Stabilization and Chiropractic

Ask the Chiropractor- Dr Hulsebus discusses how chiropractic care paired with spinal stabilization might be the best bet for chronic lower back issues.  The latest research is exciting. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus and welcome to another edition of "Ask The Chiropractor". Ask the Chiropractor's where we come on here and we discuss chiropractic topics by a chiropractor. All too often, people ask advice about chiropractic care from someone who's not a chiropractor. Matter of fact, this week, I had an encounter with a D.O. who tried to explain to me that he does the same things I do. But when I started talking to him, I could see that he had no idea what I do. It was, to me it was fun. But again, if you have question about chiropractic, always ask a chiropractor. We're the ones that know the most about chiropractic care. Just like if you had a question about your teeth, you would ask a dentist. So I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer Chiropractic and I'm also the official chiropractor for the AHL Rockford IceHogs, the Chicago Blackhawks affiliate. And I come out to answer your questions. So question I was given was,"Hey, Dr. Hulsebus, I get a chiropractic adjustment or I've been doing different things, physical therapy and stuff like that. And I'm having a hard time maintaining my health. My spine not seem to be doing its job. And I go to the gym and I exercise and it just seems like my back never really holds the way it's supposed to. You know, what can I do? I work out, I exercise, I did physical therapy, but I keep having these problems. So what can I do to make it better?" Well, there was actually a PubMed article, for those of you don't know, I'm a huge fan of PubMed. If you don't know what PubMed is, take a quick look at a previous podcast where we discuss it in more detail. But the short story here is PubMed is the best research. It's been tested and replicated, and it's been proven to be pretty true to today's date. So this is called, "The Effectiveness of Spinal Stabilization Exercises on The Movement Performance in Adults with Chronic Lower Back Pain." This came out in the International Journal of Sports Therapy, 2023 of February. So this is a new article, right? This just came out and this talks a lot about where people try to do stuff for their spine. It just doesn't work. Like they keep having the same problems and they talk a lot about the fact that the stabilization muscles are key. Now, what are stabilization muscles? Well, you see there's a thing called the righting reflex, R-I-G-H-T, righting reflex. And that says, no matter what, my eyes stay level. So if I start to bend and twist and move around, my eyes will always stay level. Another example, let's say, that you were standing in front of me and I put a camera on you slow motion, and I decided to walk up, and knock you down. You'd be surprised on your way down, the way your core, your spinal stabilization muscles move and twist you to keep your eyes level at all times. These muscles are extremely well-innervated. You know, the spinal muscles in the back of your head and your neck have 273 neural connections per square millimeter. Now what does that mean? The next closest is your jaw, your TMJ and right there, we're looking at about somewhere in the seventies. So this is like 200 times more. And again, they're so highly innervated, but yet there's something they don't have and that's called the golgi tendon organ. You've probably heard me, if you've listened to this before, you've heard me talk about this. Your big muscles of your arms, and your shoulders, and your hips, they all have golgi tendon organs. And your brain can consciously move those around. Muscles without these are a hundred percent reflexatory, meaning their job is to keep you up. So we find as a lot of patients who have these reoccurring issues is they have really weak spinal stabilization muscles. So I work with the local high school, we talk to kids about a career, chiropractic and they come in. I'm 48, they're 17. And I try to ask them which one of us can stand on one foot longer and keep our balance and I have yet to lose. And if you know me, I am not some kind of gymnast or high-rope trapeze artist, or something like that by any means. That's, no one's ever described me that way. But I do work on my spinal stabilization muscles all the time by challenging my balance. So what's the course of action? I have chronic lower back pain. If you've listened to my other podcast where I talked about NSAIDs don't work for chronic lower back pain, they actually create chronic lower back pain. You've heard my other podcasts where I talked about steroid injections in the spine that have never been FDA-approved nor recommended by the manufacturer. And you can say, "Hey, I still got chronic lower back pain. What do I do?" Well, the first step is you go see a chiropractor, right? because the first step is you gotta get the stress off these joints. So the chiropractor's job is to give you a chiropractic adjustment, help get things back in alignment, flow in the right way. So now the chiropractor unlocks your spine. Step one cannot be skipped. Get your spine unlocked, get it where it's supposed to be, get it so it's free moving. Step two, put the glue on it, hold it in place better, do a better job. And how do you do that? That's what this article is talking about. It's talking about spinal stabilization muscles. And those are done by testing your balance. Now here in my office, we email our patients a whole list of real easy spinal stabilization muscles for them to start working on. Then as it gets, as they get better at 'em, we have another phase. We sent him phase two if they want it. But the main thing is think about, can you stand on one foot for 30 seconds without falling over? Can you set an exercise ball and not bobble all over the place? Can you keep your maintained balance? For me, in the past, I have took a wobble board and I've done standing up squats on it, trying to keep my balance. I used that to do pushups on. I make everything unstable when I do certain exercises in order to challenge my stabilization muscles. Because if I want to make my stabilization muscles stronger, I have to challenge them, I have to use them, I have to test them. And so I'm doing stuff on one leg. When I'm doing stuff on wobble boards, I'm challenging them. I am testing those. I have a lot of young athletes that come in here, especially young female athletes that have chronic lower back and hip stuff going on. And what we do is we get them adjusted, we get their hips straight. we get their lower back moving the way it's supposed to be. And then we introduce them, once they start to hold that adjustment, once they're starting to stay where they're supposed to stay, then we put them on an unstable surface and I make them do their sport. I had a young lady coming in here who plays basketball. We put her on a wobble board and shooting free throws. Her dad elevated the hoop the same height as the wobble board. So she was still shooting 10 foot baskets. But after being on that wobble board, her lower back got really strong to the point where during a game, if you ran into her, she wasn't budging. I have volleyball players that sit there and bounce the ball off the wall, while they're on the wobble board. I have hockey players that stand on the wobble board, and we put the stick in front of them, and they do stick slap shots on an elevated surface to match the height of the wobble board, and practice that on the unstable surface. So if you really wanna take care of lower back issues, you gotta, with your stabilization stuff. What's cool about this article is I talked about how people who've had actually had back surgery, later on still have aches and pains. Like they did the back surgery and they kind of regretted it afterwards. That's because the back surgery was done, but the real issue was the weak stabilization muscles. In order to get the stabilization and get the alignment back, these people might not have had to have surgery. Again, this is the article. This is not me. I'm quoting the article. They're saying that "If they would've done that they would've done better" because they test their stabilization muscles before surgery. They tested them after surgery and they just, they weren't there and the pain was still there. Other people built their stabilization muscles. They didn't have half the pain the other people did. So learning those stabilization muscles is so key. And you know, so where can I learn them besides, you know I go to the chiropractor, I get my spine aligned. Can I go to the gym and learn them? Well, I mean some strength conditioning coaches understand what I'm talking about. Not all of them, right? Not, the guys that do it the old school way. They didn't, we never did this stuff old school. Physical therapists, well if you, all your physical therapy is about stretching your lower back and stretching your hips, that's good stuff. But you're lacking the stabilization stuff. And again, almost any chiropractor can work with you on this because us chiropractors, we know how important these are. We see the difference in our patients with this and without this. So if you're doing a chronic lower back pain, going to a chiropractor, okay, I'm gonna evaluate your spine, get you in alignment, and then talk to you about stabilization stuff afterwards. According to the science, according to the data might be your best outcome in order to getting better, more than anything else. So we've already, last month I talked about the fact that when it comes to acute lower back pain, nothing's better than chiropractic according to the North America Spinal Society. We talked before, like I said about other stuff, not being a good choice, long term as far as NSAIDs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and cortisone shots. So what's the answer? Well, more and more and more is pointing at like getting your spine adjusted, and then now introducing some spinal stabilization exercises. So how do I get my back better? You get it aligned, then you get it stronger. That's how we do it. All right, I hope I answered the question about "How do I maintain my adjustment? How do I deal with this chronic back pain that keeps coming? I've tried all these different exercise and therapies. Nothing seems to work." This recipe right here is where we've had the best success with our patients, both short term and then long term. Short term, we get them outta the pain and discomfort with the adjustments. Long term, we work with them with adjusting them periodically, but introducing more and more spinal stabilization exercises. All right, hope everybody got something out of this. Now remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or the chiropractor, go ahead and leave me a message below. Go to my website, rockforddc.com. R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. Leave me a message there. Hit the contact us. Say, hey, I got a question for the chiropractor. And maybe next week when we meet you or not, we'll be answering your question. All right. Hope I answered everything. Thanks everybody. I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.