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Daniel Williams, DO, offers osteopathic manipulation, acupuncture, and regenerative prolotherapy treatments in northern Indianapolis and Carmel, IN.

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Dr. Williams

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Dr. Williams

HEALING A SPORTS INJURY NATURALLY | ASK DR DAN  

So let’s take a little bit of time today to talk about how to rehabilitate sports injuries. Whenever you get an injury, often times conventional wisdom tells us to do R.I.C.E. – rest, ice, compression, and elevation. And I’m sure you’ve heard this somewhere along the line. But let’s talk a little bit about where that came from.

 

The concept of R.I.C.E. came from actually trying to actively return athletes to play. So in sports medicine, one of the goals often times, not always but often times, and in the research, is how do we get that athlete back to play. There tends to be less emphasis on long term consequences and long term rehabilitation.

 

So while R.I.C.E. are all beneficial in reducing pain, sometimes they don’t give us the best outcomes long term because injuries need rehabilitation. Let’s talk a little bit about why that is.

 

When you damage muscles, tendons, ligaments, they tend to be very slow to heal. The reason being is that they have low blood supply. And remember that your blood is really a big part of how you heal in your body. If you cut your skin, if you get a paper cut, it bleeds, platelets come in, they form a clot, and that is what starts that healing process in the body. When we don’t have a good vascular supply, we don’t heal as well. So often times these tendons, ligaments, muscle injuries take quite a long time to heal.

 

But there is several things we can do. First is those initial stages of inflammation can be healthy. Now, they can also be overdone and occasionally we do need to suppress them. But for the most part, that initial inflammation in the first 48-72 hours is often beneficial. So then what we want to do is let that inflammation take place. It’s uncomfortable, and I know it, but that is your body’s initial response to that injury.

 

After that, what I like to do is even during that initial stage is some very, very gentle osteopathic manipulation. The focus on manipulation at this stage isn’t on getting the bones back into place, it’s actually on restoring the proper function of the tissues.

 

We have a video on breathing, where we talk about how all the tissue planes in the body need to move with respiration. So at the very basic level, often times that’s one of the first things I’m looking for at this initial stage of rehab is just getting the tissues unfrozen and getting them moving again. So typically I’m not popping joints or doing anything aggressive like that. It’s usually a very light touch focused on restoring those tissues so that all of those inflammatory products that are there to heal can drain properly.

 

Because what happens is we have an influx of all of the healing properties of your body. All of the blood products, all of this inflammatory cascade, and all of that starts coming into the injured area. Yes, the area swells up, it hurts, it gets stiff and it’s sore, and that is beneficial, and we want that to take place. But we also don’t want it to become a stagnant swamp of inflammatory products.

 

At that point, now we’re hurting without getting any benefit. So it’s not that we just want all of this inflammation to come into the area, we also want to make sure that it can drain.

 

We also want to make sure the area can move because remember, with every breath that you take all of the tissues in your body are moving. And that performs a pump-like action to help drain out and flush out those inflammatory products. So we want to not just let that inflammation take place, we want to drain the area.

 

As that process unfolds, sometimes patients are having a fair amount of pain and discomfort and it can be quite uncomfortable, especially if we’re not taking things like Advil and Motrin. Acupuncture can play a big role in helping to manage pain.

 

We know from research that acupuncture plays an effect on increasing blood flow, we know that it alters the tissue planes, it helps the area to drain, it gets those inflammatory products out when they’re done causing their beneficial effect before they start to build up and actually make things worse, but it also changes the chemicals in our brain, and it helps us with our pain modulation. So a lot of benefit from acupuncture in this process.

 

As we go through the process, sometimes we just simply don’t have enough blood flow to get good rehabilitation in the area. At that point we need to look at going into something like prolotherapy and PRP. We have several videos on those.

 

Basically what that is is we augment the inflammation because remember, as we age, with our diet, with our lifestyle, with many things our inflammatory response, often times we have some bad inflammation that gets overplayed, we have too much of it, and then the good inflammation, the healing inflammation, ends up being suppressed and inadequate. So we need to suppress the bad inflammation and we need to augment the good inflammation. And we do that with prolotherapy and PRP, depending upon the nature of the injury. And in those two procedures, we come in and we inject a substance into your body to augment your body’s own, natural inflammatory response to help the tissues to heal.

 

Now, just doing those regenerative injections, like prolotherapy or PRP, often times isn’t sufficient. It is beneficial, but we need to continue with the manipulation, sometimes with the acupuncture in order to get an ideal response. Because again, just fixing the ligament if the tissues are still stuck doesn’t provide much benefit.

 

In fact, you may have heard about people who’ve had prolotherapy or PRP and not only did the tissues flare up but they got worse and it stayed worse for a period of time. Often times, it’s because we didn’t have adequate preparation in that area for the body to properly deal with the inflammatory response that was created with the injection. That’s how we start to use acupuncture, manipulation, and the injections together.

 

Another key part of that is we also have to look at the total health of the individual because all of these treatments are based on the idea that your body has the ability to heal itself. My job as a physician is to help augment that process.

 

That process should be able to take care of most things. It’s our diet, it’s our lifestyle, it’s the traumatic events that aren’t properly rehabilitated that really get into the way. So we want to find those barriers to health and help you remove them.

 

And so looking at things like hormone levels, at your sleep, at your stress, at your diet, all of those play an important role in making sure that your body has the resources that it needs in order to mount a good, healing, therapeutic response.

 

So my approach to rehabbing injuries focuses on all of these things. It focuses on your total health. If you’re not healthy, then you’re not going to have good resources to recruit to allow this healing to take place.

 

It requires manipulation, we need to make sure that the tissues are functional and are moving. Acupuncture can often times play a key role in helping us get the tissue planes moving, but also in modulating pain, helping to balance hormone levels, etc.

 

And then at times we need the regenerative injections which come in and boost your body’s own healing response in order to get the full stability that we want.

 

sually then we cap all of that off with a good rehabilitative effect, work with some key physical therapists in the local area or for patients that travel from out of town or out of state or even out of the country at times, for you we help find somebody in your local area, but we have to get corrective exercises because often times many patients that come to me, the problem’s been there for a long time so that problem is now hardwired into the neurology of your brain and how you move. We need to undo that, and there’s a lot of consequences to that and I’m not really doing that justice in that explanation, but that is just another thing to keep in mind.

 

So all of these things are important to help you non-surgically manage musculoskeletal injuries. I hope this information was helpful.

ACUPUNCTURE FOR KNEE PAIN? | Ask Dr Dan  

I’m often asked what about acupuncture and knee pain.

 

So in Chinese medicine, you have to remember where Chinese medicine came from. It came from an agrarian society several millennia ago and everything related back to nature. And everything was connected. And so they looked for patterns.

 

When we talk about the knee in Chinese medicine, that tends to be associated with the kidney. Now again, just because you have knee pain doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with your kidney from a medical perspective, but from a Chinese perspective the kidney was related to the knee.

 

Here’s what’s interesting, the way that we tend to push and drive ourselves today. We live in a very driven world, we live in a world where we’re on 24-7, we have our smartphones, we’re looking at videos, we’re on Facebook, we’re on YouTube, we’re constantly answering emails, that depletes our battery. That depletes our kidney.

 

In Chinese medicine, that kidney is kind of our root, it’s our base. And we deplete it. But the interesting thing is that’s part of what nurtures our knee in the Chinese thought process. And so what happens is the more we deplete our kidney, the more prone we are to actually damaging the knee.

 

So if you’re one of those really driven people that you work too much, you don’t sleep enough, you don’t get rest, maybe you’re like me, you have some premature graying in the hair, all of these can be signs of kidney deficiency. And so what can happen is now you start to weaken those tissues around the knee and you make yourself more prone to knee injuries.

 

So that’s one way in which people might use acupuncture to try to avoid injury and damage to the knee.

ARTHRITIS AND PROLOTHERAPY? | ASK DR DAN  

I want to talk to you today a little bit about some treatments for arthritis. Arthritis is all over in our country. Many patients suffer from it and it can be quite disabling.

 

It’s not uncommon that as we go through childhood, college, and adulthood, as we get minor aches and pains, as we get little twists and strains in our body, often times what happens is we don’t get complete healing. But in addition to that, we never restore the biomechanics.

 

And what does that mean? Well, biomechanics is like when you used to play with tinker toys or legos, you put them together in a very specific way to gain stability and structure.

 

So what happens is whenever we damage our joints, and this can be from things like sprained ankles, from strained knees, strained backs, whiplash injuries from car accidents, throwing injuries from baseball or other throwing sports, what happens is we disrupt those biomechanics. We change the proper function of the joint.

 

Over time, that alteration has to be compensated for somehow. As those ligaments get weak – think of ligaments as the rubber bands that hold the bones together – the bones move ever so slightly. So your muscles and tendons have to make up for that. So what happens is we start to get tendonitis problems, it sets us up for rotator cuff tears, and then eventually down the line, it sets us up for arthritis.

 

So when you’re thinking about natural treatment options or, even better, prevention, one of the good things you can do is to think about some of the regenerative medicine techniques. In particular, prolotherapy and PRP.

 

We’re going to have some videos coming out that are going to be discussing both those treatment options. They’re both very good.

 

I think you get a better response with both prolotherapy and or PRP when you combine it with other treatments such as functional medicine, osteopathic manipulation, acupuncture, and physical therapy.

 

So if you’re suffering from arthritis or know somebody who is, especially if it’s still earlier in moderate stages, then you might be a candidate for prolotherapy or PRP, which is also known as platelet rich plasma.

 

So take a look at our other videos to learn more about those and if we can help you find somebody in your local area or if we can be of service to you, give us a call 317-660-0888.

DEEP BREATHING | ASK DR DAN  

So patients often ask me about breathing. And often times they’ll ask ‘Well, in my yoga class, Pilates class, they talk a lot about breathing?’ and really, we could make a video blog about breathing that could be several hours long because there’s more and more research about breathing in terms of helping to manage stress, helping to balance your hormones and the chemicals in your brain, helping you to deal with pain, helping you to focus, helping you to sleep, helping depression and anxiety and so on.

 

But there’s one other aspect of breathing that I think is interesting to talk about and that is, what happens in your body when you breathe?

 

At a very basic level, we all know we take a breath in, air comes into our body, goes to the lungs, something happens there, we let the air out and the process repeats. And we could into how that works in a lot of detail and that would likely help you with your insomnia and put you to sleep rather quickly.

 

But rather than that, there’s actually something else that takes place when you breathe that’s quite important. You see, when you breathe, all the tissues in your body move to some extent. We see this motion on imaging.

 

When you have a CAT scan or an MRI, or even sometimes and x-ray, they’ll ask you to hold your breath. Now obviously, if we’re working around the lungs, it’s more obvious but we do see this motion in other parts of the body at times. Especially when we train our hands, we can feel this motion in the body: that the body’s tissues move and respond to respiration.

 

How is that relevant to me?

 

Everything in the body is connected. When we talk about osteopathic medicine, we say the body is a unit. And that means many different things but one of the things that it talks about is that everything in the body is connected. All of the tissue planes, all of the connective tissues, your muscles, your bones, everything is connected. Nothing can really be viewed in isolation.

 

So what happens when you breathe is not only is your chest going up and down and the air going in and out, all of the tissues of your body are actually responding to that breath. And so what happens is when you breathe, you’re actually causing motion throughout your entire body.

 

In fact, one of the things I sometimes look for in patients, in particular complicated patients who have maybe been to many practitioners and haven’t gotten the results they were seeking, is I often look for are the tissues responding to breathing.

 

Because when the tissues can’t respond to that very basic motion of breathing, that’s an area where I know we have some significant problems. And that’s usually a good place to start.

 

And so when you breathe, when you take those nice, big breaths, not only are you helping to oxygenate your blood, not only are you lowering your heart rate, lowering your blood pressure, helping manage your stress, helping to control depression and anxiety, but with each one of those breaths, you’re actually mobilizing every cell in your body. And so when you breathe, it really is motion. And it really is motion throughout your entire body.

 

Remember, when the tissues become stuck and rigid and not moving, that’s often times when we get pain. And so breathing is one of the simplest ways in order for you to increase your motion in your body.

 

And so what I encourage my patients to do is to practice deep breathing. Not only does it help control stress and all of the other great benefits, it also provides motion for your entire body.

LOWER BACK PAIN (CAUSES AND NATURAL TREATMENTS) | ASK DR DAN  

If you have low back pain, especially if it’s not radiating past the knee, what’s causing the pain?

 

Well see, when we think about pain, we want to think about all the different structures in the body that cause pain. That’s actually one of my fascinations and why I’m in this field is that there is many things in the body that cause pain other than just discs and nerves, although nerves are always involved to some extent. There is many structures that cause pain, and they tend to cause pain in very predictable patterns.

 

So for example, we can have the joints in the back where they don’t move quite right. When those joints get stuck and restricted, pain often times is the result. The muscles aren’t quite working right, many different things get out of whack, so to speak.

 

In these areas, things like manual medicine, finding a great osteopathic physician who knows osteopathic manipulation, perhaps a chiropractor, maybe even a massage therapist, a physical therapist who does manual medicine. For that type of pain, those types of treatments, can be very, very effective.

 

Also with that type of pain, there is also a fair amount of inflammation. Traditional medical care might have you put on an anti-inflammatory like Motrin, Advil, Naprosyn. Those can be effective as well. As can several different kinds of herbal remedies, like turmeric, kaparyst are some, just to name a few.

 

So there is still some other structures that are big culprits in low back pain. In addition to the joints not working, if you think about your body as having different bones that are then held together by rubber bands, or ligaments.

 

As those ligaments become strained over time, often times we don’t have our bodies in the best position to be able to heal. So what happens is when you strain those ligaments, they never heal right back up. And so what happens is over time, we start to lose a little bit of stability in the joint.

 

Since that joint is just a little bit loose, the muscles have to work harder in order to keep your back stable. That starts to lead to muscle pain. In addition, where muscles attach to bones, we have what are called tendons. As those muscles are working harder and pulling harder, we start pulling on our tendons and we start to get things like tendonitis or tendinosis.

 

And so that’s another big culprit in the cause of low back pain, is looking for these areas that are restricted. But then, they’re not just restricted, but they’re actually hypermobile, the back is moving too much, the muscles are having to work extra hard to stabilize it. And in those cases, treatments like platelet rich plasma (PRP) a very popular treatment, and prolotherapy, can be exceptionally effective. Especially if you find a competent provided who can help you with that.

 

Another great treatment for low back pain is acupuncture. Now, there’s a couple of different views on acupuncture. One is the more traditional model, which would say that classically would be described in the ancient Chinese texts as thinking about the human body as being composed of complex, inner moving streams of energy.

 

And when those streams and flow of energy becomes blocked, pain and disease are the result. So when those channels or meridians become blocked, pain is often times the result. So then the needles are placed at specific sites in the body and they open those blockages, allow that free low of energy, and then the pain dissipates. Now modern science tells us that with acupuncture, we have an increase in the body’s natural pain killers, or endorphins. That helps contribute to pain relief.

 

We also know that with current research in dry needling or trigger point treatment, for example, that the acupuncture needles also work to deactivate the pain generators inside the muscle.

 

Finally, we get to diet. When we talk about diet, we’re in a very pro-inflammatory diet in America. We’re eating a lot of gluten, we’re eating a lot of sugar, we’re eating a lot of dairy. These things lead to inappropriate inflammation. So in some cases, not all but certainly in some cases, a reduction in those can actually help increase your overall state of inflammation and actually help reduce your level of pain.

 

So, if you’re suffering from sciatica, what I would encourage you to do is to find an excellent osteopathic physician or a physician who really specializes in manual medicine who can look at you from the whole-person perspective, who can evaluate whether or not this pain is coming from a disc problem or a nerve problem that may need more aggressive treatment, or whether your pain is coming from one of these other very common causes that can be easily fixed without needing to resort to drugs or surgery.

NATURAL HEADACHE REMEDY (STOP THINKING) | ASK DR DAN  

Hi everybody, Dr. Dan Williams here with you and I’d like to take a couple of minutes to talk to you about how you can help your headaches. And I’m going to give you a piece of advice nobody has probably given you before about treating headaches, stop thinking.

 

That’s right, it can actually be that simple. Stop thinking.

 

I don’t know how many times I have patients that come into my office with a variety of health complaints that it literally becomes an obsession. They’re constantly on the internet, they’re constantly looking, they’re constantly asking people, they don’t know what to do.

 

We are so stressed out in America. We know that stress contributes greatly to headaches. So if you’re suffering from headaches, one of the simplest things that you can do is give yourself dedicated time, twice a day, take 5-10 minutes where you can lay down in a comfortable position. Ideally not to go to sleep, but just lay down, turn off the lights, and use a good mediation app. I like the Cleveland Clinic Stress app. We’re going to be coming out with a video on guided meditation as well. That’s a great way for you to lay down and get these muscles to relax. Turn your mind off. Change your processing of pain. And to help you feel better.

 

Not only will you treat your headaches, you’ll help any depression, anxiety, stress, and you’ll also go through your day with a sense of clarity. And it’ll help you actually be more productive at work.

 

So that’s a great easy tip of how you can treat your own headaches.

WHAT CAUSES ROTATOR CUFF INJURIES? | ASK DR DAN  

Rotator cuff injuries are quite common. In fact, chances are you know somebody or have one yourself. Think about how common shoulder pain is!

 

So a couple things set us up for rotator cuff injuries. The first is that we use our shoulders all the time, so it’s very easy to injure our shoulders. You know, we fall and catch our self, we’re in an accident, we sleep on it, we lift our children, grandchildren, carry the groceries, carry heavy objects, many things strain the rotator cuff. But even if we don’t strain the rotator cuff, many things can injure the ligaments, or the rubber bands that hold the bones together.

 

So what happens is when we strain the ligaments or rubber bands then that allows a little bit of joint play. It lets that joint be a little floppier than it should be. Now, as you know, we don’t walk around with floppy joints, so the muscles and the tendons have to make up for it. So what happens is those muscles and tendons put more tension on themselves.

 

Muscles get tight, we get trigger points, we get pain, but we also then start to set up those tendons and ligaments for injury. So the second factor that sets us up for rotator cuff injuries is that we have fairly poor blood supply to the rotator cuff, and that blood supply gets worse as we age. So now those injuries have minimal chance of healing on their own.

 

So what do you do about it? Many people try anti-inflammatories, steroid injections, physical therapy, and even surgery. The problem is is there is a fairly high failure rate for surgery for rotator cuff tears. So you say, “what are we supposed to do?”

 

Well first off, if we can catch things early, hopefully we can prevent it from even getting that far. But even if you have one, there is some new technology that can help us repair that shoulder. Typically, I like to do that with two things. Either prolotherapy or PRP (platelet rich plasma).

 

So in both of those injections, they’re a little bit different, we have other videos on that I encourage you to look at, but both of those treatments focus on helping your body go into that damaged tissue, repair the damage in the torn ligaments and tendons, and then helping your body repair that injury on its own. Sometimes, we do need to repeat the treatment a couple of times, 2, 3, 4 times, but we’re getting outstanding results with rotator cuff tears, labral tears, and other types of damage and injury to the shoulder.

 

So if you’re suffering from shoulder pain, I encourage you to seek out a physician that is trained in regenerative medicine, prolotherapy and PRP, osteopathic manipulation because again, those joints we want to make sure that they’re functional. When we’re going in there and trying to help your body help itself, we want to make sure that we’re setting you up for success.

 

And that means we want to take every advantage: osteopathic manipulation, functional medicine, nutritional medicine to make sure that your body has what it needs to come in for the repair process, and finally acupuncture can be very beneficial to help with trigger points, help with pain, and help expedite the healing.

 

So if you have rotator cuff problems and you’re wondering what to do about it, before you make your decision, I encourage you to explore the regenerative medicine field and look at prolotherapy and platelet rich plasma and see if they can be beneficial.

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of Dr. Williams

Excell for Life Family Care & Pediatrics  


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Please Note: This link will direct you to a third-party website unaffiliated with MD.com (https://www.excellforlife.com/new-patient-inquiries/), where you're able to request or schedule an appointment online with Dr. Dan Williams.

Accepting New Patients?

Yes, Dr. Dan Williams is accepting new patients at this office.


Fax

(317) 660-0880


Address

1329 W. 96th Street, Indianapolis, IN 46260-1190

Office Hours

  Open Lunch Close
Mon 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Tue 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Wed 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Thu 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Fri 12:00 - 1:00 pm

Office Details

Doctor Specialties Osteopathic Medicine & Pain Management & Family Medicine & Functional Medicine
Accepting New Patients? Yes
Practice Specialty Functional Medicine
Languages Spoken English

Insurance Accepted  


  • Medicare

About Dr. Williams
Dr. Williams

Bio


Dr. Daniel Williams, DO, is a board certified osteopathic physician, trained in medical acupuncture, functional medicine, prolotherapy (Hackett Hemwall Technique), platelet rich plasma therapy (PRP), and other regenerative medicine techniques. In 2017, he joined Excell for Life Family Care & Pediatrics, the largest and most experienced functional medicine clinic in Indiana providing holistic, functional, traditional, and goal-oriented healthcare.

In November of 2017, Dr. Dan was selected to join the American Osteopathic Association senior management team as the Vice President of Certifying Board Services.

Dr. Dan became fascinated with healing at an early age. He developed a passion for the holistic approach applied in ancient Chinese medicine. This would lead him to master integrated, lasting techniques for healing using natural and restorative medicine. Upon graduation, he began traveling internationally to apprentice and learn techniques from the most renowned holistic doctors in the world.

His approach today uses a variety of natural, hands-on treatments to three objectives: 1) support vibrant newborns 2) optimize the health of adult patients and 3) naturally alleviate pain and discomfort.

An astute and passionate practitioner, Dr. Dan has authored several board review products, and assisted with NIH-funded (National Institutes of Health) research about the effects of osteopathic manipulation on pain.

Remember that your body is designed to carry you comfortably, to function effortlessly, to be free from pain. Dr. Dan has made it his life's mission to unlock your body’s innate ability to do all of these things.

Specialties


Conditions Treated 


  • ACL tear
  • Arthritis Pain
  • Back Pain
  • Joint Pain
  • Knee Pain
  • Lower Back Pain
  • Migraines
  • Neck Pain
  • Plantar Fasciitis
  • Rheumatoid Arthritis
  • Rotator Cuff Injuries
  • Sciatica Pain
  • Shoulder Pain
  • Tennis and Golfer’s Elbow

Services & Procedures


  • Acupuncture
  • Osteopathic Manipulation
  • Pediatric Care
  • Prolotherapy
  • PRP (Platelets Rich Plasma) injections
  • PRP / Platelet Rich Plasma Injections
  • PRP Therapy (Platelet Rich Plasma)

Education & Training  


Medical School

  • Oklahoma College Of Osteopathic Medicine And Surgery
    MD • 2005


Languages Spoken  


  • English

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