Chiropractic Questions

Chronic Shoulder and Neck Issues

February 14, 2023 Brant Hulsebus DC LCP CCWP FICA Season 6 Episode 11
Chiropractic Questions
Chronic Shoulder and Neck Issues
Show Notes Transcript

Ask the Chiropractor- How does Chiropractic help with chronic shoulder and neck pain?  Dr Hulsebus will discuss that chiropractic plays a role in the process.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

- Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor, here. Welcome to another edition of Ask The Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is a little podcast that we do for when people have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care that's answered by a chiropractor. Because I've always said if you want information about your teeth don't ask your family doctor, ask your dentist. Questions about your feet, ask your podiatrist, not your family doctor. Questions about normal headaches and colds and stuff like that that you wanna know medicine for, that's what your family doctor does. So always ask the expert. So this little podcast is a little thing that we do where people send us questions or ask us questions and then we come back out once a week and we try to answer that question. Let's talk about this week's question. This week dealt with somebody who had issues about that pain that goes down the neck into the shoulders and how it doesn't seem to go away or get better. This person had tried a few visits at the chiropractor, kind of quit. And then tried a couple of visits at the acupuncture, and then kind of quit. And then went to a massage therapist, did a couple of visits and tried to quit. Well, what happens is this particular person does computer work. They're always a front of the computer, they're hunched over, they're doing it all the time. And that's the posture that rolls your shoulder forward and sticks your head out. In chiropractic we call it forward head posture and that's a lot of stress. So the human head weighs about the same as a bowling ball. And for every inch forward you go roughly you increase 10 pounds of force pulling down. And when you do that, the muscles between your shoulders and the base of your neck, they kick in overdrive. So you gotta imagine they're working overtime all the time to keep that posture, maintaining it. And then if you sleep wrong or turn your head wrong or grab dumbbells at the gym and do something like that or pull on something or reach for something, because these muscles have been working all the time, really over time, they're real easy to irritate and inflame. Now, once a muscle becomes inflamed, it becomes sticky. You get back and forth, back and forth. And those stickies make knots. And those knots then make it easier to get inflamed which makes it more sticky, which makes bigger knots. So if you're walking on inflamed, irritated all the time because if you're bad posture and you keep doing things wrong you just keep making it worse. Now, how do you get bad posture? Well, whenever you're sitting. Whenever you sit you stick your head out and you roll your shoulders forward. That's the problem. See, our clinic's been open since 1949 and when you go back and look at things my grandfather saw lots of people for lower back pain. Because if you ever get into an older car, you'll find that the old cars, their seats are not very comfortable for very long. Well, today... I rode in a truck the other day, an F-150, has a built-in chair massager to massage your lower back. That felt great. So now we're in a world where more stuff requires sitting and we're able to sit longer with our lower backs'cause our chairs have gotten better support for our lower backs. Unfortunately, now that we silt longer our neck posture deteriorates more and more and more. So whether it's at work, whether it's driving a car, whether it's watching this weekend is the big football game, sitting back watching the big football game for a couple hours, or even if you sleep on your side and you roll your shoulders together when you're sleeping on your side, that's the same thing. And you don't even have to sit to do this. I like to cook a lot so if I'm in the kitchen hunched over the countertop making the food, I'm rolled forward. I have everything rolled forward, the same problem. So we keep doing things all day long to make this bad, right? Whether it's cooking, whether it's washing, whether it's sitting, whether it's driving, whether it's at work. So we do things all day long to make this bad. So we've gotta start doing things that make it better because these things aren't going away. One time I was involved in a group and they wanted to ban tablets and iPhones for under 18 because of this forward head posture it was creating. And I suggested we also ban books.'Cause when you read a book you do the same thing too. So I am a kind of a chiropractor that says,"Let's find the real answer to this." Let's find out. You can't get rid of the books, you can't get rid of computers, you can't get rid of cars. So we have to do something different to balance it out. And so that could be a whole combination of things. Now, how do we know where to start? Well, it depends how bad you are. If you're really bad and you've been doing this for years and years and years, you can't just get better in two or three weeks. So like my patient who's been dealing with this for years and he's only gets a little bit better, a little bit better, goes backwards, a little bit better, and kind bouncing around trying different things. He's gonna have to do them all. Because if your job is sitting all day behind a computer and you go home, you sit all day in front of the TV when you get home. Or you stay hunched over working in the kitchen or whatever you do. If you like to put the puzzles together, whatever it is. If you're in this position all day long you have to do that much more to reverse it. For example, if all I ate was candy I'm gonna have to brush my teeth more than twice a day. because all I'm eating is candy, so I'm making my teeth worse. So this person who said I tried chiropractic for a while, I tried to massage for a while, I tried acupuncture for a while. I believe in order to get over this initial inflammation, to get over that knotting to inflammation, knotting to inflammation, they might have to do all three for a while to catch up, right? because they're so far behind, they're so inflamed, they're so irritated. In order to get out of the state of inflammation they're gonna have to try everything together all at once to climb over that. So here as a chiropractor in Rockford, Illinois we don't do massage therapy here yet. We don't have a physical therapy here yet. We don't have an acupuncturist here yet. So I would refer you to other people to help you with that while I did the chiropractic. So as a team we could work to get you better. Now some chiropractors have those services. If they're certified in it, and they went to school, and they had to got special training in that, great. See them for that too. But we go through chiropractic school we're not taught acupuncture, we're not taught massage. So if you're going to somebody that does those things make sure that they've got a certification or education in those to make them qualified to do it. Simply being a chiropractor does not make you qualified to do massage therapy or acupuncture. These are old sciences that've been around a long time, deserve someone who's actually certified or qualified to do them. So with that being said, when you come here as a patient what we'll do is we'll take your x-rays if you're having these chronic neck and shoulder issues. And what we'll do is we'll see how far off alignment are you? How bad is your posture? Where are we starting, how many things do we have to do here and other places in order to catch up with you? So we'll do that. We'll get you so now of a sudden now you're feeling better, your neck's turning, the pain's gone. But see, you're gonna go right back to the same job, same lifestyle as you did before. So now it's your chiropractor's job is to help educate you and how to counterbalance that. Some of the things I love to do is going up against the wall every day and doing 25 big wall angels like a snow angel in the snow to help train your shoulders and go back more. Another thing I love to do is just standing up, squeeze your shoulder blades together, pull them like you put them back pockets, and count the 10 and really hold that. Try to do it like every half an hour of sitting. So that way you don't learn this forward posture, you keep your shoulders back more. So there's all kinds of little tricks and things we'll teach you how to get over this. And I give you the tools to keep doing it. Now, when I had my shoulder surgery, right, I had to do physical therapy afterwards. And I asked the therapist how long do I have to do these stretches for, these exercises. And she told me because your shoulder now has been altered'cause of this injury, you can stop whenever you want the pain to come back. So I don't have to do them on this side, the left side, but I had to do them on the right side all the time otherwise the pain comes back. So if you've dealt with this neck problem you have a lifestyle that puts you in the situation where you're achy down from the base of your skull down into your shoulder blade. How often do you have to do this? Standing up and doing the stretches and the maintenance that's required to do it? Well, you have to do it as long as you're living that lifestyle, right? So if you were to retire and move to Alaska and become a park ranger outside all day hiking, you don't have to do it anymore. But if you're gonna be in a position where you're in the same posture shoulders forward, head out, you're always gonna be irritating that. You gotta keep doing the maintenance that's required. And that's your chiropractor's job. Your chiropractor's job is to get you over the hump, get you back to where you need to be, and then keep you there. That's the goal. So if you go see a chiropractor, your goal is to work with him, the chiropractor, and anybody else the chiropractor might seem fit to work with you in order to get you over the hump. And then come up with a maintenance thing. Whether that's getting adjusted, getting massage once a month and maybe daily exercises, daily stretches. That's up to between you and the chiropractor. And that's gonna differ person to person based on how much of the things that you're doing or are not doing. So if you have that chronic pain going down into your shoulder blade, going up to your head this is the kind of area you wanna work with a chiropractor on to work your way through this because this can become a thing. And the longer you wait to get aggressive with it, the longer more care you're gonna need versus getting in right away and dealing with it. And if you're working with other people like a massage therapist, acupuncturist, make sure that you have them all talk to each other, all communicate. because as a team they can do great things for you. Individually they're limited. As a team they work great. So that's the Ask The Chiropractor. Okay? So if you have any questions for me about chiropractic or chiropractic care, go ahead and leave a message below. Go to my website rockforddc.com. R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C dot com. There's a thing there called Contact Us. Go ahead and leave a message there. Those come right to me and maybe next time you'll be the question that we can ask the chiropractor. Thank you.