The Cause (and Solution) of Back and Neck Pain With Neck Shaper

The Wellness Mama Podcast

435: Eileen Durfee on the Cause & Solution of Back and Neck Pain

00:00 / 00:47:20

I am back today with Eileen Durfee, a former nuclear power plant engineer who, like many of us, has battled through a lot of her own health problems. Eileen has figured out a really innovative solution called the Neck Shaper that helps the misalignment of spinal posture that causes many back and neck problems. There are so many factors in our modern society that put a strain on posture, such as slouching over and looking down at phones way too much. The good news is the solution is much easier than you would expect.

And one huge bonus: she says we should never do sit-ups again. I’m listening, Eileen! 😉

Episode Highlights With Neck Shaper

How misalignment of spinal posture can cause back and neck problems
The reason looking down at our phones so much can cause a force of hundreds of pounds of pressure on the neck and spine
How treating the root cause and treating the symptoms are so different when it comes to neck and back pain
The reason to stop doing sit-ups
Some simple exercises to try for back and neck pain
The role a good diet plays in flexibility, mobility, and strength
How to care for joints and keep them healthy (the answer may surprise you!)
Tips for weightlifters: how to lift weights while respecting alignment
And more!

Resources We Mention

The Neck Shaper Kit
Creatix Products, Vision, and Mission by Eileen Durfee
Book: Your Body’s Many Cries for Water

More From Wellness Mama

Did you enjoy this episode? Please drop a comment below or leave a review on iTunes to let us know. We value knowing what you think and this helps other moms find the podcast as well.

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Katie: Welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com. That’s wellnesse with an E on the end, my new personal care line. I am back today with Eileen Durfee, who is a former nuclear power plant engineer and who has battled through a lot of her own health problems to find surprising solutions. And in this one, we go deep on a different topic. I will link to our first episode in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. But she has figured out a really innovative solution that helps misalignment of spinal posture that is related to back and neck problems, specifically problems caused by us living in a modern society, and slouching over, and looking down at phones way too much. And we go deep into the causes and the solutions in this episode. The good news is it’s easier than you would expect. And she says we should never do sit-ups again. So that and much more in this episode. Let’s jump in. Eileen, welcome. Thanks for being here again.

Eileen: Oh, well, thank you for having me.

Katie: I think this topic is especially important in today’s world when things like back and neck pain are on the rise, I’m guessing, in part because we’re all staring at a phone instead of keeping our head where it’s supposed to be. But we’re gonna delve into all of that today. So, to start broad, walk us through, I know that you’ve done some deep-dive research on this, but what are some of the causes of back and neck pain?

Eileen: Well, the main thing is gravity. People don’t realize how much energy your body spends to hold you upright. And the main problem comes into play when you think about the development of the spinal column. You know, when babies are born, they’re, like, curled up in a C shape, and they can’t walk because they don’t have curvature in their spine. So, you know, they start crawling and you start seeing the development of curves. But it really takes 18 years to develop proper curvature and ossification or the hardness, the density of the bones. But guess what? Our athletic training system for the youth is not doing the proper exercises to give everyone ideal curvature. Most children are not getting it, then, you know, you have repetitive injuries. I mean, I could go on and on about why, you know, in America, just on low back pain alone, we spend $100 billion a year. And a lot of those, you know, remedies, so to speak, surgery, and this and that, don’t always work. How many people have had back pain? How many people do you know have back pain or chronic back problems that they can’t get rid of? It’s an epidemic.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And certainly, there’s so much information on this. And I’m guessing there’s gonna be, like, some very clear and easy things that people just haven’t thought of. Like, for instance, I interviewed someone once, it was a lot about shoulder pain. And he recommended…he said if people would just hang by their arms for three minutes a day, even if it was broken up in little chunks but hang, that would eliminate so many of the causes of shoulder pain. Like, part of this is that we’re not moving how humans were meant to move. And so it sounds like that’s, kind of, the same thing that’s going on with our back in our neck, right?

Eileen: Yes. Yes, it is. And, you know, we’ll floss and we’ll brush our teeth, the ones we wanna keep. But what are we doing to maintain proper curvature or get it if you never had it? You know, we have these, you know, things that are simple, like you say, that we could do on a daily basis that would make a huge difference. And that’s because of my whole history of what I went through from the time I was born to different things that happened to me why this is so primary for me because, you know, everybody’s tired. Well, let’s reduce the amount of energy your body has to spend just to exist in gravity. There are some great things that people can implement to make a difference in their lives.

Katie: So, let’s start talking through some of those things. Like I said, I’m sure that there’s probably, like, the two-part thing. One, we need to stop doing the things that are causing the problem and probably we need to integrate some things that are gonna help fix the problem. So walk us through some of those specifics.

Eileen: Okay. Well, there’s a lot of forward head posture going on. You know, even as early as children with heavy backpacks on their back and just focusing down at devices and everything else, when you have your head down, the force of gravity is enormous and your muscles tighten up. And so, what do people do? They might go get a massage to get rid of a tight muscle or they might take Advil or muscle relaxers or, you know, use CBD or whatever it is. But the key factor you’re not looking at is the shape in gravity. Because if you have correct curvature, there’ll be, you know, like 20 times less the amount of gravitational force activating the trigger of the muscles. So, just like brushing and flossing your teeth, we need to do the neck flexion exercise. That will strengthen two muscles that everyone forgets. You know, we’re body muscle overload. We’re doing all of these exercises to strengthen our muscles but we’re not looking specifically at the muscles that induce proper curvature. There’s the multifidus and the inner spinalis muscles that we need to work. And we have to do two things simultaneously in order to activate those.

So there’s one particular exercise we developed, what we call the neck shaper, to put this facepiece on your face like a mask and it has a bar that you can add resistance with your hands. But you can literally do a free body exercise where you stand up and look up to the ceiling with your eyes. It’s naturally gonna bring your head all the way back so that your forehead and chin are, like, close to horizontal to the ceiling. So, if you look up, you know, so you’re relaxing and that’s where the position of the exercise begins. So then you can take your hands, your fingers, put them on your cheekbones, and begin putting pressure. And then you just simply, like, you’re gonna nod your head, you bring your chin down to a level position, you know, you’re putting that gentle force against the face. And then once your chin is level, you basically relax the neck muscles. You keep the force on your cheeks with your fingers and you just push your chin back, keeping, you know, your head back, keeping your chin level. And when you do that…you stand up when you’re doing this. When you do that properly, your spine’s actually gonna become more flexible where you actually begin developing a curve in the lower back.

And this is amazing with this neck shaper, you know, you can generally start out, you know, even without the piece of equipment, you can, like, do six of those every hour, just gently. And there’s people with bulged discs, you know, neck pain that radiates clear down into their arms and everything else. But that’s just a simple exercise that they can do during the day but also do things like make sure that your computer monitor or your device is in a position where you can, you know, keep your head to the point where your chin is level and you look at it. You’re not cranking your neck to look up. You’re not cranking your neck to look down. I mean, the reason why we have the neck shaper where you could really, you know, put some force and develop those neck muscles, you know, is so that just like you eat food and food gets between your teeth, you know, when you floss it, you know, brush, then everything’s back to normal, that’s the same thing. Your body is meant to be flexible to look down, look up. But when we’re not doing the things to strengthen the multifidus and inner spinalis muscles, then you gradually lose the curvature, and then muscles get tight, and then pain develops.

Now, the neat thing about our spine is if we have the proper curvature, there’s these bones on the back, they’re called facets, but what they do is they interlock. When you have the curvature of your spine, the adjacent vertebrae have this bone-on-bone contact that’s super strong. It’s like when you have the curvature, your spine can’t go out of whack because it’s bone-on-bone that protects you from drifting out of shape. But when you are reaching, head down, or whatever, then those bones on the back don’t make contact. And then the muscles that are keeping you from having a slipped disc or a vertebra that goes out of whack is that multifidus and that inner spinalis muscle. And so we need to have force coming on top of us. It’s considered anterior force. That’s your hands on your cheekbones pushing, that’s anterior force.

Then you have to have some posterior support. And, you know we’ve got a whole line of spinal fitness equipment coming out that have a specialized groove in it so you can arch your neck over it. And the little pointy bone on the back of your spine is called a spinous. So if we can let that spinous float, not touch anything, and then the sides of your vertebrae, those edges, those are called the transverse process, then they catch these shapes. It’s kind of like, you know, a train follows a train track. It’s like, we wanna do the same thing for the spine. So we wanna have a particular shape underneath, then we wanna have force on top, and then we wanna have muscular co-contraction. So this neck flexion that I described is just critical for anybody who’s using any kind of electronic device.

And then we have the neck shaper now. I mean, you could even lay down on a flat bench, use some exercise bands on the bar on the neck shaper. You know, you can wad up a towel underneath your neck and you could do the neck flexion exercise that way. There’s just a lot of things that impact your body, but like, if our neck is, like, forward, you know, between our hips, you know, our torso and our head, if it’s a grand total of 4 inches forward…you know, normally when you stand up, the hamstrings have zero muscle effort. But let’s say from my waist to my head, I’m 4 inches forward over the center of my hips, that hamstring muscle will be firing and tight, resisting 983 pounds. That’s mathematically calculated. So anybody can stand up right now listening to this podcast, stand up where you think you’re straight, are your hamstrings tight? If they are, you do not have the mechanical advantage, your body’s spending energy holding you in gravity that it doesn’t need to and you’re wearing off edges of your bones, your scrunching discs, and causing premature aging. There’s all kinds of things to do with gravity. Gravity is not your friend unless you have the right shape.

Katie: That’s really astounding. So over 900 pounds of pressure, just in terms of misalignment. What about…? Because certainly, like back pain seems to be on the rise and neck pain as well. And I see people, like, on Instagram using different types of back braces or these, kind of, like, contraptions that pull their shoulders back. What do you think about those? Does that help counteract the neck misalignment at all?

Eileen: Well, it basically treats the symptom. Like, you got a flat tire because there’s a nail in it, and you refuse to take the nail out, but you’ll carry a compressed air can around to pump up your tire all the time to deal with the slow leak. That’s what I think those things are for. You know, it’s good to go get a massage, you know, get rid of the tight muscles but it’s like a bent crankshaft in the motor. You know, I mean, for proper tolerances for everything to work, there’s certain alignment, you know, that needs to happen. And it’s basically the curvature in the spine that gives you the mechanical advantage. So, for proper correction, for healing faster from injuries, preventing injuries, what you need to do is acquire the shape that’s most efficient in gravity because there’s like three curves in the spine. You got your neck curve, you know, then your thoracic area curves back and then to a low back curve and then the sacral curve. So you have those three curves that you need to properly develop and maintain.

And, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do. You know, if you gotta do some traction, if you, you know, do some things that temporarily relieve the pain, but people are gonna realize that those kinds of things are like having a ball and chain around your ankle. You’re always having to do them because you always go back to the point, you know, where you were at. And so, it’s really important to have the leverage points. Like, if somebody’s gonna move a giant rock, it’s really big and heavy, and they get this long bar and they can put the bar down at the bottom underneath that rock but then they put a piece of wood or a block or something underneath it so they can get some leverage to pull on that and they’ll be stronger. What we do is we put the body over like that block, a fulcrum, and then we put force on top, and then we induce the curvature by strengthening certain muscles that only can be strengthened if you have simultaneous posterior support, anterior support, and muscular co-contraction, then it develops curvature where you can…

I mean, I can take an athlete here and test their hamstring tightness, test how far they can reach, and I can have them do 1 set of maybe 10 to 15 neck flexions, a sit-up over this arch. It’s got a different curvature than, like, an exercise ball. You don’t get the right curvature just arching over an exercise ball. So we have a specialized cushion with the groove in it against…when you arch over it, you know, you’re aligning your spine, and you’re doing these sit-ups. And then we have another cushion that you have this pelvic tilt where it’s got a shape underneath and you put the force on top. And I can do one set of each of those and get up to 6-inch reach improvement in an athlete where they can stand up and not have any tight hamstrings. They’re like going, “Man, I didn’t have to hold my shoulders back anymore. My shoulders are naturally…I feel taller. I feel lighter.” And that’s just one set of exercises.

And so, that’s my solution. You know, I almost have to laugh when I see that thing on Instagram where it has this little necklace that’s like an alarm so it can sense when you’re hunching, so it vibrates and it goes off. You know, so anybody with severe back pain, you know, just telling them to stand up straight doesn’t mean much. Like, me, I was almost a miscarriage. My hips came out twisted. I had to wear, like, special shoes. Every time I walked, my one knee hit the other one. I was in chronic pain. I mean, some of the eighth graders grew 9 inches in three months. And I never got that curvature. Then I was run over in a parking lot by a car. I couldn’t even breathe without severe pain like somebody was stabbing me multiple times in the chest. So, I have been through it with back pain.

And I came to know a chiropractor. He’s, you know, passed on. But he did some fantastic work with the U.S. Olympic team and NFL teams, just so happens a lot of the ones that win all the Super Bowls because he taught them these exercises. And, you know, I was told I’d never be able to lift my hands over my head after the car ran me over. But it was through these exercises that I’ve used pretty much my whole life that have kept me…I mean, I’ve got good bone density. I don’t have any deteriorating discs. I don’t have…A bunch of edges in my bones wore off. And I know that it’s just proper care of the body to get it into the shape and gravity because gravity is gonna win. It’s like you see, you know, babies are C shape, look at all the old people, they’re, like, bent over holding a cane and walking. See they’ve lost their curvature. The longer you can get and maintain that curvature, the more mobile you’re gonna be, the less pain you’re gonna have.

Katie: That makes complete sense. I’ve said so many times, I think we can learn so much from children. And certainly, movement is one of those things. Like, if you watch a baby that’s just learned how to walk, once they get their stability, their squat is perfect. And they use their whole body when they move. And if we try to keep up with them, I’m pretty sure we’d be exhausted in about 12 minutes. But we can learn so, so much from them. And I’ve also heard you say that there’s a few popular exercises that people do that actually can weaken the core structure and make some of these problems worse. And I feel like there’s definitely some misadvice going on. So, can you walk us through what you mean by that?

Eileen: Right. Well, a lot of, you know, the athletes are doing a lot of exercises to strengthen their muscles. You know, and they’re not looking at, you know, do they have correct neutral posture or do they a flat lower back, you know? There’s just a lot of different things you gotta evaluate on an athlete to know whether they should be doing those heavy, heavy squats or whether they should quit doing the leg curls with the knee joint, and different things like that. You know, I’ve heard, like, even with Tom Brady, now, he doesn’t do weightlifting. Everything’s about mobility and flexibility. So I think that’s starting, you know, to come around. But there’s an evaluation that needs to be done on a person and then to be able to add, you know, or modify, you know, the exercises. So, it’s really hard because it’s, you know, so individualized, you know, for person, you know, to person as far as what they should do.

But in general, for exercising the upper body, you know, what’s good for it, you know, dips are good. Pull-ups are good. You know, pec deck things are good. And when you isolate leg and arm muscles, you gotta make sure that it does something to where it’s not putting stress on the posture of your spine, like on the back of the spine. Like, strict standing or seated bicep curls or squats can cause the posterior back muscles to work to stabilize that weight mass when it goes forward from the spinal column. You know, so even though they’re meant for leg or arm, you’re really exercising those back muscles, which is a poor mechanical advantage, you know.

So, you know, like, modify the curls, you know. Make sure that you’re using one of those tilted benches to stop the force from reaching the back because, you know, like, I know myself, like, you know, I have an old injury in my right shoulder. So I have a tendency…you know, I can’t lift as much with that arm and I’ll effort more, and so it will pull on my low back more on the right side than on the left side. You know, so that’s all bad. You know, so leg presses for muscles on the front of the leg, a lot of times, you know, these athletes that have somewhat good curvature could still do a lot of light with a lot of reps. But if they start doing real heavy and do these things, then it is going to put a strain on their low back. And that’s where a lot of, like, the football players and contact injuries are gonna have problems. You know, so those are just some things.

So what we should avoid. So back extension, bent over slides, seated rows, that causes the posture of your back muscles to use directly in the exercise, kind of like a force of effect. So we don’t wanna activate the posture of your back muscles to be used as primary movers, you know, in exercise. So, you know, you can do other exercises to strengthen those muscles without doing those. So we just wanna reduce injuries to the back, but strengthen our muscles and strengthen our core.

Katie: That makes sense. I’ve been experimenting with weightlifting more in this past year, but trying to make sure I have the mobility before that and with it as well, using good form, but I’ve become a big fan of anything bodyweight related. Like, pull-ups or climbing or things that use our body in natural ways, I feel like that’s helped my mobility a ton, but also just because it requires, like, the movement of both arms and both legs. And it feels like a much more deep core workout than just doing, for instance, like, crunches or some of these things they say that are supposed to help our core fitness. I find that more natural human movements, again, like babies would do are so much more beneficial for the core. Is that what you find as well that, like, there’s, like, a deep core movement beyond just what we think of as core exercises?

Eileen: Yeah, well, see those typical core exercises are not strengthening the multifidus or the inner spinalis muscles. So it’s not inducing proper curvature. It’s actually stressing and over-strengthening certain muscles that make you lose curvature. So yes, the movement without the weights is really good, but there’s a real lack in the whole industry to be able to say, “Okay. You can do these exercises three to five days a week for eight weeks and we can get you back to normal posture.” Who can say that? Nobody. Because they don’t have the ability to induce that curvature. And it’s actually gonna be more than just the neck shaper. We have the neck shaper right now and we are right now pouring…we’re getting the densities right on the foam cushions that have the groove like the train track for the neck and for the low back, and we’re gonna have them in five different diameters and three different densities because everybody’s at a different spot. They’re either really injured, super forward head posture, super flat back.

We got all these things we gotta deal with, so we got a different cushion where somebody can then do a twist and lay over these things, you know, so you get your discs where they go from a sponge to a liquid. You lay over this, it induces the right shape. You relax. Gravity, you know, is not your enemy anymore. Bones actually drift where you’re laying on this. And then boom, after 20 minutes, your discs go from a liquid state back to a foam state, and you get up and it’s, like, absolutely amazing what you do. That’s like brushing your teeth. You just do that every day. And then we’re gonna have the cushion. Now, we got different height of people, plus we got different densities, that’s got the groove in it. It’s the one that’s used by the New England Patriots, the Dallas Cowboys, and New York Giants, and the Jets. They all have this. Marcus Paul, God rest his soul, before he passed away, he had called me wanting more because he found my name with Dr. Sugar. But Dr. Sugar passed on and he was just a crazy mad scientist. And all these NFL teams, they don’t want anybody else to know that they got the secret to, you know, run faster, jump harder, push harder, and not get dislocations and everything like this, but the general population needs it.

So it’s like a cushion. They’ll have an integrated neck thing on it. And you basically do three exercises, and it’s transformational. I don’t know. There was a guy who rented one of our family commercial buildings and his kid fell off of a trampoline, and he’d gone to all the physical therapists and everything but he was having these seizures every day. He was over here and I had these ugly foam reject cushions that we’ve been playing around with densities, and surfaces, and all that. So I taught him how to do the back twist and to lay down on these cushions. And the dad got ahold me a week later and he says he’s never had a seizure since. Now, this has been, you know, almost a year now. And this kid takes these cushions with him everywhere in his backpack and he does them faithfully every day.

I mean, there was another guy in California that got one of my prototype neck shapers, and literally, he was scheduled for neck surgery. And nothing would get rid of his neck pain. Three days of doing the neck shaper, just six reps like every hour, it’s just like having this little device there and you just do it. You know, you don’t put a lot of pressure on. You don’t hurt yourself or anything but just he stretches. After three days, all of his pain was gone and he’s canceled his surgery. Now, that’s been five months, still no need for surgery. It’s just gravity. Oh my gosh.

So, you know, we gotta do everything we can to correct our curvature because you gotta realize that those tight muscles are there to tell you, “Don’t drift any farther out of whack. It’s gonna get worse. It’s gonna be worse for your body.” So it’s a self-protective mechanism. We’re getting tight muscles. So we got to induce the right shape and then the muscles will relax. You’ll have better rotation and mobility. So, yeah, it’s just like, this is my passion to get this out to the world because it’s just not being taught. I mean, it shouldn’t be…no one should ever do a regular sit-up, ever. If you have to, take a sleeping bag, a rolled-up sleeping bag because the blow-up exercise ball, the curvature is not right. Like, roll up a sleeping bag and then arch over that sleeping bag, you know, bend your knees, have your butt on the ground, arch back over, and you’re gonna find out you’re not gonna be able to arch back over very far.

But that’s okay. Just go as far as you can, kind of, like, hang your head, and then just don’t curl your chin down to your chest. You just, kind of, lead with your chest and do, like, a sit-up and arch over that. You know, I just say, “Don’t do any more situps.” You gotta arch over that. And then you could have, like, your friend put resistance on your chest by putting their hands on your pec muscles and just general resistance as you try to sit up. That’s your anterior force. You got your shape. I mean, it doesn’t have the groove like our equipment will have to really, like, stretch the vertebrae and align it as you’re doing the exercise, but you’re gonna get the muscular co-contraction. You’re gonna get the force, and it’s gonna strengthen the multifidus and the inner spinalis muscles and start developing that low back curve that you need.

And as far as, you know, I talked about doing the back twist and laying down over some cushions, you can use specially folded bath towels. Basically, you take a bath towel and you fold it in half so it’s not long anymore, then you fold in each end so they don’t touch each other so there’s about a 1-inch gap in the middle, then you roll it up and you take rubber bands on either side because depending on how fluffy your bath towel is, you can achieve different diameters of that roll. Okay? So you wanna be able to adjust that. So, when you position those rolls, you’re gonna need two of them, one for your low back, one for your neck. So 1 inch, just find the top of your hip bones when you’re sitting down. You can find the iliac pointing out. So, you put the low back roll 1 inch above that in, you know, the small of your back. And now the neck, you roll up one of those towels to where it just fills the opening. So the back of your head just barely touches the ground, sort of, you know, filling up that whole curvature.

But before you lay down on those towels, you basically just sit on a regular chair. It’s like when I used to play the cello. My teacher would say, “Sit on your bones.” It was like you’d arch forward with your hips to where you were sitting on your pelvic bones, you know. And then you can just basically keep your chin level and put your arms out like a 90 degree, kind of like a chicken wing, you know, then you pretend like there’s a rod going through your head all the way down through your pelvis. So you’re keeping that column straight, okay? Then you rotate. You lead with your eyes, and look back, and you arch, and you just rotate, you know, where your elbow goes all the way back. So, you just go back and forth, back and forth, you do that rotation, leading with your eyes, you know, then what that does is it pumps blood in the vessels near the discs, and it causes the rotation or hydration to go into the discs but more blood flow and it changes the discs from that dense foam to more like a liquid.

So, then we want you immediately to lay down over those two towels I described. One for the low back, one for the neck. You lay down, you know, with your legs straight so you’re just supine on the floor for 20 minutes. Then when you get up, don’t do a sit-up, roll over to your side and push up with your hands. And it’s like you would be amazed. You know, if any listeners have any tight muscles, pain, just using the towels and doing that exercise will be transformational for you. And so, that’s why we’re coming up with three densities. You know, soft for the injured, medium for the beginner, and hard for the athlete. And then we have the five different diameters. So, as your curvature begins to increase, then you can change the diameter and have that support, you know, on your spine. And so, you know, it’s like having had back pain, it’s like you can’t really focus on much of anything else. It’s just so hard and it consumes so much energy. I have so much empathy for people that are really going through it, and that’s a lot of people.

Katie: It absolutely is. And certainly, the solutions you’re talking about, learning to move better and have better posture and work with gravity instead of against it and then have these tools like the neck shaper, are a much easier and more natural, and also less painful alternative than things like surgeries or steroids or so many of the things that are offered as the first line of treatment. And I know…not to say that there’s never a place for those things but certainly, we’re seeing all these problems rise and it’s certainly not from a steroid deficiency or a back surgery deficiency. So it’s so much better to, like, what you’re doing and address that root cause and figure out how to get our bodies back in alignment and like you mentioned, all of the benefits that go with that. And not to mention, letting go of those hundreds of pounds of extra pressure that don’t need to be on our spine just from learning how to stand, and move, and exist like a normal human again, and realize we weren’t meant to stare down at a screen all day long. I read that, you know, our heads are so heavy, even just that small tilt forward to look at a screen constantly hugely changes everything because everything stems from the neck. And you’ve talked about that and explained how basically, that’s a ripple effect all the way down, essentially, our whole entire body.

Eileen: Yeah, and people don’t realize, you know, that our brain, all the nerves that control everything in our body goes through the spinal column. And then the dura has these little sheaths where the nerves, you know, come out in between vertebrae to go feed and control, you know, the nervous system because we’ve got the parasympathetic nervous system, you know, we got the sympathetic nervous system. You know, we got things going to all the time in our body. And, you know, just having pinched nerves…you know, somebody could be complaining of digestion and it could be a loss of curvature in the mid-back, pinching nerves in the back. You know, and then we’re just, you know, yes, enzymes and we’re like combining foods and we’re doing all this kind of stuff to improve our digestion, but if our nerves are pinched that supply the organ the stimulation to function normally, you’re not gonna win.

And so, there’s just that component that we really need to think about, the shape of that spine, you know, and how when we do get proper curvature, because of the design, bone-on-bone is so strong, just imagine with proper curvature, how it’s, like, super hard for your spine to go out of whack. It’s like, nowadays, you know, we’ve got all kinds of problems, even our tissues are not as resilient as they used to be because we got problems with copper toxicity. So our whole connective tissue, it’s kind of like a spiderweb that doesn’t have both horizontal and vertical support members, you know. So we got nutritional aspects that are contributing to, you know, spine problems, back pain, those kinds of things as well. You know, so I’m a great proponent…I don’t think there’s any silver bullet for anything. But, you know, we have to, kind of, look at gravity as a major contributor. Yes, let’s do some good diet. Yes, let’s detoxify. Yes, let’s get some sleep. Let’s watch the sun. You know, we do all these things together and it’s gonna really make a difference.

Katie: Agreed. And I’ve been taking notes while you’ve been talking to put in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. There will also be a link there to the neck shaper so you guys can see that. I’ve got one and I’ve been using it at my house. And I do notice a real difference in my head alignment and just the tension in my head, and my neck, and my jaw when I use that regularly. And I don’t even look at my phone probably as much as a lot of people do. So definitely we’ll have that info there at wellnessmama.fm so you guys can find it and learn more. I’ll also, of course, link to our other podcast episodes. People can learn from our first one as well and from all of your other products. And you said that you have more products coming on this. And, of course, this is a topic that seems to be getting increasingly important. So, I think we’ll have to do another round eventually and tackle some questions we’ll get from this one.

But Eileen, thank you so much. This has been such a fun episode. Any parting advice or book recommendations you’d like to leave with people today?

Eileen: Well, really one of my favorite books is “Your Body’s Many Cries for Water.” I think I really do agree with Dr. Batmanghelidj that 80% of disease is because you’re dehydrated. But one of the parts in there that really relates to the back is your body will not feed water to your spinal discs, those cushions, if you’re dehydrated because there’s more important things like your bone marrow. I mean, there’s a hierarchy, right? You know, you don’t have enough water, you start depriving your joint cartilage, and your discs, and your spine. And the movement, the flexible movement that you can do helps to pump water in there to plump that up so they can do more of their job so you’re less compressed, you’re less tense. But, you know, stay hydrated, that’s what I gotta say. That’s, like, one of the most important things.

Katie: That’s a great one. Yeah, certainly, and that lines up, I feel like with the mobility and good posture as well because I’ve read that our joints, since they’re not integrated, they don’t have blood flow that goes to them, and that is how they get nutrients is through hydration and movement. So when it comes to joints, we need hydration and movement. So that’s such a perfect point to end, I believe. And like I said, we’ll have to do another round sometime soon. But I’m a big fan of the neck shaper. You guys definitely check it out. And Eileen, thank you for your time.

Eileen: Oh, you’re welcome.

Katie: And thank you guys, as always, for listening, for sharing your valuable resources, your time and your energy, with us today. We’re so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama” podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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435: Eileen Durfee on the Cause & Solution of Back and Neck Pain

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