Body Works Clinic

08/06/2026

Dr. Demel will be out of the office from Friday August 7th through Tuesday, August 11th. Regular massage hours will be available during that time frame and staff will be present on Monday to take care of administrative duties. In the meantime, you can continue to use the online schedule on the front page of the website, as well as message at our regular phone number or email at [email protected]. Office communications will be monitored on Friday and Tuesday even when staff is not present in the office. We look forward to seeing you in the middle of next week again.

08/03/2026

CHRONIC PAIN, CHIROPRACTIC AND THE BRAIN, PART 4: HANDS-ON APPROACH

In this final installment of the series on chronic pain, I want to cover some of the modifications of hands-on manual therapy that may best address the unique central nervous system dysfunction associated with chronic pain. What may work for a more immediate issue, or episodically relapsing, with more of a peripheral and less of the central nervous system involvement may really backfire in chronic pain.

Since one of the hallmarks of chronic pain is the fact that pain signal is becoming very "efficient" and amplified and multiple points along the relay from the site of injury and the periphery through the spinal cord, and the sensory cortex, including all of the other branching off to other parts of the brain, manual therapy should avoid amplifying and that efficient pain transmission any further.

A fairly natural and instinctive reflex of people with chronic pain is to "dig deep" into the areas affected. If the sensory transmission loops in the sensory cortex perception of sensory transmission are working normally, that approach is going to be successful. However...
https://www.bwclinic.com/blog/2026/8/2/chronic-pain-chiropractic-and-the-brain-part-4-hands-on-approach

07/18/2026

CHIROPRACTIC, CHRONIC PAIN AND THE BRAIN PART 3: new strategies for the brain

In this section I would like to review some important concepts on how we treat chronic pain differently than acute pain, with the understanding that this is a vast complex and evolving field, and we will only be able to touch on the surface in this blog entry. In this section I will focus on how we understand the brain's reaction to chronic pain, while focusing on how we need to modify body care approaches in the following section.

In section 2 we discussed how chronic pain is transmitted differently and more "efficiently" to the brain, with much more signal ramification into other parts of the brain as well. Meaning that chronic pain can be triggered with minimal sensory input, and is more perpetuated and activated at the level of the brain itself by other functions and parts of the brain. As a result, you really need to think about how well all of your brain is functioning when you're trying to manage chronic pain.

Brain nutrition and biochemistry: this is often overlooked in chronic pain.
https://www.bwclinic.com/blog/2026/7/18/chiropractic-chronic-pain-and-the-brain-part-3-new-strategies-for-the-brain

06/29/2026

CAN THE LOW BACK CAUSE ABDOMINAL PAIN ?

It's a question that has been posed to me on a couple of occasions. Obviously, abdominal pain can have many pain generating structures, and internal abdominal organs are going to be the primary source of pain. However, I have had many a case over my 30 years in practice where a patient came in with persistent vague lower abdominal discomfort that felt really deep, and had had a battery of tests from ultrasounds, endoscopies, colonoscopies, and a boatload of labs, without any explanation for the continued symptoms. In the process of working up the patient for some other symptoms (lower back with thoracic pain most commonly), the patient reports a substantial improvement in their long-standing abdominal pain when starting chiropractic care.

https://www.bwclinic.com/blog/2024/6/20/can-the-low-back-cause-abdominal-pain-?rq=ABDOMINAL
An older and wiser colleague who mentored me in my early career once said: "there is as much lumbar spine in the front as there is in the back". The point was that the posterior aspect of the lumbar spine gets the lion's share of attention, since the posterior structures such as the facet joints, and the posterior margin of the lumbar discs, have a higher density of fine discriminating pain sensors, and all the spinal nerves which exit posterior to the center of the vertebral body can basically only be compressed in the posterior half of the lumbar spine. However, this is not to say that anterior lumbar pain generating structures do not exist or that they are rare. Anterior lumbar disc herniations are clearly seen on MRIs. They do not often get the attention they deserve,

https://www.bwclinic.com/blog/2024/6/20/can-the-low-back-cause-abdominal-pain-?rq=ABDOMINAL

06/28/2026

CHRONIC PAIN, CHIROPRACTIC and THE BRAIN, PART 2: why and how

In this brief section I want to further expand on some of the mechanisms by which chronic pain develops from acute pain, and why it may do so.
– Acute pain is usually described as new onset pain that results within 6 weeks, while chronic pain is pain that is persistent 12 weeks after an initial insult or trauma. So chronic pain normally starts becoming chronic pain anywhere between 6 and 12 weeks.
– Acute pain transmission to the brain is pretty energy consuming, so if the brain senses the need to continually experience pain signaling for self protection, it will switch to a more efficient and less metabolically demanding way of doing so. The type of chronic pain fibers are often referred to as "C fibers", which has less myelin, transmit pain signal more slowly, but also more efficiently. C pain fibers are also known to sprout more side connecting branches to other parts of the nervous system in the spinal cord, and at the level of the brain.
– Chronic pain signaling is happening increasingly less in the periphery, at the site of the original insult, and more so at the level of the central nervous system, especially starting to give side branches into other brain centers that manage sleep, mood, autonomic regulation, and thus becomes increasingly independent from the original injury, almost taking a circuitry and a life of its own over time. The chronic pain becomes more "efficient" in the sense that it takes less signaling for the body to experience the warning signal. It had an evolutionary benefit in making us aware more easily that a previously injured area is at risk of reinjury for the sake of self protection, but in our modern times, means that the pain is more easily triggered with a very minimal threshold, which is no longer an evolutionary advantage.

– The circuitry and neuronal hardware of chronic pain take some time to build up, and unfortunately can also take some time to takedown. Which is why chronic pain is often persistent when all the apparent active triggers may have been resolved.

https://www.bwclinic.com/blog/2026/6/27/chronic-pain-chiropractic-in-the-brain-part-2-why-and-how

06/21/2026

CHRONIC PAIN, THE BRAIN AND CHIROPRACTIC ( part 1)

While our stated goal is to help people optimize the health potential through our chiropractic invention, the reality is that the majority of people will seek care with their primary focus on addressing pain. Pain is the human experience that is as old as human themselves, and it is a complex topic to put it mildly.

The series is intended to talk about the even more complex subset of chronic pain. Acute onset new trauma related pain is quite different than ongoing chronic pain, from a neurological and physiological perspective. As a result, we need to apply different concepts on addressing chronic pain and acute pain, and quite a bit of the frustration in dealing with chronic pain is that we are trying to apply concepts of acute pain management to a completely different clinical presentation.

1st you need to understand that pain is a brain phenomenon, whether acute or chronic. But the ways in which pain registers in the brain are quite different.

Acute pain: it is mediated through a set of nerves that are large, highly coated in myelin which makes them fast, they have few relay points between the periphery in the brain, and they do not send side branches. As a result, it's pretty much a 1:1 connection between the body insult and the landing place in the central part of the brain cortex. It fires out fast and it turns off equally fast if the periphery receptor is not being activated. To some extent, that's what most people think of as pain, and it's a bit more of an uncomplicated system.

Chronic pain: it looks different neurologically and biochemically.

https://www.bwclinic.com/blog/2026/6/21/chronic-pain-the-brain-and-chiropractic-part-1

06/08/2026

Not immediately a topic of discussion within a chiropractic practice, the subject of environmental toxicity and more specifically micro plastics toxicity will often hover on the periphery, as all chemical burden on the body will increase systemic inflammation and at some point, spillover into the know musculoskeletal system, especially chronic pain. It is definitely a topic for many questions from patients with whom were working on hormone balancing, which in most cases, involves as much hormone detoxification support is it does hormone and enhancing support.

As with all things environmental, the proverbial "deer in the headlights look" seems to be the 1st reaction to the topic, as the idea of how, where, and when to start tackling reducing exposure can feel overwhelming. This 30 minute podcast is a great starting point to start understanding the issues, and more importantly, understanding some relatively straightforward 1st step you can take in starting to reduce your exposure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg6151sABPk

05/18/2026

MAY 18TH UPDATE
The new online scheduling link is up and running:
https://scheduler.chirofusionlive.com/bodyworksclinicfionaefletcherdcltd
Appointment reminders are going out via text and email from our new EHR.
The text messaging system is still down while we wait for our phone number to be reassigned, anticipating restart on Wednesday

05/15/2026

FRIDAY MAY 15TH UPDATE: DUE TO DATA MIGRATION LONGER THAN EXPECTED, THE ONLINE SCHEDULING LINK RESTART HAS BEEN MOVED TO MONDAY MAY 18TH

The office messaging and online scheduling system is transitioning to a new platform starting 6 PM Wednesday May 13th. Both functions will be disabled at that time. Existing appointments scheduled on the old platform will be migrated to the new platform. You will receive a text signaling the messaging function has been restored in the next 5 days. The online scheduling is expecting to resume no later than midday on Monday, updates will be posted on www.bwclinic.com front page with the new scheduling link. We appreciate your patience during the transition. In the meantime you can continue to communicate with the office by CALLING 507 263 2393 or emailing [email protected]

The Body Works Clinic has been serving the health and wellness needs in Cannon Falls, Minnesota since 1994. Our mission is to offer healthcare needs using a variety of tools, including specific chiropractic care, support of soft tissue therapy, acupuncture therapy, and integrative nutrition.

05/14/2026

The office messaging and online scheduling system is transitioning to a new platform starting 6 PM Wednesday May 13th. Both functions will be disabled at that time. Existing appointments scheduled on the old platform will be migrated to the new platform. You will receive a text signaling the messaging function has been restored in the next 5 days. The online scheduling is expecting to resume no later than midday on Friday, updates will be posted on www.bwclinic.com front page with the new scheduling link. We appreciate your patience during the transition. In the meantime you can continue to communicate with the office by CALLING 507 263 2393 or emailing [email protected].