I had to be in Medford at 7:30 am Sunday morning (don’t ask!) and I have to tell you, the first 15 minutes of that ride I was terrified.  Route 62 was a sheet of black ice.  In the 23+ years that I have been driving I had never felt more helpless than I was Sunday morning.  Thankfully, people had realized the situation and I didn’t  see anyone driving more than 5 mph and most people were using their hazards.

I noticed that any quick movements resulted in near total loss of control of the car.  The slower and more gentle I drove the better control I had.  With that in mind let’s go through some tips on how to drive on ice/snow and tomorrow we will go over what to do if you have been in an accident.

Become a weather person

The very first mistake that I made was not checking the weather.  I was caught off guard and therefore surprised when the car skidded.  Whenever possible, especially when traveling earlier in the morning, check the weather to avoid surprises.

Car Tips

How are the tires on your car?  Starting to bald a bit?  If so, get them changed and quick.  Consider going with a snow tire, you will appreciate the extra grip.  How about the windshield, is it nice and clear?  Rain-x makes a great product that you spray on your windshield creating a film that will keep it clear.

ABS is standard on most cars these days, which is awesome, however, you need to know how to drive and more importantly stop with this technology.  Most drivers who have been in accidents with ABS report that they panicked when they felt the brake pedal shaking and took their foot off the pedal.  When the brake pedal pulsates it is doing its job!!!  By taking your foot off the brake pedal, you are actually defeating the technology.  The other part about ABS is the ability for you to steer your way out of trouble.

Driving Technique

Ever hear the expression a little goes a long way?  When driving on ice, no truer words have ever been spoken.  In a lot of cases, the wheels will grip at some point, now if you have oversteered the car, when those tires grip your car will

head in that direction.  If that direction is traffic or a telephone pole, you are in trouble.

It is also vital to plan ahead.  Since we know that sudden movements on ice can result in loss of control, if you know where you are going you can anticipate corners, hills and tricky intersections.  By slowly accelerating or decelerating you can keep yourself out of having to make sudden movements.

Look to Safety

Here is a tip worth it’s weight in Gold…Nascar drivers know that where you are looking is where you will go, this is how they can drive so close to the wall without hitting it, they never look at it.  When you are in a skid, look at where you want to go as opposed to that tree in front of you!  Trust me it works!

Tomorrow I will cover what you need to do once you have been in an accident.

Are there any tips you can share with us on how to drive on ice?  Please comment below.

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Here in the Northeast, the days have gotten short awfully quickly.  It is not unusual to go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.  Mix that in with gray skies and no green/leaves on the trees and it is easy to slide into a funk.

Here are a couple of tips to help avoid the winter blues:

• Accept winter for what it is and get out there and do something fun…the big thing around here is paddle…me I am dying to try curling.
• Dress in bright colors.  Who said we have to go all drab?  Bust out the pastels, but please do us all a favor…those white pants weren’t working before Labor Day, nevermind after it…:)
• Exercise, Exercise, Exercise…you simply can’t do enough of it.  Get out, get in, get moving.  Like to skiing, walking with snow shoes or hitting the elliptical will help fight off the blues.
• Have friends over the house….nothing beats the blues like socializing.  Try this, get an outdoor fire pit, start a fire and invite people over to make smores…trust me there will be smiles everywhere.
• Consider getting a chiropractic adjustment, what did you think I was going to recommend???  There are promising case studies out there linking the adjustment to better moods.

Lastly, make sure you are supplementing with Vitamin D.  The chief source of vitamin D is sunlight and when that goes away we can become deficient very quickly.

How do you fight the winter blues, please comment below.

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November is a big month for renewing insurance plans.  A lot of patients come into the office with insurance questions and over the years I have become fairly adept at reading insurance plans.  It used to be very simple, what was the co-pay, did I have prescription coverage and what sort of flexibility did I have if I am in a jam somewhere far away?

Now the categories have gotten much more complicated.  Take a look at some of the areas of concern:

• Co-pays…now $25 and up is the norm.  Many plans also charge upwards of $45 for a specialist…
• Deductibles…do you need to meet a deductible before the plan will cover anything…is it a hospital only deductible?
• Out of Pocket Maximum…these can range from nothing to $5,000 per individual
• Prescription coverage…are name brands covered or must you get generic?  Is there a prescription deductible…different co-pays for different levels of drugs.
• In network vs out of network…go to the hospital and have an x-ray taken…the x-ray is covered but is the radiologist who is reading it?  That makes for a nice surprise when that bill shows up at home.
• Plan limits… Did you know there may be a lifetime maximum of how much the plan will cover?
• Service limits…love your chiropractor, how many visits will the plan cover?
• Lastly co-insurance…this one is nasty with a capital N.

The new thing in insurance plans is co-insurance.  Allow me to explain how that works.  You go to the hospital for a procedure, let’s say a gall bladder removal.  Total cost of said procedure is       $20, 000.  You pay your co-pay and head home.  Two weeks later a bill shows up in the mail for $7000.  7 GRAND!!!!  Welcome to your 35% co-insurance.  Now every plan is not that bad; I have seen this range from 10%-35%, but as you can imagine, this could get expensive.

You must be very diligent when picking your insurance plan.  Please check all of the categories above, especially the co-insurance category before making your decision.

If you have any questions please hit the contact us tab and we will be very happy to help you.  If you are local to me, please bring the plan sheet over to my office and I will gladly walk you through your options.

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Imagine I told you that I could save you .35 cents on every $1 that you spent on something, would you be interested?

If your company is offering you a flex spending plan (FSA)  and you are not taking advantage of it, you are leaving real money on the table.  Please let me explain how it works.

You decide how much money you want to set aside from your paycheck for health care expenses.  This money is taken from your check, pre-tax.  If you are doing well, this could represent a ton of savings, easily over 35%

Take a look at how much money you have spent on healthcare related products in the last couple of years.  Now take a look at what you plan on spending in 2011.  Are braces in the cards, did your deductible go up, is there a surgery you know you need, are your eye glasses getting up there in age, do you want to see your favorite chiropractor a little more?

Once you have an idea of what you are going to spend, go to your HR department and ask to enroll in the FSA program.  Most companies will offer this and make it very easy to use by giving you a debit card with your funds pre-loaded on it.  Let me repeat that…PRE-LOADED!!!  If you need your braces on January 10th, the money is there, how cool is that?

These funds can also be used for childcare.

Now there are two downsides, the first is every now and then you may need to fill out some paperwork.  It won’t be much and it shouldn’t take up too much of your time.  The second problem is a bit bigger…

Whatever money you do not use by the end of the year you lose!  Now I am going to share a little secret with you, please don’t tell anyone…this money that you lose goes back to your employer!  It is imperative that you use this money by the end of 2011 or you risk losing it.

Please consider using an FSA to save yourself a ton of money if you plan on using any sort of health care in the next calendar year.

A great article can be found here on some of the new rule changes that are coming forward for 2011.

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While I knew that soda wasn’t good for you I was a little horrified when I saw this video…enjoy.

Ask any chiropractor what their client’s biggest problems are and I guarantee you that stress will be in the top two.

Stress can take on many different forms, it could be physical stress (how you sit at your desk), chemical stress (poor diet) or mental stress (what you spend a ton of time worrying about).

If you are a parent of a teenager, how you are going to pay for college is a huge stress for most parents.  Let’s say your daughter wants to go to BU.  For 2010-2011, tuition including housing and a meal plan comes in at a whopping $51,574.  That’s dollars not yen!!!

Now what are you getting for your 50k+ investment per year?  Well certainly a leg up in the job market, right?

Well, maybe not.

In an article in the Wall St. Journal, employment recruiters say that public universities are producing the most prepared and well-rounded prospects for entry-level jobs, with better life skills to fit in to their corporate cultures and prosper.

And prosper…wow!

Now to tell both sides of the story, the article did note that most Harvard type students only dabble in the job market before going back to school to get graduate degrees.

If you compare the cost of a typical private school, 5ok+ with the cost of a typical in state public school, right around 20k, does the cost of private school make sense?

If you believe what the employment recruiters tell you, it may not.

See, now there are 120 thousand less things to worry about, you can thank me later!!

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This is the first in a series of posts where I will be looking at things you probably shouldn’t do.

As a healthcare professional (no jokes please), it never ceases to amaze me the risks that some people will take. Apparently a couple of students in Dover NH didn’t realize that running electricity through your nipples could result in injury.

These future Mensa society members, on a dare, clipped electrical clamps from electrical demonstration cords onto one of the students nipples.It is fairly important to note that this “victim” is 18 years old.  When that was done, another of the students plugged the cords in and the student shocked himself so bad that his heart stopped.

The student was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with, among other things, an out of hospital electrocution resulting in cardiac arrest.

The parents of this student are suing the teacher claiming that the teacher was aware of this dare and did nothing to stop it.  I am not here to judge on the merits of the lawsuit, however, if you are attaching electrical clamps to your nipples and allowing someone to plug it in, aren’t you assuming most of the liability here?

Hopefully this young man will make a full recovery.

Have any suggestions for You Probably Shouldn’t Do This…please leave them below.

In a recent study, a group of Boston doctors have discovered that 1 in 5 kids having hearing loss typical of 50-60 year olds.

In this study, the doctors looked at a group of 3000 teens from 1988 to 1994 and compared their hearing data with a group of 1500 teens between 2005 and 2006.  What they found was disturbing.  Slight hearing loss and more severe hearing loss was higher in the 05/06 group when compared to the 88-94 group.

This is not good.  See it starts with the teens not being able to hear whispers when they are young.  This shouldn’t happen until they are in their 30’s or 40’s.  If they continue down this road, as many doctors assume they will, when they are 30-40 they will have a hard time hearing questions in a boardroom.  You can imagine the frustration of an employer when you answer a question wrong because you cannot hear.

Theses teens are experiencing Noise Induced Hearing Loss.  When we are exposed to harmful noise—sounds that are too loud or loud sounds that last a long time—sensitive structures in our inner ear can be damaged.  These sensitive structures, called hair cells, are small sensory cells that convert sound energy into electrical signals that travel to the brain. Once damaged, our hair cells cannot grow back.

Sound is measured in decibels and it is pretty well accepted that noises between 120 and 150 decibels can cause this hearing loss.Long or repeated exposure to sounds at or above 85 decibels can cause hearing loss. The louder the sound, the shorter the time period before hearing loss can occur. Sounds of less than 75 decibels, even after long exposure, are unlikely to cause hearing loss.

Let’s take a guess at what decibel level a typical MP3 player comes in at.  The max volume cranks out about 120 decibels.  A study that I looked at felt that one hour per day at 60% shouldn’t cause damage but they couldn’t be sure.

What can you do about it?

The MP3 player that I am most familiar with is the Ipod.  Apple has a cool feature that allows you to set the max volume that an Ipod can be played at, they even include a combination to lock this level.  Follow these instructions to set your max volume level:

• Select settings>volume limit
• Use the click wheel to slide the bar up and down, until you find a reasonable level, maybe 50%
• Click set combination and put in a 4 digit code that you won’t forget
• Test

If this Ipod is for your children this will be a great way to manage the volume that they can max out at.

Choosing a good set of headphones may also help.  Ditch the in the ear headphones and go for something that goes over the ear and has a noise canceling feature.  Companies like Bose make a nice set, although oftentimes you will spend more on the head phones than the Ipod itself.

Lastly, limit how much time you spend listening to music piped directly into your ears.  30 minutes a day at the gym? No big deal.  4 hours in the car on a road trip, big deal.

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Anyone who has known me for any period of time will probably agree that I think I am pretty good at what I do.

Well now, CBS News agrees also!  They may not mention me by name but you all know they are really talking about me!!!

Please note when they talk about the best way to stay out of back pain.

If you live in Massachusetts you may have noticed the recent ruling from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that no longer guarantees a woman’s job after 8 weeks of maternity leave.

In the past most companies would allow up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, using the  federal Family and Medical Leave Act as a guideline.  This federal guideline would also allow for absences to care for sick relatives, however, it only applied to companies with more than 50 employees.  Basically your small business was on its own under the federal law.

As you can probably imagine, this ruling has sparked some real debate over what companies should do.

How do you feel about this?  Should a company allow for 12 weeks when the law is now only for 8?

I think it is a very tricky situation.  On one hand you want happy employees and let’s face it, allowing a mom or dad to stay home with their baby for a little bit longer time makes for a happier parent/employee.  As a parent, there is no way I want my child going to daycare after 8 weeks.

Yet on the other hand as a small business owner myself, I can see where having employees out for long periods of time can be devastating.

Many other countries offer huge maternity leave times with many of them paying full salary for up to 7 months in certain cases.

According to a study from the  Center for Economic and Policy Research, there are only 2 countries out of the top 21 high income countries that offer no paid parental leave.  Yep, we are one of them.

If I had to offer paid leave, as well as pay someone else to temporarily do their job, I would not be able to hire anyone.

This is for sure a sticky situation, please share your feelings below by commenting.