Ask the Chiropractor- Chiropractic is non-opioid help. Chiropractic should be the first choice. Dr Hulsebus explains why through science and research #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Ask the Chiropractor- Chiropractic is non-opioid help. Chiropractic should be the first choice. Dr Hulsebus explains why through science and research #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
- Hi, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor. Coming today with another edition of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor" is my podcast where people have questions about chiropractic care. They email me, they send me, they call me, they send me a message and then I come on here and try to answer their question. I always feel if you have a question about chiropractic, you should always ask a chiropractor. A lot of people tend to ask their family doctor, but your family doctor has never studied chiropractic just like your family doctors never studied dentistry. If you had questions about your teeth, you wouldn't ask your family doctor, you'd ask your dentist. So today's question has a lot to do with something that's very important to me. Opiates, a lot of people today are dying of opiates. Did you know that back in November of 17, 2021, the CDC reports that over 100,000 Americans die annually from opioid overdose? What is opioid overdose? How do people get addicted to opioid? Well, what happens is you go to the doctor and you have an ache or complaint. Something hurts. The doctor prescribes you an opioid to help you get over the pain. Now, it used to be much more common 10 years ago to get this even for lower back pain. Now today with the new laws and regulations, it's a little more challenging. But let's say you had shoulder surgery or maybe ankle surgery and then after the surgery you're giving an opiate because the amount of pain you're in and once you recover from the surgery. But what happens is people get addicted to this opiate, and eventually the doctor cuts you off. The doctor says, "I'm not gonna give you anymore." The pharmacist says, "No more opioids for you too." So now we have check systems. Well, these people then hit the streets and they find heroin, which is another form of opiate and they get addicted to that. And then let's say it's laced with fentanyl, and let's they say they do too much opioid and they ruin their lives, they ruin their family's lives, and just causes great pain to everybody. And it usually starts off as innocent, like I said, as having an ankle surgery or something like that. So as chiropractors, this has always bothered us. You see, chiropractors, we've always had a drug free answer to some of these aches and pains. Obviously, not after an ankle surgery but for the lower back pain, for the neck pain people, for the leg pain, and stuff like that, chiropractics done amazing things to help people heal and get better. And we specialize in looking at the long-term picture and the short-term picture and getting you over the pain helping you get better and feel better because chiropractors wanna stop this opioid deaths. Chiropractors have been working on this. While I've been in practice for 21 years, I can remember talking about this when I first got out of school when opioids were first highly prescribed. And who does the opioid epidemic affect? Anybody and everybody. There's no one part of the population affects more than others. It affects all of us. Any walk of life can have this problem. Did you know that in chiropractic, that we've been trying to get people to come see us to be primary healthcare providers to deal with this issue for many, many years? Matter of fact, if you look at the Spine magazine from October, 2010, we have what they call is the North America Spinal Society. The North America Spinal Society believes that chiropractic is the number one answer to this. They believe if you have an acute lower back pain, you should go to the chiropractor. Now the North America Spine Society is not chiropractors. They are medical doctors and other people like this. So this came out in Spine of October, 2010, and recently PubMed indexed. Recommending that you go to the chiropractor when you have acute lower back pain. They believe that we are the best answer and solution to this. Not only for not habit forming, but generally just the best solution to help people get over and recover and get better. Unfortunately, today many people go with the primary doctor. The primary doctor usually will prescribe an NSAID, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Now what do we know about non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs? Well, Science of 2020 May, 2020 Volume 14 came out with an article talking about people who do non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs whenever they have this issue, tend to develop chronic lower back pain. This has a lot to do with what the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs do. They treat the acute pain, meaning the pain you have right now. But unfortunately the damage that it leaves behind setting you up for chronic lower back pain for the rest of your life. And so as chiropractors, you know, a lot of people ask me is there so much to take over the counter? And it's very hard to get me to answer that because I know that these non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs according to the science are gonna cause longer and bigger problems down the road. That's always why I say just put an ice pack on there because if it's inflammation that's causing the problem, obviously putting ice on there will help defeat the inflammation. So as a chiropractor, it's really hard for me to sit there and tell you to maybe take something like a leave or something because I know the fact that it's going on. Now another avenue people go with this and they don't wanna do chiropractic, and they don't wanna do opioids, maybe they'll get a cortisone shot in their spine. This is a very common practice, and I'm not really sure why this is a common practice. There's basically three reasons. The first reason is the FDA never has ever approved the steroid cortisone shots into the epidural space. That's your spine in the epidural space. The manufacturer doesn't recommend it, and the FDA's never said it's okay. So it's always interesting then when someone tells me that, you know, they find my profession chiropractic to be unscientific and not enough data behind supporting it, but yet they're gonna go ahead and start giving you shots in your spine that are not FDA approved. That's kinda weird, right? The same person saying both things. Not only that, but there is no research that supports that using the steroid shots actually do benefit to your lower back pain. They might give you a quick temporary burst just like the NSAIDs give you a quick temporary burst of making you feel better, but there's no evidence that actually resolves in the lower back pain. It just kind of solely makes you feel better. At that moment, and that's not even true all the time. As a chiropractor, I know it's not true all the time because I have patients that go and get them and they come see me right afterwards because they had got no relief from it, and now we're the only choice that's left. Unfortunately, the research does show when you've had multiple of these cortisone steroid shots, there's actually starts to be joint deterioration. A matter of fact, every time you get one of those shots, the research shows that the rates of spinal fractures up 20% of the fracture of your spine. So if you have someone who doesn't exercise, out of shape, maybe overweight continuously gets these shots in their spine maybe three, four times a year, what's gonna happen to that joint long term? What's gonna happen if they're taking NSAIDs in between the shots, which creates chronic lower back issues? You know, so as chiropractors we throw there and we try to do our chiropractic adjustments to help take the pressure off, help alleviate it. It's probably why the Northern American Spinal Society realizes that chiropractors know better long-term solutions with this. Now if you look at PubMed that just got released just in 2023 just this year about stabilization exercises in February, it's really interesting because what they did is they took a whole bunch of people who had their back actually surgically fused. They had a lot of back pain so they went to the doctor after surprisingly, the NSAIDs failed, didn't wanna get on opiates, and then next thing you know they're trying to avoid the epidural shots because they're not working either. So they end up having surgery and when they find out a lot of these people after surgery is that they're still in lots of pain. After all this stuff, they're still not doing very well. And the research shows us the fact that they did some research on these people like before surgery and after surgery, they tested a whole bunch of stuff and the number one thing they found was a lack of stabilization muscles. Now as chiropractors, we're always talking about stabilization muscles. We talk about the thing called the righting reflex where your eyes always stay level and keep your spine balanced. And so as chiropractors, we know to go in there and we help level everything. Here in my office we look at the entire spine because if you have a lower back that's deviating to the right and an upper neck that's deviating to the left in order to keep your eyes level, and we only fix one of the two problems, you tend to keep going back to the same issue. So as chiropractors, we've always looked at the full spine. We always try to correct the righting reflex. Now what's interesting to me is these people who had this lower back surgery and they were miserable after the lower back surgery, they went to a therapist or maybe a chiropractor and they were taught stabilization exercises. And lo and behold, even after surgery feeling miserable, the stabilization exercises were taught to them and then now they're finally living a more functional pain-free life. So it's interesting to me to kinda ask the question, what if we hadn't had surgery, and what if we just did the stabilization exercises from the beginning? Maybe it's not always the bulging disc that's the issue. Maybe it's the facet joint, that's the little joint on the back where the nerve comes out. Maybe it's the irritation there. See the disc's like a balloon. When you step on a balloon, the balloon will herniate out one side. Now is that swollen balloon the issue, or is the foot on the balloon the issue? When the facets irritate and inflame, it moves away from the inflammation causing the joint itself to move and shift, which is like putting a foot on a disc and making the disc bulge on the other side. All too often you hear diagnosis of a disc bulge, or disc herniation, this and that going on. In reality, you've got a weak facet on the opposite side that can't maintain its posture, can't maintain its space, continuously gets inflamed, continuously gets irritated. This is the same joint that gets damaged so much on those cortisone shots that they give over and over again. This is the same joint that we're talking about now. So as chiropractors, we try to restore that motion, we try to get that joint feeling good again. Try to drive the inflammation out by using ice and other natural methods by adjusting it so it can heal on its own. So all these people that had this back surgery were taught the stabilization muscles. After the stabilization exercises after the surgery was over and after the surgery failed, when they did these stabilization exercise and their back finally started to improve, was it the stabilization exercise that they needed all along and a little bit of chiropractic care to get rid of the stress? So a good chiropractor will adjust your lower back, and then teach you the things to do to keep it from coming back like stabilization exercises. Again, this is all new research. PubMed, February, 2023 information. So if you're watching this podcast, we're putting the images up of the research, you can see it yourself. All the ones that I can find to get to you. Everything we do here, we try to use our science, we try to use what we know and we try to stay current, right? We're reading the research February, 2023. That's pretty current research. We're taking a look at everything. So again, I hope I answered the question about opiates. Why chiropractors get so mad, why chiropractors is a non-opioid approach long term. You know, we just, we know better answers. We got the research, we got the science. It's not even, none of this by the way, is chiropractic research. None of this is coming from a chiropractic journal. This is all coming from medical research and medical papers and books and stuff like that. So, you know, if I found it, they found it. So I don't know what's going on. So we're doing the best we can as chiropractors to spread the word. Help us spread the word, share this podcast with somebody you know who might be hesitant about trying chiropractic care. We're just gonna show you the science of what we do and how we get people better. And if you have a question about chiropractic, leave me a comment below and maybe next week you'll be the topic of"Ask the Chiropractor." Otherwise, go ahead to our website, rockfordc.com.` R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-DpC.com. Again, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus. I am the official team chiropractor of the AHL Rockford IceHogs. The proud affiliate of Chicago Black Hawks. I'm also proud graduate of Palmer Chiropractic. I'm a member of the International Chiropractic Association, and I'm a proud member of the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association. So if you have any questions or anything like that, get back to me, leave me a message, and we'll get back to you. Other than that, stay healthy, stay strong, and come back next week for another episode of "Ask the Chiropractor." We're gonna talk a little bit about some research on the immune system next week. Take care.