Chiropractic after Surgery

Ask the Chiropractor- can you go to the chiropractor after spinal surgery?  Dr Hulsebus explains the most common types of spinal surgery and when you can return to chiropractic care.  #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud

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Transcript

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- Hello, I'm Dr. Brant Hulsebus, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is our podcast that we do for the people who have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care. All too often people make the mistake of asking a family doctor whether or not they should go to a chiropractor, or maybe even orthopedic doctor. And the reason I say that's a mistake is because those two kind of doctors have very little to no education on what chiropractors do. So that would kind of like be asking them,"Should I go see a dentist for this toothache?" Again, they're not dentists, so why would you ask them? I would ask a dentist to find a toothache. So people have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, how it works, and then whether or not they should be a good chiropractic patient. And I ask people to send me emails, chat with me in person, or send me a message, and then I come on here and ask the question. This week's question comes about whether I can still receive chiropractic care after surgical intervention. I've had surgery on my lower back previously, before I ever met a chiropractor. Can I still go to a chiropractor? Or maybe I've got the C5, C6 in my neck fused. I never went to a chiropractor before, I had surgery before, now I want to know if I can still go to a chiropractor. Well, sometimes talking to the surgeon about this isn't the worst idea. Sometimes I talk about you should also ask a chiropractor. But you could ask a surgeon. But the only question you should really ask the surgeon, is my surgery done? Am I healed? Is everything as solid as it can be? Because if everything's as solid as it can be, and everything's healed up, now only the chiropractor would know whether or not you can receive chiropractic care. You see, and we go through chiropractic college, and I went to Palmer College of Chiropractic. And you know, in my opinion, that's the best school. It's the best school because it's the first school, and it's the biggest school in chiropractic, that all started there in Davenport, Iowa, and at Palmer College. So I'm a Palmer Graduate graduate, third-generation graduate of Palmer College. And you see, when we're at Palmer College, we learn something called the Palmer Package. And what's the Palmer package? The Palmer package is a bunch of different chiropractic techniques. We learn many different ways to adjust your spine depending on your needs and the patient itself, and the situation we're in. When we go through like learning the neck or the cervical spine, we learn so many different ways to adjust your cervical spine, because everyone's different, everyone's unique. So if you came to see me, and you've had interesting changes in your spine, because maybe you've had surgical intervention or something, there's definitely a way that we could change or adapt our adjusting technique around your surgery and still benefit you. Now the vertebraes that have the surgery on them, we can't really do a lot with, right? They've been fused together. We're not gonna be able to make them move independently. Again, that's not a realistic thing that can happen. But what we can do as chiropractors, is we can adjust the ones above and below to try to help out. Now, will you get the full relief that a chiropractic patient without surgery ever have? Probably not because you've had the surgical intervention. But can you live a better, healthier life after getting adjusted by a chiropractor even though you've had these vertebraes fused? Absolutely, matter of fact, I have a couple of patients who have most of their entire neck fused, and they're miserable. They had C5, C6 fused, and after a couple of months or some time went by, they started having more problems. So they fused more vertebraes and they went back, and had more problems, fused more vertebraes. And the patients started realizing that we're doing the same thing, and we're getting expecting different results, and there's a term for that. So they decided to stop having their neck fused anymore, and they wanted to try something new and they came and saw me. And as a chiropractor, I was able to change my technique, adapt the way I adjust them because they've had surgery in the past, and I'm very happy to say even though they've been all over the country seeing all different kinds of specialists, we were able to adjust their neck and get them a tremendous amount of relief. So if you've had surgery, you absolutely can still see a chiropractor. Now, another common surgery they do is they kind of go in, and they clean out what we call the IVF. The IVF is the intervertebral foramen. And what that is, is on the backside of your spine, everyone knows you have a spinous that sticks out, that's the bumps you feel when you rub someone's back. But about midway between that spinous and the vertebrae, the big bone that you've seen so many times, there's a little hole that comes on the side. Now it's made up of two vertebraes. The top of the hole is made up of the bottom of the top bone, and the bottom of the hole is made out of the top of the bottom bone. That's kind of confusing. If I have a diagram, I'll flip, show it to you here real quick, so you can kind of get it a better idea. But the bottom line is here, I'll show you right here. So there's the hole right here where the nerve comes out. If you see, if you're watching me on YouTube or Facebook right now or LinkedIn or my website, you can see this, there's a little hole right here. The nerve comes out the side, it comes out between, behind the body, before what they call the facet joints. And if you've listened to my podcast previously, you know I talk a lot about these facet joints and how important they are. But right there, the nerve comes out. A lot of times what they do is they take that hole, it kind of looks like a, there's like a football or kidney bean shape. What they do is they go in there and they take like, I call it like a Roto Rooter. They go in there, they kinda shave off the things that are growing in that hole that make up that, compromise that hole with the disc, the nerves coming out. They often call it a pinched nerve. But if you listen to my podcast from the previous, you know it's not really pinched, because if it was pinched, it'd be under paralysis. It's just under stress is what it's under. It's not so much pinched, it's just got a little stress hitting it. So they go in, they remove some of that stress and they suck it all out. That's usually microscopic surgery. So if you're like in the car, and you're hearing radios about microscopic surgery, I know when I go to Chicago, I listen to AM 670 The Score sometimes, and they'll talk a little bit about microscopic laser surgery to help your spine. That's what they're talking about. So this wouldn't be a fusion. This is, would be like cleaning out the joint. Then after they've gone in there and cleaned out that joint can you go see a chiropractor? Well, that's why I'd like you talk to your surgeon. I want your surgeon to tell you you're totally healed. Everything that we could have done for this joint has been done. It's healed up. You're good to go. So once you get that green light, then you're good to go to the chiropractor, and the chiropractor's good to adjust you now. See we might be really experts on doing chiropractic adjustments, but we're not really experts on spinal surgery, because we're not spinal surgeons, just like the spinal surgeon's not an expert on chiropractic, because they're not a chiropractor. So once the spinal surgeon says everything's healed up from the surgery, you should be good to go. Now they can come and see us. Now can we go back and adjust that one? Absolutely, because that's pretty much what they're doing. And there's either they're shaving off bone in some of the extreme cases, like little bony spurs, or they're, most of the time they're cleaning up some discs. Now the discs are really resilient. They're mostly made up of water and fibrous tissues that just kinda hold that in like a shock absorber. So once you clean it out, it's fully capable of taking the force of a chiropractic adjustment. Now the different techniques that we would use, yeah, we'd probably wouldn't want to do a big rotational force in the lower back, right after you got that set and healed up. We would find a different technique. Again, if you ask a doctor, should you go to a chiropractor after having the lower back disc discectomy, or microscopic surgery, they'll probably tell you no, because they're gonna assume, that the chiropractor's gonna use the most violent aggressive twerking adjustment there is. But the good news is, most chiropractors aren't idiots. Most chiropractors are really well educated, and we wouldn't do that. Now maybe if we don't like you, no, I'm just teasing, we would never do that to a patient. We're way trained, way beyond that. So a lot of times for some reason, they just assume that chiropractors are one-dimensional, and they can only do one thing. But we learn all different techniques. So if you were to spend a day with me like many students do, you'll see that I, you might feel like I adjust you the same way every time you come in. And maybe I adjust your spouse or a family member the same way every time they come in. But you'll see the next family, I do things completely different, because they have different spines, they have different needs, their different lifestyles and their spines aren't the same as yours. So if you've had the surgery, can we still help you? Absolutely, chiropractic are experts at figuring out how to take care of somebody after the surgical intervention. So you have a couple surgeries there, you have the ones where they go in, they fuse it together, no problem. Where you adjust the ones above and below more. Because also if you look at someone who's had two vertebraes fused together, a lot of times your arthritis can travel above and below where that surgery is, because that whole area becomes more immobile after the surgery, which leads to degeneration arthritis. And it's really hard to stop degeneration arthritis from occurring. So what you have to do is, you have to go in there, and make a move again so it doesn't happen. So yes, we can definitely adjust you after a fusion, but if you've had the C5 and C6 fused, don't expect us to move the C5, C6 independently,'cause they are fused and they are fused with titanium. And I've known some really big chiropractors over my years, even went to Palmer College with a former professional wrestler. And I don't think even he's gonna break the titanium in your neck, even on a bad day. I don't think he's gonna do that. So you're totally safe to see a chiropractor after having fusion. Again, most common infusions that I've seen as a chiropractor are C5, C6. And then we talk about some of the lower lumbars. And the other type of surgery they do is the microscopic or discectomy stuff, where they kind of go in and shave off part of the area. You know, that area down there, we pretty much can chart. That one's just fully here. We can just go back to adjusting you like we did before. Pretty normally as needed. It's, again, the chiropractor will determine whether or not you need it. Another one that does happen though sometimes is, like if you have a infection in your spine, they might have to do a laminectomy and that's where the little arch that comes in the back, they literally just cut that part off, because it's been infected, it's dangerous, it's gotta come out. And that's usually like, if they don't get it out, you can become paralyzed from that point down, it's very, very serious. Very, very life-threatening. Those are the surgeries that we have to rush to. Like if you come to my office and I suspect that, we're gonna rush you there. And I've had a couple of patients over the years, that's exactly what we did. They came in, something wasn't adding up, they had a weird thing on their skin. So we got them out right away. They were able to have emergency laminectomy, and they chopped off the column in the back that makes the spinous, and the patient now lives happy. Not as much comfort as it used to be, but still lives pretty happy. So, can we still adjust those ones? Well no, those ones we don't adjust. Because even the levers that we use to adjust you, they've been physically removed. Can we still adjust you above and below that one, absolutely. So, can you still go see a chiropractor? Absolutely, you can still go see a chiropractor, but we just don't touch that area. That area just gets left alone. Unfortunately, a lot of times, this is the area where the arthritis degeneration starts to occur, because of the emergency surgery. But you know, I would take that over being paralyzed. One gentleman I know had his whole neck, and had it done from C3 down to C6, and if it wasn't done, he would've been paralyzed neck down for the rest of his life. So he had to take off, and we can't really adjust his neck too much anymore. Is that a big deal? Nope, nope, it's not a big deal, because he's not paralyzed. So those are the kind of things that chiropractors know. We don't have to be told those things often. If a patient comes to me with a letter from the doctor letting me know it's okay to adjust them and take care of them after they've done the things they have, I usually send a letter back letting them know that it's okay for them to continue care also, after I've completed my care. because I feel like they don't know what they're talking about, and maybe I'll talk to them the same way, see how much it goes back and forth, how much it reciprocates. So I like to have fun, so there you go. Can you still go to the chiropractor if I had surgery? Doctor's gonna go in and do one of three different types of surgeries. Am I still safe to come in? And there's more surgeries I've talked about too. There's the ones where the vertebra slip forward and slippage here, and they put a plate there to keep it coming backwards, called the spondylolisthesis. And those those, yeah, we can definitely still work with those areas. Again, just like another fusion surgery, a lot of times we try to stop those surgeries from happening. A lot of times we can't. So if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, if you've had pre-vehicle surgical intervention, you want to make sure you find someone that knows what the surgery was, you want to have them address with you the surgery. I would not go to a chiropractor after I've had surgeries in my spine, and have the chiropractor just brush over them. I'd like to have him to talk to me about them. Like here, we take full spine x-rays, if you've had fusion, and we'll point the screws out to you. We'll talk to you about that. We'll tell you how we're gonna change our technique based on the surgery. If you've had a laminectomy, we're gonna tell you how we're not gonna adjust those areas with any kind of manual force at all, but how we would adapt and change to that. And if you had the microscopic cleaning out of the vertebraes, we would talk about how we're gonna take care of those, when we're gonna adjust those, if we need to adjust those, and how often we would need to adjust those certain areas, too. A lot of times it's good to let sleeping dogs lie if it's moving and bending. We'd also talk about the areas above and below we would want to work on, too. So I wouldn't go to a chiropractor after spinal surgery if the chiropractor didn't address the areas with me. So that would be a red flag to me, if I went to a chiropractor and they failed to mention the surgeries or talk about the surgeries. So there you have it. Can I go to the chiropractor after the surgery? Talk to your chiropractor. More than likely you can. Alright everybody, if you have a question for me, go ahead and leave me a comment below, wherever you're listening to this or watching this, I'm sure I'll see it. If not, get over to my website, rockforddc.com. R O C K F O R D D C.com. And there, hit the contact us. Also, there you'll see our blogs, and all of our previous episodes. And if you're just listening to me, you wonder what I look like, I hope I don't disappoint. You can see all the videos there of me speaking, too. All right, thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you again next time, bye-bye.