Chiropractic and head injury

Ask the Chiropractor- Have you had a head injury or concussion?  Did you know you can not have a concussion with out a neck injury?  Is it safe to go to the chiropractor afterwards?  Take a listen, going to the chiropractor might be your best choice.  #healthy815

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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- Hello, welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor here, in Rockford, Illinois. I've been in practice for nearly 20 years. It's a third generation chiropractic clinic. We are graduates of Palmer College and what it comes down to is a lot of people have questions about chiropractic, and they're not sure who to ask. And often when you see a new special about chiropractic that often tells you to check with your family doctor before you go and I'm here to tell you that your family doctor doesn't really know what chiropractors do. So I always say, if you have a question for a chiropractor, ask a chiropractor. If you have a question about your teeth, ask a dentist. If you have a question about your feet, ask a podiatrist. So make sure that you always find the right doctor to ask the right questions. And so here, people ask us questions and I come on here and try to answer 'em for you. So you get answers straight from a chiropractor. With that being said, recently we had somebody ask us,"Hey, I recently fell."I had a concussion and a head injury,"and I wanna know if it's okay"to go to the chiropractor afterwards." And the answer is yes, it's definitely okay to go to the chiropractor afterwards. One of the most important things that people fail to realize is that you cannot have concussion or a head injury without a neck injury. It's impossible to whip your head back and forth and not affect your neck. So when you fall and you have concussion or you, when you have a head injury of any type, there's definitely neck involvement. And as long as part of you is not working right, none of you is working right. So the neck is not repaired. The neck is not addressed. It's almost like it takes that much longer to heal from everything else. Let's talk about the brain for a second. The brain sits in like on a hammock system they're called, of different things inside your skull. So it's basically floating in spinal fluid and it's on like on a suspension bridge being held in place. And what happens is when you have a head injury or concussion, you whip forward, you whip backwards, and you whip side to side but basically the brain then shifting and go side to side or front to back. And it can be hit in the inside of the cranial, the skull. This is how concussions happen. The brain hits the skull when you fall real violently or get hit violently. So as a chiropractor what I know is that when these violent actions occur that the neck has to be whipped around. So when we take a look at you, we look at your spine and we look at the C5, C6, typically. These are those spots that's typically in whiplash. Now the C5, C6 is very important.'Cause that's where an artery goes into the neck. It supplies the base of your brain with blood. So if you have a head injury or a brain injury and you need to have it heal, one of the most important things to do is get the blood up there. So as a chiropractor will adjust your C5, C6 area and see if there's any situations there that could be affecting blood flow. Now the second most important spot for the blood flow are the top two bones in your neck, your C1 and your C2. Should these become misaligned, you'll have bloodflow issues but there's also a couple other bigger issues here. These ones can also hit the bottom of your brain stem. Your brain stem kind of, sorta is in charge of your coordination. So the nerves come up to your brainstem and your brainstem to your brain. Your brain back to your brainstem, your brainstem back down. So if you have a head injury and we've hurt the C1 and C2 area, it could definitely affect the way you heal, the way you perceive where you are and the extra stress going on down to your system. Not only that, but your brain is suspended in fluid, I said. This fluid is called spinal fluid. And we find a lot of times concussions and head injuries, that the channels that help the spinal fluid flow in and out of the head, up and down the spine, can often get damaged during a head injury. And often the spinal fluid flow is interrupted. When the spinal fluid flow is interrupted, what happens is the spinal fluid's not flushing itself in and out. Once it was thought the spinal fluid's simply just water the brain sits in. But in reality, it actually has a big role in bringing in nutrition and the toxicity in and out of the brain area. So should your spinal fluid be altered, the ability to heal from a concussion becomes greatly, greatly more challenging. Maybe you've heard of CTE, the concussion stuff that the football players and hockey players are getting. I got the opportunity to work with Dr. Scott Rosa. Dr. Scott Rosa would get a little bit of fame because he's the one that helped 1985 Chicago Bears Quarterback, Jim McMahon go back to being Jim McMahon. Jim McMahon had seen several head injuries in his playing career. And as a Bear fan, I'll tell you a lot of them came from Charles Martin's cheap shot at Jim McMahon, back in the, I think it was the 86 season when he hit him head first into the AstroTurf. Well, these kinda injuries added up on Jim McMahon after a while. And he started having some of these symptoms that you hear so many of these players talk about where they can't remember where they live, they can't remember the people they live with. They had these horrible headaches and Dr. Scott Rosa was able to help Jim McMahon. He found out the first two bones in his neck were rotated and they were altering the spinal fluid flow. So I've had the unique opportunity to work with Dr. Scott Rosa,'cause of my connections with the Rockford IceHogs. He sought me out to meet one of the players he thought he could help. And so Dr. Rosa and I talked a lot about how the spinal fluid flow works and he showed me some points and trigger points in the back of your skull to do a little, what we call cranial adjustment on to help flush your spinal fluid. So I've had people come in with really bad headaches and or concussions and we were able to do this and help them get better in no time flat. Another thing we found out is that when the brain goes back and forth like this, it can really damage those top two bones in the neck. And there's another chiropractor that got famous 'cause he was able to help Sidney Crosby. Again, we're talking hockey, but Sidney Crosby is LeBron James of hockey, right? He's not Wayne Gretzky, but LeBron is a Michael Jordan but he is a very, very talented player. Sidney Crosby had missed 18 months'cause of concussion stuff and nobody was able to help him. And they had actually started writing articles about the greatest guy that never quite made it. But he was able to go see Dr. Ted Carrick and Dr. Ted Carrick has these weird things that he does where he watches your eye patterns and other things. And he was able to track some neurological things the hockey player that he was able to give him adjustments. Well, the good thing about being the team chiropractor for an AHL hockey team is sometimes these guys also get concussions. This is not a good thing. I don't want them to concussions but when they do get concussions, they have the same agents as some of these famous players. And I go to a lot of these sports seminars, sports conferences, 'cause I'm part of the Pro Hockey Player Chiropractic Society and a proud member of the International Chiropractor Association. And once a year we get together and we have a huge sports conference. We were able to have Dr. Carrick come speak and because of the fact that he took care of one of my guys in the off season for concussion injuries, we were able to sit down and discuss what we can do to help 'em. So if you have a injury, not only do I get to work with Scott Rosa, who's one of the top chiropractors to help Jim McMahon, but I've also got to meet Dr. Ted Carrick several times. And he's the one that helped so many hockey players and football players so they can get back on the field and on the ice. So we're able to use the knowledge I've acquired from two of the top concussion, excuse me, concussion doctors in the world. I was gonna say concussion chiropractors. But in reality, these two chiropractors are leading the charge for almost all head injuries. And they're doing amazing, amazing things. A matter of fact, Dr Ted Carrick is now at Harvard University working on brain injuries. The Harvard University, the one in Boston, Massachusetts. He has worked at chiropractor colleges before, but they saw his work, Harvard had to bring him on, so. They might not tell everybody he's a chiropractor at first, but he is a chiropractor. He adjusts just like I do. It's just his method of fighting the problem is a little bit more advanced but now he's helped me learn part of that. So not, I would never say I can do all of his care but I can do part of it. So in this office, when you come in Rockford, Illinois and you have concussion, what we do is we often work with a doctor down the street, Dr Raju and he does a really good concussion testing. He's able to evaluate it when you can go back to work or back to sports or back to activity. So he takes care of the testing. I take care of the care. So we have a good partnership where we partner up with the guys down the road from us in order to make your situation the best possible. We also have different recommendations we do when it comes to like turning the TV off and avoiding this, avoiding that. We go over that all with you while you're in the healing process. So if you feel you've had a head injury and you wanna know if it's safe to go to the chiropractor, in reality, it's probably one of the best places you can go as far as getting the care. Today, we actually have hands on care things we do, it's not just sit and wait. Often, when you have concussion, doctor will say,"Well, let's just have you rest and come back"and we'll see how you're doing." And where that works sometimes, but some of the more extreme cases this does not work anymore. This is why we like to go ahead and start the care right away. Other thing that we do for our athletes, for the people who are playing contact sports or sports where there's possible concussions is we often take x-rays before the season starts so we have a baseline. The concussion's bad but going back to sports prior to the concussion is really bad. So we have a baseline x-ray or baseline image of what you're supposed to look like when you're healthy. This is a great, great tool for us to know when it's safe to go back. A lot of people know hockey and football and most sports 'cause concussions. A lot of us know that. Lacrosse and stuff like that cause of the collisions but a lot of people are surprised to learn that the sport with the most concussions, the most frequent concussions is actually girls soccer.'Cause they run into each other. They headbutt the ball and stuff like that. And those things add up. So don't think just because they're not actually like tackling each other, sliding into the glass walls in hockey, that they're safe from concussions'cause every sport can happen. Or for me, they happen just 'cause of the guys down the street from me, growing up I used to monkey around like that. I was more likely to get hurt from them than I ever was on the football field. So it could happen anywhere at any time. Like I said, even just falling down the stairs. So having that baseline x-ray is huge. It's safe that you're over it when we compare the x-rays and see where you are compared to where you were. So if you have any injury questions about any type of injury or anything else that chiropractors may or may not be involved with, go ahead and ask. I'm sure a lot of you had no idea that chiropractors are leading the charge of concussion care. And I'm really proud of that. So if we could help you with a head injury or any other type of injury, let us know. Talk to the chiropractor about it. Don't talk to anybody else. The chiropractor is the expert of chiropractic. The dentist is the expert on the teeth. So if you have a question about your teeth ask the dentist, don't ask the chiropractor about your teeth, ask the dentist. All right. So Dr. Brent Hulsebus, chiropractor here at Rockford, Illinois, Ask the Chiropractor. If you have a question that you'd like to see us answer and maybe that you've wondered about, go ahead and leave a comment below, send us an email go to RockfordDC.com and hit send us a message. And maybe next time when I'm doing this video, this podcast I'll be talking about your question. Other than that have great day, stay safe and like I said, I'll ask the chiropractor. Bye bye.