What’s in our chiropractic newsletter this month
Can you see her posture transformation? A pediatric case study in a child without pain
Can a child have a significant neck problem without experiencing pain?
In this pediatric case study, we explore how posture, head positioning, and cervical movement testing revealed functional concerns that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This case highlights why evaluating how the neck functions can be just as important as asking whether it hurts.
This is an in depth post with posture photos and NeckCare testing results, including video.
Despite our profession existing for well over 100 years, there are still places in the globe that want to limit the ability of chiropractors to work with children.
It’s important for many of us to document these stories.
The basis for questioning the new HRT push, and some new insights into post-menopausal ovaries
Last month we covered why hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is experiencing renewed interest due to a change in FDA policy.
Women are increasingly exploring HRT not only for relief from menopausal symptoms, but also for its potential to protect against age-related declines in bone, cardiovascular, muscle, and brain health.
I also provided a link to Dr. Ed Pomicter from the “Physiological HRT” perspective which believes in supporting women with bioidentical estrogen. I found his writings to be detailed and clear and helpful for understand the pro-HRT side.
But there’s another side to this conversation. Just because we can replace declining hormones, does that mean we should?
Some say we’re only just beginning to understand the intricacies of menopause, and treating all menopausal changes as a disease process is very short sighted.
Study from October 2026 on post-menopausal ovaries is extremely fascinating
There’s new study in a journal called Aging Cell that is making the rounds in the scientific community. In the study, researchers looked at a variety of post-menopausal women to see how the ovary changed in the decades after ovulation ended.
Here’s the link to the original study.
Here’s what they found:
Despite jokes from stand-up comedians, the factory isn’t closed.
The ovaries don’t just shut down, and go to sleep. There were structural differences between women in their 50s and those older than 70. The ovary continues to re-organize itself and change despite not releasing eggs.
- There are changes associated with immune activity. The older, post-menopausal ovaries started shifting their proteins to those associated with the immune system and inflammation mediation.
- Younger menopausal ovaries had more gene regulation proteins than older menopausal ovaries.
- Older menopausal ovaries had more proteins associated with metabolism and tissue remodeling.
You can think of this study as a protein survey, to see how ovary proteins change after menopause over time.
Since proteins are the “doers” of the cell, the study seems to show that the ovary function is changing, and perhaps contributing to a larger process.
That process may be negative. That process may be positive. It may be a little of both. If I know anything about the body, it’s probably both and is pushed into a negative state or a positive state by stress and behavior.
So what’s the take away from this ovary study as it relates to the new HRT scene?
Menopause shouldn’t just be classified as a malfunction. In fact, the ovary may be reorganizing its resources to take one a secondary function in the female body that we don’t quite understand.
How well those resources are re-organized may play out differently in differently in some women than others based on their health status before and after menopause.
Some symptoms of menopause may ultimately be protective and not just annoying.
New options in HRT may affect these functions positive, negatively, or may have no effect at all. We don’t know yet.
Are there any experts disagreeing with the FDA HRT policy changes?
Anytime a longstanding policy changes, there’s going to be controversy.
Drs. Adriane Fugh-Berman and Barbara Mintzes have written an editorial critical of the decision. They represent a fair number of doctors who don’t agree with the decision. Here are their main points:
- Menopause is being blamed for symptoms it shouldn’t. They say only hot flashes, vaginal dryness, and night sweats can be strongly linked to menopause. Everything else can be blamed on aging in general, which means the primary treatment wouldn’t be hormones.
- They are still convinced by the Women’s Health Initiative Study, which found an association between estrogen and progesterone and cancer.
- They cite an early estrogen study called Kronos Early Estrogen Prevention Study (KEEPS), which found that there was no real benefit for the the 211 women who received estrogen patches and micronized progresterone for heart health, cognition, or depression. The study was too small to find harm either.
In summary, they say that symptoms of menopause (that we can blame on menopause alone) don’t require HRT that hasn’t been proven to be safe. And since newer forms of estrogen and progesterone haven’t been proven safe, the answer isn’t to open the door to allow anyone to try it.
Here is the link to their editorial from the American Academy of Family Physicians.
What is my conclusion?
I don’t have one yet. I don’t prescribe and I don’t advise when it comes to pharmaceuticals. That said, this is a common topic of conversation, or it will be soon for many of patients. So I wanted to provide a brief overview of the conversation’s shape and a few resources to help you sort your own opinion.
Why BMI doesn’t tell the whole story, and why visceral fat is bad, except for when its not
Imagine two people with an identical BMI. Let’s say they are about the same height, about the same weight, and even have about the same percentage of body fat.
And let’s sat that the BMI is probably larger than it should be.
Can we say they are going to have similar metabolic health?
Nope, not at all. And the reason is that there is more than one kind of fat: there is visceral fat and subcutaneous fat.
The difference between the two kinds of fat
Subcutaneous fat is what you can pinch and what you can feel under your skin. It’s what most people think of when they think of fat.
Visceral fat can’t be pinched or grabbed, because it’s deep inside the belly. It’s surrounding our vital organs like the liver, stomach, and the intestines. And visceral fat behaves a little bit differently than subcutaneous fat. If you take two people with a larger BMI, and one has much more visceral fat, then the person with more visceral fat could be more at risk, in terms of probability.
Why?
A new study of over 800 adults showed that visceral fat is found with 221 circulating proteins, and 62% of those proteins are associated with inflammatory signaling.
(By the way, visceral fat is sometimes called visceral adipose tissue (VAT) in studies.)
Here are some take-aways from the study:
- Visceral fat may be an important driver of chronic low-grade inflammation.
- Traditional metabolic measurements don’t directly measure the inflammatory activity associated with VAT.
- Two individuals with similar BMI measurements can have very different amounts of visceral fat and different health profiles due to the effect of VAT on the heart, liver, pancreas and other organs.
So, to break it down a little bit….A slightly overweight person with more visceral fat may be less metabolically healthy than someone with more subcutaneous fat.
And someone with a poor metabolic profile may actually get healthier if they target visceral fat, but don’t lost much fat overall.
Do we need any visceral fat?
Yes, visceral fat is actually critical to body. Like many organ systems, it can be both helpful and harmful depending if its in balance or not.
Here are the good things that our visceral fat does:
- It provides mechanical protection of our internal organs
- It’s part of our immune system, particularly around the intestinal system
- It’s part of long-term energy storage and energy for our organs in extreme situations
- It’s a normal part of our hormone signaling system
It’s only when visceral fat grows beyond its normal function that we see metabolic problems and see it primarily as an organ driving inflammation and disease.
This study suggests that when visceral fat is reduced the effects of inflammation are reduced, mediated through the 221 VAT associated proteins.
Anyone looking to reduce inflammation and improve metabolic health should be targeting visceral fat with their exercise and weight loss strategy.
- November Newsletter 2026 – Resources - November 8, 2026
- A child with a neck problem without pain? Pediatric case study in posture and head awareness - November 5, 2026
- October Newsletter 2026 – Resources - October 7, 2026
