Sleep and Chiropractic

Ask the Chiropractor- can Chiropractic care help with sleep issues?  Dr Hulsebus will break it down.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor

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- Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, chiropractor, coming today with another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is a little podcast that we do every week about a question that somebody might have about chiropractic. A lot of times people have questions about chiropractic care, not sure what to do about chiropractic care. And they're not really sure who to ask. Often, you'll see someone say, well ask your family doctor about chiropractic. Maybe your family doctor can answer some questions. And I would say the majority of family doctors have no idea what chiropractors do. So what I always recommend you do, if you have a question about chiropractic is ask a chiropractor and that's what this little podcast is all about. This is a question somebody asked me during the week or submitted online. So this week's question is chiropractic care and sleep. Someone emailed me, hey, Dr. Hulsebus, I heard that chiropractic adjustments can help me sleep better. I've had a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. And I don't feel like the quality of my sleep is very good. So the answer to this is actually kind of fun because usually when you come in for your first ever chiropractic adjustment, I usually tell you the side effect is most likely gonna be a good night's sleep. You see, when you spine's out of alignment, when you have issues going on, often we get stuck into a state what we call fight or flight or sympathetic nervous system. Your fight or flight's designed to protect you for an attack or danger. And when your body thinks you're under attack or in danger, it doesn't want to slow down or shut off. Therefore sleep is a challenge. When you get a chiropractic adjustment, the Ogura studies that were done show that we change the sympathetic tone or the way fight or flight behaves. A lot of times people either are stuck in fight or flight or the off switch to the fight and flight's not working right. When we give that chiropractic adjustment to probably the C1, C2 nerve and we effect what they call it, vagus nerve. Then what happens is the body can go into a state of ease or relaxation and you'll actually get a quality sleep. Now, what are some of the clues that maybe I need this adjustment?

One: headaches. Two: 2:12

problems focusing.

Three: 2:15

my neck's always stiff. Or maybe I don't sleep very good on Monday night or Tuesday night but Wednesday night I slept forever but I woke up still tired. Now what's happening there is that you're getting some sleep, some hours of sleep, but the quality of that sleep is not very good, meaning that you're tossing and turning all night. You don't have the ability to go into what they call deep sleep. When you go into deep sleep, or REM sleep, your body's actually repairing itself, healing itself, and allowing itself to build up the immune system and prepare for the next day. If you lack that, you tend to stay in a state of stress or catabolic state, and you start to wear down over time more and more and more. So when you get a good chiropractic adjustment to your upper neck, a lot of times what happens is you go home that night and you actually kind of feel lethargic or kind of lazy. That's all because that we finally hit that nerve is telling your body it's time to relax. See, I mentioned the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve, in Latin, vagus means wander. It wanders everywhere, generically speaking belly button up. And that nerve's job is to tell your body that danger has gone. It's not so much that it puts you in fight or flight. It kind of brings you out of fight or flight. So if you're stuck in fight and flight, you get the vagus nerve stimulated through a chiropractic adjustment which you've learned has happened. There's like I said, some of the studies from Ogura, it shows that the body goes into ease. And when you're in ease and you can actually relax, mellow down, calm down. And that's why a lot of people, too, when they get this adjustment, they see that their blood pressure goes down. Some of their lab work gets improve. It's because we're going from fight or flight back to ease. To me, it's always interesting in the rooms. I have a poster up about what the stress response is. So when you're under stress, this is what could happen to your body. One of them is high blood pressure. One of 'them is high blood sugar, inability to sleep, digestion problems. And to me, high cholesterol is even an issue. And to me, it's interesting when I watch these commercials about different pharmaceutical agencies and you see that one of them is for high blood pressure. Then it says, well, if you suffer from high blood pressure and high cholesterol, then look at this. If you suffer from high blood sugar problems, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, look at this. And in my mind, what I'm seeing is a real problem with the sympathetic tone and the fact that you're in fight or flight all the time and your body's producing these things. And that's what gets you there. And there's always ways to get you off of these medications. But I always say, you have to earn 'them. You can't just say, you know what, I don't want to do this medication anymore. I'm just gonna start doing this and this. No, you have to make dramatic lifestyle changes and you have to start doing certain things and stop doing other things. Some of these things might be, like I said, 30 minutes of exercise every day, it would be dramatic diet change. It would be the ability to maybe do some meditation or some yoga. It would be the ability to start making better choices and decreasing your overall stress, making some major posture changes. And of course, as chiropractors, I would tell you to get that vagus nerve adjustment, that would be like the jump start to stimulate the change in the growth. So if you're finding that you're one of these people and those are all things that are hitting home with you I'm describing, especially the sleep issue, come on in and get an adjustment. How do we know if you're a candidate for this or not? How do we know this is gonna happen? I told you a lot of patients, I x-ray them, give them their first adjustment and say you know what? I bet tonight you're gonna have crazy dreams and have a good night's sleep. Well, it's really, really easy for a chiropractor to detect this. All we have to do is look at that x-ray of your neck. When we see that x-ray of your neck, a lot of times what we'll have you do is go up against the board and we'll have you open your mouth really big. The reason we have you open your mouth really big is because your C1, C2 sit right behind your jaw. In order to see those, we have you open your mouth, tilt your head a little bit so we can shoot through and see what your C1 and C2 are doing. If we see a major misalignment going on there, the C1 bone, I always call the bow tie bone. It's got like two little big little triangle shaped things going in, trapezoid shapes going in. And what happens is when they rotate, one looks smaller, one looks bigger when they rotate left to right. And it spins like this. You can see that this shape and size. So when we look at the x-ray, we look at the size comparison of the two. And we know the larger one has rotated away and that the smaller one's rotating in. And that helps us to figure out which way to adjust you. We'll also see if it sits like this. If it's sitting like this, then we know there's a problem. But if we're sitting like this, so if it's sitting like this and it's rotated, we know there's an issue. If it's doing this, we know, it's an issue. But worse, if it's doing this and this, then we know is a really big issue. And those are the cases that we see that we get pretty excited about because we know there's a lot of stress building up there and a lot of issues with turning off the fight and flight. And we hope that by going up there and giving you a big adjustment there. that could almost be the start to a major change in major improvement of your health. And again, how do we know that? Well, usually the next day when I see you, you'll tell me, you slept really really good that night, or you had lots and lots of dreams.'Cause we only dream when we're in deep sleep. If we're not in deep sleep, you don't dream. So I don't care if you remember your dreams or what your dreams are about, but if you came in the next morning, like, man, I had a great night's sleep last night. I had all kinds of dreams. I woke up, I felt refreshed. Now I know that this patient's gonna have major lifestyle, major healthcare changes. And we can start talking about the ability to start working with your doctor to help get you off some medications if you're heavily medicated. We don't just do that blindly. We don't just take somebody off of medication. That's ask the chiropractor about chiropractic, ask the medical doctor about medicine. But we are able to help you earn the right to start asking about getting off medications. A lot of times patients will come to me and tell me I don't want to take this cholesterol medication. I go, okay. So what are you gonna do different? Nothing. I just don't want to do it. I'm like, no, you know, can't just say nothing. You have to do something different, whether it's chiropractic care, whether it's supplementation, whether it's diet change or whether it's exercise change, hopefully all the above. And then you'll actually make a change and earn the right to get off those things. So again, number one clue that you're maybe going down the road of bad health. And if you're younger, it's a really big clue. There's the fact that you can't sleep or the fact that you're always tired. That could be a major indication that you're in the state of stress or fight or flight or you have the inability to turn the fight and flight off. Great reason to come in and see a chiropractor. And this office, like I said, will take a quick x-ray of your neck. We'll see if you're a candidate. If you're a candidate, we'll start care. Once the care and how many times you have to come, how often do I have to go? I don't know until I see your x-rays and see how you respond. All right. Well, I hope that answers your questions, everybody, about chiropractic and whether it can help us sleep. It's definitely one of the first things that we see that happens really, really fast usually. So I hope I answered your question. If you have a question for the chiropractor, just go ahead and leave a message below. Reach out to us at Rockford DC, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D D-C .com. And we'll we'll get back to your question. You can also go there to see all of our past episodes. We try to do this about once a week. Other than that, stay healthy, stay safe. And remember if you have a question about chiropractic, ask a chiropractor. If you have a question about your teeth, ask a dentist. All right, everybody. Thank you and ave fun.