 10 am or 11 am at The Therapy Room Cambridge
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There are not many of us who escape bouts of back pain at sometime in our lives, and often it seems to recur without reason. The majority of back pain clients I see in my clinic have not injured themselves in a fall or an accident, they may have had a slight niggle that they just ignored, and then one day the pain got bad enough that they needed to get some help.
Our body is an integrated system of 120 joints and 400 pairs of muscles working together, and these joints and muscles are controlled by our nervous system, and organs and glands.
This can be explained by our evolution from a single cell, both historically and our journey from conception to birth and on through life.
As a single cell, the goal is to integrate with other cells to avoid bacteria fungus and parasites as they eat them, and to feed those cells by finding food. In nature successful animals/humans increase no of cells (integration) – to increase safety and survival. Our torso is an exact model of the single cell organism and on a foundational level, with the same goal to get to food more effectively and avoid predators.
Our muscles and joints (muscular skeletal system) are the artwork of the organs. Therefore our diet, lifestyle, organ and glands are vital for our survival and will communicate with the musculoskeletal system if the food we are consuming is not right for us, if we are not getting enough rest, if we are not moving enough to help the heart and the digestive system to work, or if we are stressed.
If our diet is not right for us then we might feel bloated, tired or sleepy after a meal, which affects our posture, the position of our joints, our breathing, our core stabilizing muscles are switched off, and this is the most common cause of back pain that I see in my clinic.
If we sit most of the day, to the degree that our chair and computer is not supporting us in good posture our body will contort to fit into that position, our organs and glands get compressed, our intestines don’t pump to help digestion and elimination, and our veins find it hard to pump blood back to the heart, our nervous system transmits this pain to our musculoskeletal system, and one day we are in pain.
These are just two of many examples of how our amazing body, works together as a physical mental emotional and spiritual entity, and whilst ensuring your spinal alignment and muscles are working correctly are vital, understanding of what your organs, glands, mental and emotional or spiritual elements are communicating to you, are just as important to beat pain for good!
Helping yourself to life without pain is as simple and as complicated as tuning into what your body is trying to tell you from the food you eat, the rest and sleep you take, the movement and exercise you do, and your thoughts.
For more information about how to help yourself to beat pain for good, sign up today for the Beat back and joint pain for good workshop – running lunchtimes and weekends.
Phone 01223 315400, pick up a leaflet, or ask at reception for more details.
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Digestion is more than our ability to break food down, and begins even before we put a food in our mouth.
Phases of digestion
1. Digest –
Selecting a food that is biocompatible (compatible with the cells of our body) is the first stage of digestion. Our genes dictate the types, ratio, and amounts of food that our body runs best on. They are passed onto us from our ancestors to help ensure our survival, and research shows that genetic code changes only 0.1% every 100,000 years. So genetically we are very similar to our distant ancestors, and we run best on the organic whole foods (meat, vegetables, fruit, grains) that they ate. If we eat a food that is not biocompatible it will stress many of the systems of our body.
2. Metabolise –
One of the primary functions of digestion is the provision of energy to each cell (metabolism), but if we provide too much energy (often sugar) then we will have problems with controlling blood sugar balance, and suffer with symptoms like energy highs and lows, headaches, inflammation, inability to heal, and hormonal imbalances.
3. Assimilate –
If the food is not recognised by the cells of the body then it can’t be assimilated (included), and it has to be dealt with by our immune system, just as it would any invader (like a virus, or bug). Our immune system tries to surround it, bind it up, and then eventually kill it, but this causes inflammation, and many other symptoms like fatigue, muscle and joint soreness, and swelling and bloating.
4. Eliminate –
The waste products (toxins) must be released from the body on a daily basis in order to detoxify. Chronic constipation can cause our body to become toxic, and cause symptoms like dizziness, fatigue, skin disorders, and other autoimmune disorders.
The process of digestion literally provides life and recreates all our cells, not only fuel, and building blocks, but it provides the fats and proteins for the production of hormones, that make our very thoughts and feelings a reality in our body. Each food emits a frequency of energy that our bodies cells seeks to harmonise with, but processed foods, additives, refined sugar, flour, salt, pasteurised milk will not harmonise and will cause stress in our body.
If you are interested in learning more, I will be running a series of workshops at The Therapy Room in Cambridge entitled- Own Your Health.
I will show you how to observe and assess your own health, and cover the four vital principles for your good health and vitality – Diet, sleep, movement, and thought.
For more details and to book your place please phone 01223 315400 or email damien@dcintegratedhealth.com
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Stress – busting!
By Damien Clements – Integrated Health Consultant at The Therapy Room,
It is my opinion that the biggest cause of ill health in the 21st century is Stress, and this often manifests itself as degenerative or fatigue related disease with associated spinal and joint pain. There are many types of stress, but our body does not distinguish the source of stress, and shares them amongst the control systems.
If the summation of all this stress is greater than our body can balance (homeostasis) then the autonomic nervous system switches the sympathetic nervous system on and parasympathetic off, adversely affecting digestion, repair, growth and breaking down our cells and we become dis-eased or chronically out of balance.
I believe the solution to this lack of balance (disease) is the pursuit of good health rather than the treatment of disease, and we can look back to the ancient greek philosophy of consulting our internal doctors to discover where we have a stress imbalance, and implement change–
Dr Diet – Food and water as building blocks and energy for life
Dr Quiet – sleep and quiet time, to manage our energy use, and allow for regeneration, repair and growth.
Dr Movement (this is a new dr, for our sedentary 21st century lifestyle) – exercise and breathing to help digestion, blood flow, and energy flow.
Dr Thought – What we think feeds us in the same way as food.
The latest research by Deepak Chopra indicates that all the cells of our body are replaced on an annual basis. We are literally recreated from the food we assimilate into our bodies, and shaped by the rest we take, the movement we make, and the thoughts we feed it with.
The pursuit of good health must always start with a consultation with our internal doctors.
Try it for yourself by taking a lifestyle diary over the next 14 days – diet, exercise, sunlight, sleep, and note down how you feel each day. Ask yourself the following questions -
-Does my diet energise me?
- Do I wake from sleep, rested and full of energy?
- Do I feel tired or sore all the time when I exercise? Do you never exercise?
- Do I know where I am going in life, and wake every day with a zest for life?
If you think you need some help to regain good health consulting with an Integrated Health consultant will help.
If you are a health professional from any discipline, I am running a 3 hour introductory course on ‘how to become an integrated health consultant’ at The Therapy Room in
For more details visit http://www.thetherapyroomcambridge.co.uk/int_health_con.html or Call 01223 315400 to reserve your place today.
Damien runs DC integrated Health from The Therapy Room in
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