What makes Chiropractic Different?

Ask the Chiropractor - What makes chiropractic care different than other health care?  Dr Hulsebus explains the difference in chiropractic care vs other care and the history.  #healhty815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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- Hi, Dr. Brant Hulsebus. Welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor Chiropractic Questions." Our podcast here is the idea that people have questions about chiropractic and often they'll ask their primary healthcare provider questions about chiropractic, but their primary healthcare provider doesn't know anything about chiropractic, and so I feel like they're a bad expert. Just like if I had a question about my teeth, I wouldn't ask my family doctor, I would ask my dentist. So our podcast here, people come on, they ask us questions and we can come back and answer it. I'm a licensed chiropractor here in the State of Illinois. I'm a team chiropractor for the Rockford Ice Hogs and I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic. So let me answer the question. Today's question was interesting. It says, historically chiropractic and medicine have always committed a different approach. Can you tell us a little bit about this different approach? Why is chiropractic so different? Well, I wanna start off by showing something that I think it's pretty cool. This is Stephenson's textbook. Stephenson's textbook right here says it was written in 1927. So this is a textbook from 1927 and we still buy these today and we still look at these all the time today and study from these green books because what's interesting about this book from 1927, is everything in here, I would say 90% of it, if not more, it still holds up today, it's still accurate, the way we practice chiropractic and the results we get from chiropractic care and how we take care of our patients. What's the big difference between this textbook and a textbook that students use today? When this textbook, chiropractors were doing things, they were recording what they were doing, they were adjusting the vertebrae and they would adjust certain vertebrae they would get consistent results over and over again. So they said, "Okay, if I adjust this vertebrae this is what I expect to see happen. This is what the patient presented with and this is exactly what happened." And it happened over and over and over again. So this book is written down about what they knew at the time, science wise, and the results that they got. And the fact that the results were repetitive over and over again. So with the limited amount of science research in 1927 they had knowing about the human body. Now this is before MRIs, this is before, you know, we knew a lot of stuff about the body. Not only that, but this is also kind of time when, you know, working with cadavers was not very easy to do because religious groups didn't really want people messing with dead bodies back then. So, very limited access to some of the minor science and some of the stuff that we have today. But everything holds up, why? Well, because they were able to come up with a philosophy that said if this happens and this happens, then this must be true. And what's happened today in 2023, especially with some of the studies and some of the cool stuff that's coming out right now with some of the newest technology that we have, we're able to show now why there's thing's written in this book actually happened. Not just philosophically, but also through science. Chiropractic is an art, science, and philosophy. And it was really cool to how we apply the art with the philosophy from these books here, and how the actual science backs it up today. And what's cool about that is when you go back and you look at medicine back in the 1920s. So I looked it up this morning, right? So back in the 1920s, medicine just discovered vitamins A, B, C, K, and D. They just came up with the electrocardiogram. Insulin, they discovered insulin right before this book was written. Lactic acid in your muscles, that was first discovered. And the invention of the iron lung was a year before this book came out. So I'm gonna kind of put it in perspective to you. They didn't know about blood types, right? Like I'm, you know, blood type O, blood type AB, that wasn't even discovered until three years after this book was written. So that's the cool thing about this book. This was written back then and everything in this book still holds up and is still true. And as chiropractors we go through this book from time to time, we like to review and look at the literature that was written back then and compare it to the application of chiropractic today. And it's so cool that how much they knew in 1920s and how much of that's still accurate in practice in today's chiropractic world. And again, I don't want you to think that chiropractic itself has not advanced, right? We've definitely advanced, like we've come really, really far. I got to meet with Dr. Goodyear, excuse me, Dr. Longyear down in Jacksonville, Florida. He's got a motion MRI machine. Well, now when we get to see when someone gets their upper neck adjusted through a special adjusting tool that he has, we're able to see the adjustment happen under a motion MRI machine. And we actually watch the spinal fluid inside the cranial cavity get recycled and flushed and moved around. You see, unfortunately, back in the old days we thought when we gave a chiropractic adjustment to the upper two bones in the neck, it was the idea the blood flow increased into the ear area. It turns out, you know, some of this stuff, you know, turns out today that's not actually why people get a little lightheaded for about three seconds after an adjustment, it's because their spinal fluid is being regenerated and re flushed. There's cool videos on this. If you Google search "Jim McMahon chiropractor" you can see some of the work that Dr. Scott Rosa does with Jim McMahon. He was the '85 Bears quarterback. And what happened with him is, you know, your neck gets whipped back and forth and the brain gets sucked down, and when it gets sucked down, it clogs this foramen magnum, the little hole in the bottom of your skull. And so the spinal fluid wasn't regenerating. So they gave him an adjustment that moved, the spinal fluid moved, Jim McMahon describes as like a toilet bowl flushing. It's all the old fluid coming out and the new fluid coming in, and the only people that are doing this kinda work are chiropractors. So we get these veterans and these football players, hockey players with this concussion stuff, and it's so cool to see the work that Dr. Longyear's doing down in Jacksonville, Florida, Dr. Scott Rosa is doing with his people. And more importantly, not more importantly, but equally as important Dr. Ted Kerrick up there at Harvard. Dr. Ted Kerrick, started down in Florida with the Kerrick Institute, went on to Life Chiropractic College, and now he's at Harvard running the Brain Trauma Center with some of the coolest things that he's doing. Again, everything he does, he's got these cameras that watch you as you move around, and if your eyes start to flutter, then he knows which adjustment to give you at that moment your eye's fluttering. And he's helping these people with brain injuries, head concussions and stuff like that. He's able to go in there and make these changes and get these people back to normal. And everything he does (taps book) was written in this book. You know, again, they didn't have the technology to take, you know, pictures that fast. I don't even know if pictures were a thing in 1927, like definitely high definition movies were not a thing in 1927. Motion MRIs were not a thing in 1927. But the ideas of what would happen when you do the adjustment in 1927 still holds true today. So why is chiropractics so different? Well, we've had forever to have a philosophy that we did that that was solid and we built on that as a profession, a philosophy, today and in the future. I can't wait for that, I can't wait 20 years from now to see how much more of this stuff we can prove that we've been doing all along without having the technology to be able to prove it. I think it's exciting to see the stuff coming out. But be from 1920s and have a solid core foundation of what we do and have it go forward. I mean, I don't wanna pick on things, but if you look at mental health, you know, it wasn't until the late 1960s that frontal lobotomies went away. You think about how far, you know, that was, I mean, that's scary stuff, right? So it typically happened to females that would, the male thought they were being disrespectful or rude, and they thought they had something wrong with them mentally, so they go in and chopped that part of the brain off and that's how they cured them. I mean, if you look at the Kennedy family, they didn't know better and they thought that was a real thing. So that's what they did, too. That's awful, but that's what they were doing back then. I mean, this stuff came out when they just banned cocaine and heroin when this book was written. They were doing that currently in medicine to try to treat different things. Really, you could get cocaine and heroin. It was banned in the late 19 teens is when it was banned. And this book is, you know, the 20s, so it wasn't that far away. Snake oil was still a big thing back then. Leaches were still a big thing back then. So for us as chiropractors, it's really cool to go back and look at our early beginnings. You know, chiropractic was founded in Davenport, Iowa, September 18th, 1895, by Dr. Palmer himself from Palmer College. And the stuff that he did back then, you know, how it still holds up today. So why is chiropractic different? Well, chiropractic's different because we had a core solid philosophy, that we watched things happen, they were able to reproduce over and over again on different people, be able to keep track of stuff. And we've understood information was going forward. Medicine, they've gone all different directions and I think it's for the better, right? It's definitely better than it used to be, but chiropractic and medicine don't always gel. And a lot of times when I talk to medical doctors, as I work with pro medical doctors with the Ice Hogs, the way I look at things is different how they look at things because they're coming at it with a different philosophy and different set of original founding core values than chiropractic did. So I often have to change my lingo, change the way I look at things. And I realize that when I talk to those guys, and those guys are brilliant, don't get me wrong. I use them all as my doctors, I have nothing but the highest respect for them. But when I talk to them and work with them I realize have to do things differently because they're coming from a different background and different approach to health, where we're as chiropractors we look at lifestyles, we look at your nervous system, your function, what's limiting your ability to heal and get better. We always feel like there's something on the inside or environmental or something in lifestyle that's limiting your ability to heal. The body's a self-healing, self-regulating organism. We just gotta figure out what the interference is and remove the interference. And as chiropractors we often look to the spine to find the nervous interference and then removing the nervous interference, letting it go back to homeostasis out of a state of sympathetic or hypersympathetic, its fight or flight or non-fight or flight, getting it back to normal where it's just happy getting it out of stress. Then the nervous system can work the way it's designed to and created to, that the body can regulate and take care of itself. That's what we do as chiropractors. That's the core of what we do. Do we talk about the fact that you can't poison yourself whether it's lack of exercise, bad thoughts or bad diet? Yes, we're talking about those things, too. How to put the stuff in to make you work better, too. But again, all of that is in this book from 1927, Stephenson's textbook. If you really wanna learn a lot about chiropractic and you're a chiropractic historian, and you're a nerd like me? This is a good reference. Not the scripture, right? But a great reference to learn about chiropractic and how it started and the original ideas behind chiropractic and where it is today. So why is chiropractic different? What's the difference between chiropractic and going to a regular doctor? A lot of it has to do with our core philosophy, and the core philosophy and stuff you can find right here. All right, everybody, I hope I answered that question. Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic, for me, the answer, why chiropractic care? Just go ahead and reach out to me. My website's rockforddc.com, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, And maybe next time you'll be the question at "Ask the Chiropractor." All right, stay healthy, stay strong. Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic, ask a chiropractor or just go to, like, palmer.edu, the Palmer website and look at the college, see what they have to say about it. Thanks, everybody.