During her 34 years of clinical experience Dr Muriel Poli has helped thousands of executives and professionals, as well as their families, in restoring their health and work performance, and to awaken to a full and rich life of vitality. She frequently offers workshops to educate her patients, corporations and parent’s associations on the importance of spinal health, posture correction and computer neuro-ergonomics. In 2010 she moved to Barcelona and founded the Vitalia Quiropractica Center. Here she talks to MumAbroad.


Does this sound and look familiar?

 

A row of teenagers with their heads bent forward, hunched and with rounded shoulders.

Teenager’s digital device use has sharply increased in the past 9 years. If we look at South Korea, the most digitally connected country in the world, the leap in mobile phones owned by teenagers went from 5 million units in 2010 to more than 40.12 million in just 4 years.

Along with this trend research has shown that there exists a significant relationship between forward head bending posture and sitting for more than five hours, with neck pain, back pain, shoulder pain, headaches and reduced mobility.

A normal head weighs 4-5 kilograms in good aligned posture. In the picture above we see heads tilted forward at 45 to 60 degrees, which means their heads now compress the neck by 22 to 27 kg more!  The immediate effect is a pulling of the spinal cord. The brain then reacts by tightening the neck, shoulder and upper back muscles and “locking” vertebrae, to prevent damage. The problem is that this produces widespread “dis-communication”  within the brain-body loop, along with cognitive decline such as focus, memory, learning… It also affects mood and empathy.

This is not exactly a recipe for an open and expansive state!