Exercise Chiropractic and Pain

New research about the roles of Chiropractic and Exercise with upper back pain #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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- Hello. I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor, and welcome to another episode of "Ask the Chiropractor." This is my podcast I do for people who have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care. All too often people go with the wrong source for questions about chiropractic, and who is the right source and who's the wrong source? Well, the right source would be a chiropractor. If you have a question about your teeth, you ask a dentist. You don't ask a podiatrist. So if you have a question about chiropractic care, you should ask a chiropractor because only chiropractors are educated in chiropractic. A lot of people might ask their family doctor, but the family doctor has no idea what chiropractors do or how chiropractic works, so they would be a bad person to ask about chiropractic. Not about everything, but about chiropractic. So if you have a question, always submit it to us and we'll come on here and we'll answer your question. So, as a chiropractor, and any chiropractor will vouch for this one, you're out in public, you're walking around, people walk up to you all the time. They say, "Hey, I got this pain"up here between my shoulders."Is there like a stretch or an exercise I can do"to make that go away?" And so I get asked this all the time, and that comes from the fact that we spend most of our life sitting down. We'll be, us chiropractors call a forward, head forward posture. So your head's forward like this all the time. Your shoulders rolled forward so you got forward head posture going like this. And what happens is this doesn't hurt to sit like this with my shoulders rolled forward and my head out, but it leaves me in a vulnerable position when I sit like that. What I mean is when I get up and walk away from that position, I tend to maintain that posture even though I'm no longer sitting. And so if my shoulders are rolled forward and my head's sticking out, now I'm in a vulnerable position. So now I sleep wrong, now I go to grab a heavy bag of salt to carry down to the basement or something like that, because I'm in a vulnerable position, that then allows me to get injured. If I wasn't in that vulnerable position to start with, I wouldn't have gotten injured. But let's say this happens. Let's say now you have that pain up there and your discomfort. What do I do to get rid of it? Well, this study came out, it just came out recently, April 27th of 2023, PubMed. And it's that's, if you're watching this as I'm recording, that's less than a month. I mean, that was like four, three weeks ago this study came out, so this was a very new study. And they were doing a random control study where they looked at different groups of people who took different forms of care, which had success, which didn't, and there was three groups here. There was a group of people who had chiropractic care, a group of people who did exercise and stretching, and a group of people who did both, chiropractic and exercise and stretching. And what we found was that the people who did the exercises and stretching, they only had like short-term, temporary relief. There was nothing that really lasted and really accomplished the goal. People who got chiropractic care, they got a little bit better, but they didn't really see what they were hoping to see. Like they got a lot better, but they weren't ever perfect. It still kind of was there. They kept having flareups and reoccurring. But the people who did both, the people who started chiropractic care got some work done by the chiropractor, got the spine loosened up, got it moving again, got it freed and then were taught some exercises and stretches, they did really well. They showed they did really, really well. So that was really interesting to see, that this group that did both got better faster. So I know here in my office, when you come in, we always start off with a series of adjustments, chiropractic adjustments, to loosen up your spine and help restore some of the function. Then once we know that's been starting to be restored and once we know the nerves are happy again, the spine's moving again, now we know that your body is open to these exercises and stretches that make them more successful. You see, there's no reason for me to teach an exercise and stretch if you're not right. So like, if your spine's misaligned, it's locked up and I teach you an exercise and a stretch, what becomes of this is that that area gets more and more tight and your problem heals the wrong way because now you had a misalignment, and then what we did is we taught you how to strengthen that misalignment through exercise and stretches, and now that misalignment that was there is even more misaligned and more secured, more locked in because we've strengthened the muscles with the stress on them to really solidify that misalignment staying there. So it's always best to have that misalignment removed first or corrected first and then taught how to do the exercises and stretches now that it's moving the way we want it. You don't want to teach someone who's limping how to start running because then they're gonna learn how to run faster with a limp. Golfers understand this completely. If you have a shoulder injury and you go and start golfing, you develop new muscle memories and you alter your swing, and that muscle memory stays with you. If you get your shoulder taken care of first, then you go on swinging, then you don't get bad habits when you swing your golf club and you can save yourself lots of money in golf lessons to unlearn what you've learned improperly. So as chiropractors, our first goal, let's loosen it up, let's get it moving again and free it up. Now we will teach you exercises and stretches to complement the chiropractic care we just gave you. And then usually at this point is when you start seeing us less. So if you were coming in a few times a week initially to get it loosened up, now that we feel like you're starting to hold your adjustment and we're not seeing that misalignment as bad as it was when you first came in and subluxation's improving, then what we would do is we would start to change your care plan where we start seeing less of you but give you some things to do on your own. And we want to see you maybe like once a week now or maybe once every 10 days to make sure that you're not digressing, to make sure that you're going in the right direction. The good thing about the study I found that was interesting was they found long-term, they went back and interviewed these people long-term, and long-term they had all, a lot of them had digressed back to where they were. And what's not part of this article, what's not part of this research was, did they maintain doing the things they were doing to correct it, or did they go back doing the things that caused a problem in the first place and go back to doing it all again and then surprised when they get the same results. What I mean by that is when you come in here with this forward head posture and this thoracic pain between your shoulders, what we do is we teach you not only how to make it better and how to stretch and exercise, but we teach you, like, you can't sit in front of a computer all day and not need follow-up care. There's no way of doing it. Like, I can't lose a bunch of weight and go back and eat junk food and expect not to gain the weight again because I lost the weight before. If you go back eating a bad diet again, you're gonna go back to putting weight back on again. It's just simple math. So if I'm sitting behind a computer all day typing or driving a car all day and cause this thoracic pain to come and I get it corrected, I go to the chiropractor and they adjust me, I get onto some cool exercise and some cool stretches, they complement me, and then I go right back to driving the car again or using the computer again and I discontinue the chiropractic and I discontinue the exercise and stretches, and then I'm like, "Oh, chiropractic,"and the exercises didn't work, the pain's back." No, they worked good, but you have to do them, you have to maintain it and you have to keep going because you continue to throw the bad stimulus at it. And so if I wanted to lose a bunch of weight and somebody gave me a really awesome diet, I followed the diet perfectly, I lost a bunch of weight, then I went back to eating the junk food I ate before and put the weight back on, we don't blame the diet. You know, the diet works. I just stopped doing it, so I lost the results and I went back to doing the bad things that got me there. Now, if you gave me a new diet and then I started eating different the rest of my life, then I wouldn't put the weight back on. So we'd love to get you adjusted, get you the exercises and stretches and teach you how not to bring that discomfort back. But in reality, if you're gonna go back to doing the same job, doing the same stress, doing the same posture, the same problems are gonna return unless you do the proper maintenance to keep it at bay. And even then, sometimes when your stress increases, be it chemical, physical, or emotional stress, if those things increase, then you have to increase the things you do to fight back, if that makes sense. So yeah, so it's a really cool study about when someone says,"Hey, can you teach me a quick exercise"and make this go away?" I can now look at them and say, "No, I cannot."I can teach you some chiropractic adjustments"and then we can, or give you some chiropractic adjustments," excuse me,"and then we can teach you some exercises"and stretches and that should keep it at bay,"but there is no way to exercise this out." And someone says,"Hey, I just want you to take care of this for me."I don't want to do anything at home."I don't want any exercise or stretches."I'm here to see you, the chiropractor."You fix this problem."Don't make me do stuff at home."Can I expect great results?" The answer's probably not as good as you'd like without doing both. So again, a new study came out from PubMed. If you don't know what PubMed is, it's one of my favorite places to research on the internet. Whatever I'm researching, I just type in whatever I'm looking for, say, "Is chiropractic safe," and I type in the word PubMed afterwards. PubMed is a place where they do lots of peer review of the research. It takes a lot of work to get your article published on PubMed because they wanna make sure it's legit. So where do I go on the internet to look for research and look up things on the internet where I can trust? The answer is PubMed, P-U-B-M-E-D. There you have it."Hey, Dr. Brant, I got this pain between my shoulders."Can you fix it for me?"Can you gimme a quick exercise?" Probably not."Can I get a couple of quick adjustments"and make it go away?" Probably not. It's probably gonna require a little bit of work on your behalf and a lot of maintenance to keep it away. I hope that answered the question for this week "Ask the Chiropractor". Remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, always ask a chiropractor. You could submit a comment below wherever you're seeing this or hearing this, and I'll get back to you, or you can always go to my website at rockforddc.com, R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com. You can hit "Contact Us", leave us a message there and we'll read it and get back to you. Otherwise than that, stay healthy, stay strong, and if you have any questions, go ahead and ask away. Talk to you next week. Thanks, everybody.