Neck Pain Research

Ask the Chiropractor- Dr Hulsebus reviews latest research and methods that chiropractors use for helping with neck pain and why chiropractic should be your first choice #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor. Every week we come on and we do our little podcast here on a question that we were asked, and we call it Ask the Chiropractor. When someone asks a question about chiropractic, I always recommend you ask a chiropractor, because only a chiropractor truly knows whether or not chiropractic can help or not. So, a lot of times when you hear about chiropractic, a lot of people's first impulse is to think about lower back pain."Hey, I went to the chiropractor, I had lower back pain," or you know someone who went to their chiropractor because of lower back issues. And lower back issues are a major number one reason why people are finding themselves disabled, or chronic healthcare problems, and chiropractic has done great things for lower back issues. But, today, I wanna talk about the second most common reason you maybe heard someone go with a chiropractor, and that's ongoing neck pain."I have neck pain, I can't turn my head.""I have acute pain right here in the base of my neck.""I have this agonizing pain back here." We hear it all the time. Now, the other thing this could contribute to is headaches. You've heard people go to a chiropractor a lot. Well a lot of times people with neck pain also have headaches and vice versa. People with, you know, headaches have neck pain. So even though these are typically grouped into two different sections, as chiropractors, we kind of view it as one because, the neck and headaches are so much related, that a lot of times we find issues that can create neck pain or headaches. And a lot of times we'll put up your x-rays and we'll ask you, I bet you have really bad neck pain. Or I bet you've suffered from headaches over the years. And so, I think headaches is like number four reason for disability and people missing work, and, like, neck pain is, like, five or six, but if you add them together, the lower back pain and neck issues are hand-in-hand number one reason for disabilities and healthcare problems that fatigue us, or, plague us in our society. So, chiropractors, we do a lot with necks, just like we do a lot of lower back. Chiropractic adjustments to the neck have been going on since the beginning of chiropractic, actually. That's one of the first adjustments that was ever given. But a lot of people want to know, I go in and get and get my neck done, like, "oh, my neck hurts like crazy. What's the chiropractor gonna do?" Well you know, our clinic has been open since 1949, and so we've seen a lot of different things over the years. We've had lots of clinical experience just being that we're almost 70 years old, 75 years old. And one of the interesting things that we found, that my grandpa taught my dad, and my dad taught me, is that when you go to adjust a neck, one of the number one areas you have to look at is the thoracic spine. Now, the thoracic spine is where your ribs are. Some people used to call them dorsal spine, but, yes, your 12-- where your 12 ribs are, your 12 thoracic spine. And today we've learned is that the neck muscles themselves come down and they go all the way down to about the fifth thoracic all the way down almost halfway down the entire thoracic spine. And so, when you come see the chiropractor and your neck hurts really bad, it's really intense, how do we first get relief? Well a lot of times we just get relief by adjusting the thoracic spine. There's, I've had some patients that don't even adjust their neck the first two or three days, because, you know, you can't turn your head. It's hard for me to go in there and force it to move, and cause all kinds of agonizing pain. We go up in the upper back area, we free up the upper back and then by freeing up the upper back, now we've freed up a ton of the neck muscles, and all of a sudden you're starting to"you know what, I'm starting to move a little bit better.""I'm feeling a little bit better." And we didn't even get to the neck yet. And so we found out that there's a major correlation. This got published here, just, February 27th, 2023 talking about the effectiveness of of thoracic spine work and managing neck issues. So this has got PubMed index. You know me, I love my PubMed articles. If you don't know what PubMed is, PubMed is one of the highest, gold standard research, that's going through the most peer reviews to make sure this is a real thing. So this is a systematic review of the meta-analysis of randomized control trials, meaning that, the authors took a whole bunch of different studies and they put them all together. They found these studies that say"What's going on? What's the correlation here?" And they figured out there was a huge success rate when you get your upper back adjusted to go along with your neck pain. They found out that it's... Not only does it help with the pain and make the pain go away better, but it also helps you hold your adjustment longer. It helps what we do here, chiropractically speaking, last longer and, and stay better longer. You know, "Once I go do I have to keep going? And why do I have to keep going every day?" Well they found out by getting more work done between your shoulders, can lessen how many times you have to come in, and how much faster it's gonna get better in the neck itself by working on the upper back. So, to us it's really cool, because, you know, grandpa started doing this in 1949, noticed that it worked, and now here we are, February 27th, 2023. Now we have the research paper that says,"Yeah Dr. Bob Hulsebus, you were right. Doing that definitely pays off. It definitely makes a difference." So, that's kind of fun for us. Like we said, we've been doing that forever. When I was at chiropractic school, my father said never adjust someone's neck unless you look at their upper back also. They're so closely related. And it's kind of cool now to have the actual research back up what we're saying. So, "Should I go to the chiropractor if I'm having neck pain?" Absolutely."But what if the chiropractor wants to look at other parts of my spine is that-- I told him I only had neck pain. Why is he adjusting the other places?" Well, we're seeing more and more research come out all the time about why you adjust the whole spine, top to bottom, to affect one single area. And how, if you ignore the other spots, it takes longer for things to correct. Now why is that? Well, the number one reason that is is the thing called the Righting Reflex. R I G H T I N G, righting reflex. That says your eyes stay level at all times no matter what. So if I hurt my neck and I, I tilt my head in one direction, another part of my spine's gonna bend and twist to balance me straight again. And I'll say the neck was the primary problem. As I work, I correct in the neck over time in theory I'll go back, but if the neck wasn't the original issue, let's say the lower back was the issue, and then my neck turned like this and I felt the neck pain before I felt the lower back, and you fix my neck, what happens? It just keeps going right back because the cause of the problem was somewhere else. So, here in our office, we don't gamble, we adjust every one that needs to be adjusted. So, if you find a C5 that needs to be adjusted, causes you neck pain, we adjust that. If you find a T3 that needs to be adjusted, that can directly relate back to your neck pain, we adjust that too. And if we see an L2 all the way down your lower back that needs to be adjusted we adjust that too, because we don't know if that's part of the Righting Reflex or not. So, we adjust everything we see. So, when you go to the chiropractor, you should have more than one level adjusted, because, typically, typically, now I'm talking, not a hundred percent of the time, but, typically, what we see is that there's always gonna be two issues in the spine at least because you had the one that's caused the issue, and the one that's counter-twisting the spine to balance the issue out. Now what happens if you don't do this one? Well, one, they guessed wrong which was the primary, you're gonna continue to have the discomfort and two, let's say we ignore the one, we only take care of the one. We just keep fighting, keep fighting, keep fighting it. Well, over time, the body adapts and changes, and the vertebraes can actually change their shape and size for the stress that's put on them. That's called Wolf's Law. Wolf like the dog. So what happens is the vertebrae will actually start to decrease in shape to deal with the extra stresses that's been put on it, and the bone will remodel and restructure itself, therefore, making it almost impossible for it to go back to the normal shape without a tremendous amount of time in rehab. Which in this-- in the same time, as long as that bottom was off, continuing to change because of Wolf's law, you continue to keep the same force on your neck. So, we ignored your lower back, we did not adjust your whole spine, we only adjusted a couple areas, and now what's happening is because you didn't get the whole spine adjusted, the rest of the spine keeps fighting back, and the reason you came, in the only spot you wanted to get adjusted, the adjustment's not working, because the other spot's pulling it out all the time. This is why we have to adjust everything. When I have a patient that comes tells me,"Hey, I only want you to adjust here and here, don't look anywhere else," I just basically tell them I'll do that, right? I'll do that, but, don't ever tell someone chiropractic doesn't work, because you didn't give chiropractic a chance to work because you cut it off short. So, therefore don't blame... don't blame my profession or blame me as a chiropractor. Reality is, we have to look at your entire back in order to fix problems. Just the way the spine works. So, in this study here, really showed that the neck and the thoracic spine are closely related. What's interesting about this, this research paper, I think is really interesting is that they talked about the neck, and holding your neck adjustments better, but, they looked at thoracic spine. I know the muscles end about T5, T6. But this study showed anywhere from T1 to T 12. So, I mean, even with past the neck muscles, way past the neck muscles, and it showed still by getting that part of your spine adjusted even if it's like T11, it still made a huge difference. Again, I have to theorize because of the Righting Reflex. You know, if I got a T11 off, my neck's gonna go the other way to balance me off. Even though my upper thoracics, my T1 through five move, good. If I left that T11 there, I'm gonna keep having issues. So to me it's a really interesting article about how the spine's very dynamic and all works in one giant thing together. And that's how you have to treat the spine, and, literally treat the spine in order to get it better by getting your chiropractic adjustments and have the chiropractor look at your entire spine from C1 down to your sacrum, and make sure the entire spine's functioning right regardless of what you came in for. Because by not looking at the entire spine we're gonna miss part of it. You're not gonna get the results you wanted or that you came in for, and you're not gonna be happy at the end of the day. And so that's why chiropractors look at your whole spine. So is exciting research? Well, it is to me. I think it's really cool. I think it validates a lot of the stuff that we do here in the office. Again, the effectiveness of the thoracic spine manipulation on the management of neck pain, a systematic review and meta-analysis and random control studies... assisted controlled trials, excuse me, from the journal of pain, February 27th, 2023. The last, the lead author's last name is T S E G A Y. I'm not gonna try to say it. I have a hard time saying my own name sometimes so I'm not gonna try to say that one. But take a look at it. You know, again, go to PubMed to just go to the google.com type in "effectiveness of thoracic spine manipulation and neck pain, PubMed." It'll pop right up. Remember if you're on PubMed, you'll be at nih.gov. You'll see it there. ncbi.nim.nih.gov, PubMed, it's all there. Take a look at it. PubMed's the gold standard of medical research. Whenever I meet with other healthcare providers we quote PubMed articles so that we both know that we both know what we're talking about. All right, everybody. So, neck pain, some new stuff that came out on neck pain that chiropractors use all the time that we already know about, which is pretty cool now to see it everywhere else. Just sharing the research with you and why your chiropractor, when you come in with neck pain spend so much time with you laying on your stomach looking at your upper back. I hope that answers the question of the week."Why does my chiropractor adjust more than one area that I'm complaining about?" I think this research paper sums it up. If you have a question for the chiropractor, go ahead and leave me a comment below, shoot me a direct message. Go to my website, rockforddc.com, R O C K F O R D D C.com. Shoot me a message there. Maybe next time you watch or listen to this video you'll be the question of the week. By the way, you know this video is posted everywhere we posted on LinkedIn, we posted it on Facebook, YouTube we posted on...we have a podcast. You can find and listen to this anywhere you want to. If you're in the car and you wanna listen to my voice, I guess, take a look at us anywhere you listen to your podcast. We list it everywhere, Apple podcast, Spotify, everywhere. So take a look for it. Other than that, stay healthy, stay strong, and remember, if you have a question about chiropractic, don't ask anybody else. Ask a chiropractor. Thanks everybody.