Chiropractic Questions

Chiropractic and Brain

May 30, 2023 Brant Hulsebus DC LCP CCWP FICA Season 7 Episode 5
Chiropractic Questions
Chiropractic and Brain
Show Notes Transcript

Ask the Chiropractor - Today we look at research about  Brain activity during Chiropractic care. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud 

www.rockforddc.com

- Hello, my name's Dr. Brant Hulsebus, Chiropractor. And I wanna welcome you to another podcast of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor is our podcast where we present information and research about chiropractic. And we also try to answer people's questions about chiropractic. A lot of people mistakenly go to their family physician, will ask them questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, but your family physician even though they might be a great medical doctor, they make a really poor chiropractor. Only a chiropractor can answer questions about chiropractic. So I come on this podcast every week and try to answer questions or review a piece of research, publish about chiropractic, so you can understand chiropractic and how it works better. So we call it "Ask the Chiropractor." So welcome. So I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor from Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic. I'm the team chiropractor for the AHL Rockford Ice Hogs. So I've worked with all different shapes and sizes, of patients, and people. And so, today I wanna talk a little bit about the fact that chiropractors for many, many years have talked about how chiropractic adjustments, we know they're really good for lower back pain. We know they're really good for headaches. We know they're really good for neck pain. Almost everybody agrees with that nowadays, even your insurance company agrees and that's okay. But a lot of chiropractors over the years have talked about how chiropractic can affect the entire central nervous system. You'll see a lot of chiropractors talking about how the nervous system is what we work on through the spine. You'll see chiropractors talk about how people sleep better, eat better, move better everything after getting chiropractic care. And honestly, this is one of the talking points between medicine and chiropractic and often butt heads. They often wanna say, they wanna see proof, they wanna see more things to validate what chiropractors claim. Now, chiropractors, we say this all the time because we just see it, right? Patients come in all the time like,"Hey, after getting chiropractic care, A, B, and C happened to me. Could you explain that to me?" Well, we follow guidance, you know, anatomy book, Gray's Anatomy book, Guyton's Physiology. The body parts of the nerves innervate and how they perform at those areas. And so, as a chiropractor, we know by doing the adjustments in those areas, we affect the nerves coming and going. And we know those must affect the body parts. But what about the brain? Does chiropractic actually have any role in the brain? because that would be a big part of the nervous system, right? Probably the most important part of the nervous system, the brain. So what I have here is I have a PubMed indexed article. Again, PubMed is one of the gold standards of medical research. In order to get indexed in PubMed, it has to go through tons and tons of scrutiny to validate this is a real science, experiment's valid, real good quality of science on today's level for what we know today. And so, we had this article that was published, May of 2020. It is from the Irish Journal of Medical Science. It was submitted to PubMed. PubMed published it. It's "The effect on spinal manipulations on the brain, neurometabolites in chronic non-specific lower back pain patients a random clinical trial." So what they did is they found a whole bunch of people from the ages of 20 to 50 that were having chronic lower back pain, non-specific. This would be like somebody who's always having lower back pain, not like I raked the leaves yesterday and now I have lower back pain. This is someone who's been dealing with lower back pain for a long time. And what they did is they wanted to see what happened after they got chiropractic care to the lumbar spine, not only for the the lower back pain, right? They did that. They used to measure, that they used different questionnaires. So we used like Oswestry tests and Functional Index Ratings, and to fill it out, and also do the pain-scale thing. That's what they were doing. But the other thing to introduce on this study that makes this study unique, and why we're talking about it is H-MRS. What is H-MRS? H-MRS is Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectrography. I have a hard time with some of those big words. Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectrography. Now, I'll put it right on the spelling on the captioning on below, so you guys can see how it's actually spelled. But this is a non-invasive way to measure the biochemistry of the brain, what's happening in the brain at specific time. So with new technology comes new research and what's really interesting to see was after people receive chiropractic care to the lumbar spine, after having long-term chronic lower back pain, non-specific, meaning that it didn't happen from this incident or this incident. It's just been there for a long time. This is, there are people who come to see the chiropractor when they're in their sixties and seventies and said,"I've had lower back pain for so long, I finally decided to come to the chiropractor." What we find with those patients is one, we find a lot of arthritis degeneration usually which limits our ability to heal. We wish we wouldn't met them 20 years earlier, but often they were told not to come see us, so we wouldn't be able to help them which is why we make this podcast. But usually what we find is that there's a lot of degeneration there and all we can do at this point is offer supportive care or dealing with the acute exacerbations of chronic conditions. So let's talk about this. What did we find out? Well, they found a significant amount of changes in all different areas of the brain after every time there was a spinal chiropractic adjustment done in the lumbar spine for these people between the ages of 20 and 50. All kinds of things, the thalamus, the prefrontal cortex, all kinds of things in the, and changes that were going on. It was really cool to see these changes that we know that at the moment the adjustment was given, that the brain activity went up and how do we know this?'Cause other people received what they call, sham manipulations where chiropractic really wasn't done. They were just kind of convinced that it did, and we did not see the exact same thing. So it was really neat to see without a shadow of a doubt after looking at this research, that chiropractic adjustments can definitely affect the brain and how the brain functions. And think about that for a little bit. So if you were in chronic lower back pain between the ages of 20 and 50, it's just really to see how not only the pain went down, but the functional disability were reduced. That means some of these people might be able to start functioning again, working better, getting their brains working better, functioning better, more efficiently, and stuff like that. And they start getting their lives back. So as a chiropractor, this is really exciting to me to watch these studies as this new technology comes out. I've been able to witness a motion MRI machine when they did a chiropractic adjustment to the upper neck area, get to see the spinal fluid get dumped, a new spinal fluid come rushing in. Really, really cool stuff. So to me as a chiropractor, this stuff is really neat. I love the way all the new technology coming out. I love all the new science that we're able to see stuff, things that my grandpa talked about that he knew was happening because he saw it with patients, but didn't have the way to objectively measure it and look at it. And today, they have stuff like this to actually watch the brain chemistry change after receiving a real chiropractic adjustment. And we know exactly people did not get a real adjustment. There was no change at all. So we know that was a variable and it was really cool to see the numbers here change in the brain, know that how much were affecting the actual brain. And when you start affecting the brain, you affect the entire body, how the entire body functions. And what they were able to do is they just measure different chemicals that came in and out of the brain with this H-MRS test. It was really interesting, the difference, the measurement, I think was 0.05 was the difference. And so, we know it's pretty, pretty, pretty definite that these are having major, major metabolic effects on the brain when you get your adjustments. And these are all good things for the better, right? None of these were like negative things. These are all showing the brain functioning better and kicking out better."No significant difference in the terms of the brain metabolites at the baseline or after receiving the sham group." So they established a baseline with these patients. They gave adjustments, the other ones got sham adjustments, and there was nothing that was going on before the adjustment. But after adjustment, there definitely was something going on. And the sham group, nothing ever changed from the baseline before or after. It all stayed the exact same. Really cool study. I love these new research papers that are coming out. This one came out during COVID. That's why I think I missed it. I think we were all a little busy doing other things during COVID. Again, a randomized control study came out, his Epub, this was like 2019, November 26th. This is the 2020 May edition of the Irish Journal of Medical Science. Just a cool, cool paper. If you're watching this on YouTube or Facebook, or on my website, I'm putting the paper up, so you can see it as I'm talking. If you're listening to me on a podcast, go check us out on my website, rockforddc.com. R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D dc.com. I actually put the papers up over my face as I'm talking, so people can actually see the paper and reference the paper if you want to. It's hard for me to put links on because I post the podcast in lots of different places. It shows up lots of different ways. It's hard to put the link directly on there. I'll do my best to see that happens. But otherwise, just go to my website, rockforddc.com. You can find everything there. So, cool study about the brain. If you want more questions about chiropractic, anything I can answer about chiropractic or how it works. Maybe you've heard a chiropractor make a claim about something or tell you chiropractic can do A, B or C and you'd like to get another opinion, or understand maybe why the chiropractor claimed this or said this. I tend to try to back everything up with science and research. So go ahead and ask us, you know, go to rockforddc.com. Ask the question there, come by the office, ask if you're in the Rockford area. Otherwise, just leave us a message or a comment below and I'll try to answer your question next time. Again, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, calling you from Rockford, Illinois. Hope you understood the subject matter here,"How Chiropractic Affects The Brain." I hope it made sense. I think it's cool, all this new research. And if you have a question about chiropractic, go ahead and ask. Otherwise, we'll catch you next time. Thanks everybody for listening. Talk to you next week. Bye-bye.