Ask the Chiropractor- Did you know people find relief with fibromyalgia and Chiropractic? #healthy815 #icachiropractor
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor- Did you know people find relief with fibromyalgia and Chiropractic? #healthy815 #icachiropractor
www.rockforddc.com
- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor" is my little podcast, little blog that I do here for if somebody has a question about chiropractic care or what chiropractor can do. I always highly, highly recommend you ask a chiropractor about chiropractic, not, say your dentist or your family, your primary care physician because certainly they're not chiropractors, they don't know what chiropractors do. They try to give you the best answer they can'cause they feel like they should, but in reality, they have never studied chiropractic, so if I had a question about my teeth, I'd ask my dentist. So let's get started with this week's question. This week it was brought to me that said,"Dr. Hulsebus, I have a good friend of mine, she has fibromyalgia. Is there anything that chiropractors do with fibromyalgia?" And the good news is there's a lot of patients have with fibromyalgia have come to the chiropractor and after being at the chiropractor, have received quite a bit of relief. So does chiropractic cure fibromyalgia? That's not what I said. What I said is, a lot of people with fibromyalgia have gone to the chiropractor and after being to the chiropractor, have found a great deal of relief. So let's dive into a little bit of what fibromyalgia is. Well, fibromyalgia, we have muscles that are made up of fibers, right, and muscles, this and that and whatever reason they're all inflamed, right? Fiber, fibrous muscles that, the definition of it just means inflamed fibers and stuff like that in your body, muscles in particular, myalgia, muscle, mya. So what's going on with that? Well, what's going on with that is, there's gotta be something systemically altered or wrong that's causing the whole body to ache top and bottom, that's causing this to happen. Now where could this be come from? And as a holistic chiropractor, I'm gonna venture that you're either toxic in something or you're deficient in something that's causing the overall muscle tone throughout your body to react, so with that being said, how does chiropractor come into a role of this? Well, so as chiropractors a lot of times we're able to predict where you're gonna have shingles, what do I mean by shingles? Well, shingles hits a specific dermatome like a area of skin enervated by a nerve and it's a little different in everybody. But as chiropractors, we look for what we call the vertebral subluxation, where the two bones are misaligned, creating stress, and that stress travels out. So when you're gonna have a shingles flare-up, shingles tries to find a vulnerable or suspect, vulnerable nerve. So it finds the vulnerable nerve and it exposes itself on that nerve, so a lot of times when I look at someone's spine and take care of them for a while, I can almost predict where they're gonna have shingles based on the vulnerable nerve that's there for shingles to expose itself. So let's go back to fibromyalgia now. So when you have fibromyalgia, there's lots of different symptoms, lots of different things and effects, but if you were to look at the spine, in some areas of the spine where it might be misaligned, we can suspect that the fibromyalgia symptoms would appear more on the suspected nerves caused by the vertebral subluxation. One, tender points, a lot of patients tell me they have tender points in different spots where they're having fibromyalgia flare-ups. Well, if the vertebrae are misaligned, and there's a subluxation there, and the nerves aren't getting to the muscles the way they're supposed to or the muscle itself is under more physical stress because the misalignments say you have bad neck posture, so if I have bad neck posture, my head's sticking out forward, what we call forward head posture, it's just adding the stress to the muscles that make up my neck and my shoulder blade area. So if I add a ton of stress to those muscles and then I have a fibromyalgia flare-up on top of it, is that area really gonna be bad? Well, yeah, it's already working overtime for the bad posture and now I add this chemical, the systemic problem of fibromyalgia on top of that, those areas are really gonna ache. So if I went to the chiropractor and he worked with my posture, worked with some of the subluxations, freeing them up, get those muscles to move better, should those muscles be as tender or easy to flare up again? No, they should not be. Another one is fatigue, a lot of people with fibromyalgia suffer from fatigue, a lot of times if you come see me, I adjust your C1, C2 area, and I tell you there's a nerve there called the vagus nerve, V-A-G-U-S, the vagus nerve, and the vagus nerve is our treasure of our parasympathetics, or our, the opposite of fight and flight, right? You got fight and flight and you have the the vagus nerve that kind of turns fight and flight off, generically speaking, okay? So if your vagus nerve isn't firing right, and your upper cervicals are giving you problems, then what happens is we don't get good quality of sleep. So you have bad quality of sleep from the vagus nerve not being able to do its job 100% on top of the fibromyalgia, it's only gonna make it worse. So if we adjust the C1, C2 area, usually I tell people the first thing you're gonna notice is a good night's sleep. So if we can adjust those areas that would decrease the amount of stress, not only that, but the vagus nerve can't fire it, it basically does everything belly button up, it tells everything belly button up, the danger's gone. If that nerve's not doing its job and you got fibromyalgia, you got this flare up going on, your body's in a state of, you know, fight and flight, it's not gonna, you can't be in fight and flight and healing at the same time. So a lot of times, just by adjusting the C1, C2 area, we get a lot of people going out of fight and flight back into homeostasis or normal mode and then the fibromyalgia symptoms can decrease. Sleep disturbance, the same thing, right, if my neck hurts, I roll over, I wake up, if I have fibromyalgia, it's just like throwing fuel on the fire, right, so it's gonna make it even worse. Headaches, headaches are a common problem with fibromyalgia, well, guess what, chiropractors see a lot of people with headaches. So if you're having this horrible fibromyalgia flare-up and you're getting a really bad headache on top of it, you get a good couple adjustments to you, again, this is to your upper neck area usually, same spot again, this will help clear up the headaches and maybe make the fibromyalgia go away. And again, depression, anxiety, another problem with this, again, with depression, anxiety, we find a lot of times, people are stuck in fight and flight, maybe then an upper neck adjustment, may calm things down. Same with irritable bowel, people have irritable bowel, they get adjusted a lot of times, we help 'em with the fight and flight and get out of that. Now if you wanna read more about this, moving people out of fight and flight, check out the Ogurya studies, out of, she's a life west student, California, doing some studies about how chiropractic affects your fight and flight versus non fight and flight before and after adjustments, they're actually looking at the salivatory amylase, the chemicals in your mouth, and how they change when you're in fight and flight. So they're checking people's slavatory amylase, and then they give them an adjustment, they notice the changes afterwards, that's pretty cool stuff. Now they're gonna start doing some studies with body temperature and things like that to try to see, take a look at it, so you can look up Ogurya at PubMed, and see some really cool peer-reviewed, scientifically-proven chiropractic studies that show what I'm talking about. If you're listening to me thinking, and you're doubting me, go find the science of PubMed, it's all out there. So yeah, so that's kind of how chiropractic adjustments help with fibromyalgia. Do we have a chiropractic adjustment that cures and eradicates fibromyalgia? Absolutely not, no chiropractor should say that. We have chiropractic adjustments that get rid of some of the extra stressors that can be excited with fibromyalgia. So if you can get rid of some of those stressors, there's less for the fibromyalgia to excite and get irritable, which is why people find relief when they go to the chiropractor, when they deal with fibromyalgia. Now can you find chiropractors that took classes like myself on wellness and maybe try to get to some of the causes of the fibromyalgia? Remember, almost every single healthcare problem can be traced back to a toxicity or deficiency in something for the most part, I mean, there are genetic disorders that don't apply here, that is missing a gene when you were born, that's a different story. But if you have most everything else, you can go back to either a healthy lifestyle, or a non-healthy lifestyle choice. So a lot of times chiropractors can help educate you on what is genetically required to have things, so if you're a patient of mine with fibromyalgia, we talk about first common deficiencies in your diet that affects all of us living in North America, I don't know where you're watching this, I know I have a huge following to Germany out there, a lot of Germans watch me, hello Germans. But for those of you in North America, you know, our diet's not as good, our food choices aren't as good because the nutrient content's not what it used to be, so there are supplementations we take, there's also environmental toxins, and other things that we eat that have toxins in them that we have to detox. So we talk all about ways to detox and ways to build up different things and it's not the same for everybody, but it's pretty darn close, really darn close. So I'm always big about fish oil to help those omega-3s get back to normal. I'm really big on epsom salt bath once a week to pull all those toxins out, flush your system, oil pullings, another good one I like. Check with your doctor, check with your chiropractor before you do these things to make sure it's the right for you. But there's other things too, we talk about different antioxidants and vitamins and things like that that you just might be lacking from your diet, not because you're not trying, but it's because when you go to the grocery store today, the food quality isn't what it used to be, it's not your fault, it's society's fault, we'll blame society, right? All right. So I hope that kinda answers your questions on a chiropractic approach to fibromyalgia, so if you suffer from fibromyalgia, can you go with a chiropractor and have it eradicated? Probably not. Can you go to the chiropractor and do better when you're having a flare-up? Absolutely. Can you go with the chiropractor like myself that studies nutrition and wellness, and learn a little bit more about what I might be deficient or toxic in, in order to have less flare-ups and stuff like that? Absolutely. So if you have fibromyalgia and you have any more questions, or you maybe have a different question about something else and you'd like to ask the chiropractor, go ahead and leave a message below at "Ask the Chiropractor." You can always find me on my website, rockforddc, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, rockforddc.com. And you can submit a questionnaire by hitting the "Contact Us button, and maybe next week you'll be the topic of the "Ask the Chiropractor" topic. All right, everybody, stay healthy, and I hope I answered some questions about fibromyalgia and the role a chiropractor plays. Thank you.