Ask the Chiropractor - How long does it take to get results with chiropractic? Dr Hulsebus explains all the things that can be a variable. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor - How long does it take to get results with chiropractic? Dr Hulsebus explains all the things that can be a variable. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus and welcome to another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor" is our podcast that we do here for when people have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care. I always recommend if you have a question about chiropractic, you should always ask a chiropractor. A lot of people tend to ask their family physician, but your family physician never studied chiropractic and knows very little about it. Just like if I have a question about my teeth, I'm gonna ask my dentist, not my family doctor. All right, so let's talk about today's question. Today's question came up as, you know,"How long does it take for something to resolve?"How long do I have to wait to make whatever ailment"or reason I came to the chiropractor go away?" So when it comes to answering this question, there's 150, like, factors that go under this. So I'm gonna talk about some of the biggest ones that we see and some of the biggest factors. Here we go. Number one is how long have you had it? Some people will come see me, tell me their neck hurts or lower back hurts, and all too often, as chiropractors, we are unnecessarily the last place you've come to. You've already tried physical therapy. You've already tried some over-the-counter stuff. You maybe went to the doctor, they gave you a steroid pack. You know, you take 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 pills a day. Maybe you've had a cortisone shot. Maybe you went to the gym, trying to stretch it out. Maybe you tried to exercise it out. And none of these things seemed to help. So how long have you been doing this? Because the longer you've been walking around with it, that goes into the longer it takes to go away. What I mean by that is when you injure your back, or we call a subluxation, you got a couple bones misaligned causing some stress in the nervous system, your body will start to change and adapt to this. Now as your body changes and adapts to this, it adapts to the best it can for the time. Sometimes you maybe get involved in an accident, you have back pain for four or five days. You think it's resolved because the pain goes away. But in reality, what happened was you've changed your posture, the way you sit and stand. As chiropractors, we look at a lot of people as they walk around and we'll say they have a high shoulder and a low shoulder. We notice their posture, the way they walk. They drop a foot, the way they take a step. And they might tell you they have no issues. A lot of times, I have people that come with friends and they say, "Well, I never needed a chiropractor." But I notice the way they walk. They have a gait that's off. I notice the way they're sitting there talking to me, they have a high and low shoulder. I noticed that they've already injured themselves in the past and they don't feel it anymore. So they don't let it go. So how long have you had this? Because what happens is your body adapts and changes to it. If you go back on a previous podcast, you'll see I talked about the righting reflex, R-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, the righting reflex. And that says, no matter what, my eyes stay level. So if my neck's doing this, my middle back will do this, and eyes stay level. I don't feel it any anymore, doesn't hurt anymore. Does that mean my spine's correct? Absolutely not. We need to make sure you're in alignment. So first factor, how long have you had it? How long have you ignored it? And how much has your body and your nervous system adapted to you being wrong, that now we have to go work against, uphill against, to reprogramming you back to the way you're supposed to be. That's the first factor. The next one is on the same topic, kinda sorta, is your x-rays. We take a look at your x-rays, we do an exam on you, we want to see kind of how your spine lines up and what's going on. If I take your x-rays and your spine looks really good, I had a new patient this week, took his x-rays, I could barely finally wrong with him. I said, "You're gonna bounce right back." Sure enough, you know, by the end of the week, he's feeling great because he didn't have a lot of misalignments. He's taking care of his spine. Now he told me afterwards, he started with a chiropractor when he was younger and he just kind of came in the area. And so I didn't know that at first, but I found that out later. So he's kind of already did some of the homework. But yeah, if your spine looks good in the x-ray, we're not gonna have to see you a lot. If you have a scoliosis, if you have a thing called a spondylolisthesis where your vertebrae slips forward, if you have, you know, a big scoliotic curve in your lumbar spine, if you have a major pelvic rotation, if you have all these things going on, the more things we see in the films, the more things we see in our examination, then the more care you're gonna need just because we're working more uphill. Or, as I just talked about before, let's say you were involved in a motor vehicle accident or some type of whiplash injury before and the pain kind of didn't really bother you and you didn't really follow up with a chiropractor. And then we take a look at your examination and we find out you have a thin disc from an old injury that didn't heal right, it's gonna take longer to get you better because we're working against that. So these are factors that prolong your care and, again, we'll know that when we look at your films and we do kind of our examination on you to kind of see what's going on. But, you know, then simply put, the more you got going on, the longer it takes. because again, these are all things that we work against. But, glass is half full too, right? So if you x-ray and your spine looks good, your posture looks good, not a lot of posture problems, you're gonna get better a lot faster. The next one we talk about is your overall health. Now Dr. Palmer always calling the three Ts, thoughts, traumas, and toxins are the three Ts. The first ones are your thoughts, you know, how much stress are you carrying around? I've taken care of a lot of different people. It's always interesting to me. I end up taking care of a lot of people who are politicians and people who want to be politicians. And it's always interesting to me that during the race, like whenever they have elections coming up, I'm always amazed how much more I see them because of all the extra stress they're under running to keep their position, whatever that position is. So we talk about thoughts, you know, if you're under a tremendous amount of stress, you're gonna have to be seen more. Same thing as the opposite, right? If you don't have a lot of emotional stress because everything's going pretty good in your life except for this little, you know, kink right here, then you're gonna bounce back quicker, all right? The next one is toxins. You know, I've done several supplements about,(laughs) several supplements, I've done several podcasts about supplements and different things you need to take in your body. And so the more your body's tuned up where it's supposed to be, both in supplementation, diet, and stuff like that, the less inflamed you are. The less inflamed you are, the faster you bounce back. But if you're completely deficient in your fish oil and your omega-3s levels are high and your body's all hyperinflamatory, you have autoimmune issues going on'cause you have sustained a bad diet, if you're overloaded on, excuse me, dopamine, not serotonin, because you're all about pleasure, not this and that, what we find is that it takes you longer to heal. Now these are things we won't know when we meet you or we talk to you. There's never, I don't meet anybody that,"Do you eat healthy?" Almost everyone says yes and we talk about different things along the way and we find out that you may be more sick than we actually thought you were. So these are things that usually we have to find out after a few adjustments. So when you start getting adjusted by the chiropractor and you're not responding as quick as we think you should, that's when we find out that maybe you have, you're a little toxic or you're deficient in what you need. So the chiropractor should address that stuff with you too in order to speed things up. Now so unfortunately, this all depends, like if you've only been eating junk food for years, and years, and years, that's gonna take you a long time to turn around. But if you're pretty good but you could just do some fine tuning, you'll get better, quicker, faster. So yes, you get rewarded for doing the good stuff. Next one is trauma, that's after (indistinct), I talk about this one, more about physical stress. Do you exercise? Do you go for a 30 minute walk a day? If you listen to other podcasts, I challenge everyone to go for a 30-minute walk a day. When's the last time you went to the gym and worked out? When's the last time you sweat? When's the last time you went for a run or a long walk? These are all things that tells us your overall health. I have people that come in all the time, they come in and they're only wearing exercise clothes, they look like they work out all the time. And I said, "Yeah, I bet you bounce back really quick." I can tell that they try to spend more time exercising, do the things that's right, and sure enough, those people always bounce back really quick. The other one you'll see, a couple weeks ago, I just did a podcast on stabilization muscles. You might be big and strong. This is something I see a lot with our male patients. They might be big and strong, lift weights all the time, but they can't stand on one foot for very long. They don't have any balance. And we talked about in the previous podcast that it's the stabilization muscles, the balance muscles of your core and your spine that holds your spine alignment, allow you to keep your spine where it's supposed to be. And if these muscles are weak, and you never exercise, and you never challenge them, then these muscles are kind of, what I like to teasingly call, loosey-goosey, right? They're not very good holding things in place. And if that's the case, it's gonna take you longer to get better. But if you're doing your balance exercises, standing on one foot, sitting on an exercise ball, I have a lot of athletes use BOSU balls upside down, so the round side's down and the flat side's up and play their sport, like play catch or bounce a ball off the wall, say I'm a volleyball player, doing those kind of things, your stabilization muscles become so much stronger, and therefore, your back itself is stronger, and therefore, when we make the corrections of your spine, I give you a chiropractic adjustment, you're more likely to hold them. So these are all things that are factors into it. So when someone comes and sees me, it's always their first visit they see me, like,"Hey, how many times do I have to come see you?"How long is this gonna take?"When should I expect to make a major turnaround?" Well, initially, I tell them,"I don't know know." I usually have them come back in a second time and see how they're doing. Then, when I see how you're doing the second time, I get a better overall idea of how fast it's gonna take you to recover. I've had people come in physically fit, they work out, they look like they eat right because they're physically fit, and it turns out they take a long time to get better because they're coming around lots of emotional stress, or they've had this problem for a long time and they tried to do everything they can to take care of it other than going to a chiropractor. Or you know, all kinds of things. Maybe they're just really toxic and I have no idea. And maybe, just because they're physically fit doesn't mean they're eating their vegetables, and they might just not be eating junk, right? So we'll find those things out as we go. Then we have other people that come in and we look at them and they bounce right back even though sometimes I don't think they're gonna, because they're so acute. But it turns out they do do all those things and they bounce right back. So usually after about two or three visits, we have a good grasp on it's gonna take to get you better. And what that information, usually that's when the chiropractor will give you what we call report findings, when we kinda lay out a game plan, what it's gonna take to get you better and get you to recover faster. So the chiropractor should go over that with you. And so when you meet the chiropractor, you should try to address as many of these issues with the chiropractor as you can so they can give you a better estimate of what it's gonna take to get you better. Trying to keep things secret doesn't work, right? And your dentist asks you, "Do you floss?" You're like, "Yeah." And the dentist's like, "Really?"You know, I don't think you floss." That's what it comes down to. You can just, does your chiropractor know about these things? And I always tease, I don't need to know lots of details, I just kind of need to know, you know, are you doing this? Are you doing that? I tell people, "If you have chemical, physical,"or emotional stress, just let me know."I don't need details, just let me know"so I can judge what's going on with you." So how long does it take? How much should I have to come to the chiropractor if I'm coming in for this or this? How often do I have to be there? That's gonna totally depend on a lot of factors, a lot of things you got going on. I just hit on the big ones. There's lots more going on. Previous times you've done this, this is my, you know, my 15th time having my lower back go out. I've had previous surgery, I've done a lot of NSAIDs. You'll see in a couple episodes ago, about non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. The research now shows that the longer you take those, the more likely you are to have chronic pain because of the way they generate the nerve endings. The studies are out there. Take a look at them. Go back and listen to a couple previous podcasts. You'll see me review that research. Your stabilization muscle strength, that's something that you should be working on now. So if you're fearful of going to the chiropractor, if you're fearful that you're gonna have to go a lot when you go to the chiropractor finally, the best thing you can start doing now is working on your toxicity levels. Make sure you're doing your vegetables. Make sure you're eating better. You can see several of my old podcasts where I talk about different supplements like fish oil and stuff like that. You can start working on some stabilization exercises, trying to do your balance stuff. I usually recommend a good trainer to help you with that stuff. I can help you find one if you're in my area. If you're not in my area, I can't help you find one. And you know, just start working on some of those things. Start going for that 30 minute walk a day and just try to start building yourself up, all right? So how long does it take to start feeling better? How long does it take to recover when you start going to the chiropractor? It takes a good chiropractor to figure that number out as you start care and figure out the different factors. So I know I didn't really answer the question, but I did give you the factors that would answer the question. So I hope you enjoyed this episode of "Ask the Chiropractor." Now remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, leave us message below. Maybe next week you'll be the topic of the week, we'll get back and answer this for you. Other than that, go to our website rockforddc, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C, .com. When you're on that website, you will see the blogs listed and all the, there's a search button there if you wanna go back and find a previous topic or reference some of the ones I talked about, just type in the search and it should pop right up. Otherwise, just hit Contact Us and we'll let you know. All right, everybody, stay healthy, stay strong, and if you have any questions about chiropractic, always ask a chiropractor. Thank you.