Chiropractic FAQ.

Ask the Chiropractor-  this week we handle the most common questions.  I asked my staff "what do people ask for on the phone?"  So here are some of the most common questions we are asked.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor

www.rockforddc.com

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- Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask The Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast where people come on and they ask a question about chiropractic. And whenever you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I always recommend you ask a chiropractor. So don't ask your family doctor, don't ask a dentist, don't ask a podiatrist, don't ask a physical therapist, ask a chiropractor about chiropractic. And so, I'm a graduated of Palmer College of Chiropractic. I'm the official team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs and I'm a very active member of the International Chiropractic Association. So today, in Ask The Chiropractor, I'm gonna do a little bit different format today. Instead of me answering a question about chiropractic, I'm gonna try to address a thing I saw on the internet with a couple frequently asked questions about chiropractic. I'm gonna break them each down real quick, one by one. But if you want more in any one of these topics, if you go to our website rockforddc, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, and you head on the blogs and you search, you can find much more information on all of these topics where I talked about each one of them individually. But today, I'm gonna do a couple quick ones and I'm gonna try to answer these frequently asked questions about chiropractic. So if you know someone who's been thinking about going to chiropractic care, I might have a couple questions I'm gonna read them out. First one, what should I go to the chiropractor for? How do I know it's time for me to go to a chiropractor? Well, a lot of times, we don't know the answer to this 'cause a lot of times, I'll take someone's X-rays and we'll find out we should have met him a long time ago'cause they've got arthritic changes to their spine. But let me do the best I can to this answer. Basically, chiropractic's about how the spine moves, how the spine turns on, how the spine functions. So if you're starting to feel limitations on your range emotionally, I can look a lot really far to left or not so far the other way, that would be a reason to maybe go see a chiropractor. I think I do. A lot of times, I have people back up against the mirror. When they're against the mirror, I tell them to stand casual. I'll take a dry eraser marker and mark above each ear, each shoulder, each hip, and maybe in each arm pit, and if those lines are not straight across, then there's some twisting and turning in that spine. A lot of times too, if you're noticing that someone's gait or the way they walk or the way they step is starting to change, that could be clues that the spine is not moving biomechanically. But the number one reason why people come to see us, and unfortunately it's a sad answer but it's the real answer,"I tried everything else. I have a good friend that won't leave me alone. They really think I should come in and try the chiropractor." (chuckles) That's the real reason why most people first come in the first time. So I hope those are little clues that help to help you out more. And again, if you want more, we do the videos on this. Is chiropractic safe? Someone told me if I go to a chiropractor, they could turn my neck the wrong way and paralyze me, or chiropractic adjustments can cause a stroke and I'll have major problems. These are always funny to me because, I'll give you the simple, quickest answer. Is chiropractic safe? Chiropractors have the lowest malpractice insurance rates out of anybody. Nobody does more research to see if somebody's safe or not safe than an insurance company. Think about when you were 16 years old driving a car. You were high risk. You had high insurance rates. So if chiropractors cause lots of problems, if chiropractors were filing malpractice lawsuits all the time and injuring people and getting sued all the time, surely we would not have the lowest malpractice rates out of anybody, but chiropractors have the lowest malpractice rates out of anybody. Are you safe here? Absolutely. How do we know you're safe? When we do full exam, X-rays, and everything else that we can here in the office to make sure that you're safe and cleared. We also attend many, many, many, many years of college and get the professional training. So if you were coming in and you were having a vascular compromise in your neck, most chiropractors would recognize that and they would not proceed with care until you were checked out. So are you safe at a chiropractic clinic? Yeah, chiropractic adjustment's pretty darn safe. Not everyone's perfect and not every chiropractor's good, not every dentist is good, not every family doctor's good, but for the most part chiropractors are safe. Again, our malpractice rates speak volumes for that. Next, can children benefit from chiropractic care? Absolutely. A lot of insurance companies have this crazy notion that kids can't hurt their backs, and all you have to do is go to YouTube and type in kids and wipeouts, or kids and crashes. And yet to remember back like when I was a kid, we had a half-pipe skateboard in our skateboard ramp in our front yard. It was 10 feet tall and 20 foot wide. It's a pretty good thing my dad's a chiropractor'cause we absolutely needed him. We would fall, wipe out all the time, or fall on our bicycles and crash our bikes, or fall off the treehouse or, you know. Not only that but, you know, I grew up next to three brothers so we were quite common to get some pretty heavy wrestling and matches. Not professional or organized wrestling matches, just a Saturday night boys being boys crazy wrestling matches. But the three brothers next door and a couple other two other guys down the street, that was real common. So you know, I always tease that most of my injuries, they didn't come from football, they came from playing with the guys on the street for me. So yeah, the kids, absolutely. Do we do things different with kids? Absolutely. Depending on how old and young they are, we change the way we take care of them. And I go to that great, great detail on another podcast so go ahead and take a listen to some other podcast if you have questions about chiropractic care for kids and some of the special training. Next question. How many times do I have to go for my condition to the chiropractor? We get people all the time to call us up and they say,"I have right side sciatica. Before I come in, I wanna know exactly how many times I'm coming." Call your dentist up some time and tell your dentist, say,"Hey, I've been brushing my teeth in three years. I wanna know how many times I have to come in for cleaning," They don't know until they see you and they examine you. And the same here is true for the chiropractor. If we take your X-rays and you have all kinds of generation arthritis and you're just so toxic in chemical, physical, and emotional stress, it's gonna take a ton to get you better. But if you come in and you're healthy, you exercise, and your spine looks nice and strong and healthy, your disc bases look good, there's no arthritis, you don't need as much care as somebody with a more degenerative changes. So how long does it come in? Well, that's something you need to look at your chiropractor. Not every patient should have the exact same care plan. They should be custom-tailored to you. If you find out that chiropractor is telling everyone the exact same thing, then I raise an eyebrow at that. It's pretty weird that every patient comes in needs the exact same amount of care. So as chiropractors, it's our job to look at your spine, see how you respond to care, see how much your body's receptive to the change, and then we have to come up with a care plan that meets your needs. So if you go to a chiropractor and everyone's the same, I'd raise an eyebrow at that. But if you come with a chiropractor and they make a unique care plan directly for you, then that's what it takes. And it's okay to have these conversations with the chiropractor. You know, we're also here to teach you the things that you can do to speed it up, right?"Do this stretch. Do this, don't do this. Do more of this. Don't sit too long. Do this and this and this." We'll give you clues to make it go faster. That's part of our job. Next question. What can chiropractors treat? What can chiropractors treat? Well, chiropractors only treat one thing. That's the cool thing, right? We treat the spine. When the spine's misaligned, our job is to free it up so you can go back to where it's supposed to be. It can heal, and the nerve energy can come back out the way it's supposed to. That's all we do. Just the spine, and let the spine take care of itself. So what do chiropractors treat? We treat one thing and one thing only, we call them subluxations. Spine's misaligned, stress is kicking out, the nerve carries that stress, goes to the body parts, body parts then go into a stress response. We give you adjustments, those things heal up. So we can treat the spine, we adjust the spine. We call it subluxations. Now subluxations clear up, what gets better? Anything that has a nerve going to it, if that's the problem. I'll talk about heartburn real quick. Two types of heartburn, right? The heartburn that maybe your T6 is misaligned and the nerve coming out your T6 going to your stomach isn't properly working. When you eat food, your body doesn't know how to properly digest it because of the stress coming from your T6 to your stomach. Therefore, you overproduce your stomach acid'cause your body's confused on how much to make'cause the nerve interference. We adjust that, get that back in, the catechol meets with the type four mechanical receptors stop coming out, the stress response going to the nerve goes away, and the heartburn clears up. That's a chiropractic case right there for you. We didn't treat the heartburn, we treat the problem at T6. However, if you go eat a double bacon cheeseburger with french fries with cheese on top of them and a large chocolate milkshake to wash it down, that's heartburn your earn, that's heartburn you deserve. That's nothing we can do for that. So again, you can go back and look and see this. I talk about this all the time in different videos, do a deeper dive. And the last frequently asked question on this according to this page is can a woman who's pregnant come and see the chiropractor? And that's an absolutely yes. Absolutely. As chiropractors, we learn a special technique called the Webster Technique, W-E-B-S-T-E-R. The Webster Technique is designed for pregnant women. It's also really helpful for breech babies. So if you know someone's pregnant and has a breech baby, find a chiropractor that does the Webster Technique and go see him. Yeah, so we get special treatment in taking care of pregnant women. I take care of tons of pregnant women over the years, lots and lots and lots and lots of pregnant women. And there's all kinds of research on this because in order to get certified in pediatrics, you have to write a paper. Hundreds and thousands of chiropractors have done the certification. And there's all kinds of journals and periodicals on taking care of pregnant women and kids. So if you're like me and you wanna read the science first, take a look at the science first. go for it. But yeah, can chiropractors take care of pregnant women? Absolutely. And again, I have dived in this topic so deep in other podcasts. Go back and look at other podcasts, look at the previous history on this page. You'll see tons and tons of chiropractic podcasts I've done about pregnant women and newborns and stuff like that. So there you got it, a couple quick frequently asked questions from the chiropractor. So this week's Ask The Chiropractor a little bit different. We dove into a whole bunch of little questions, little topics, not deep dives, but just quick answers. And again, all these questions are answered in much more depth in previous podcast. Go take a listen. R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, hit the Blog page. Or if you're watching us on Facebook or YouTube, subscribe to our channel and you'll see all the videos that I've done over the years. And then if you're on LinkedIn, it's there too. I mean it's for everywhere. So you'll find us. You'll find the other topics. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoy the frequently asked questions. Gonna be hanging out to college again. My camp next week might even be more fun'cause I'll be at the school. Maybe I'll sit down with my professors, who knows? Other than that, everybody, stay healthy, stay strong, and we'll talk to you next time. And if you have a question for Ask The Chiropractor, submit it and maybe next week, you'll be the question of the week. Thank you.